Gulag

The Gulag was a vast network of "slave labor" camps run by the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1950s.^[1] Ever since the Soviet Union was founded in 1917, it imprisoned people who spoke out against it or were otherwise dangerous. Imperial Russia in previous decades had a similar system of prison camps.^[2] But the Soviet Union camp system grew to be one of the largest prison systems in existence. The Soviet camp-system was set up under Vladimir Lenin.^[3][4] It reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s.

The Gulag was run at first by the GPU (State Political Directorate), later by the NKVD and in the last years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. According to Nicolas Werth, the yearly mortality rate in the Soviet concentration camps varied, reaching 5% (1933) and 20% (1942–1943) and dropped in the post-war years to about 1 to 3% per year at the beginning of the 1950s.^[5]

Soviet leaders believed it was right to put these people to work and make their labor and goods part of the national economy. In fact, two out of every hundred workers in the Soviet Union were gulag prisoners.^[6] By 1936, there were 5,000,000 prisoners in the gulags.^[1]

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "Gulag: Labour Camps, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. July 20, 1998.
2. ↑ Gentes, A. (2004). "Katorga: Penal Labour and Tsarist Siberia" (PDF). Australian Slavonic and East European Studies. 18 (1–2). Miskin Hill: 41–61. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-03-27. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
3. ↑ Lenin's Gulag Richard Pipes, academic research journals Vol. 2, pp 140–146, June 2014
4. ↑ Gulag: An Introduction Archived September 5, 2017, at the Wayback Machine by Anne Applebaum
5. ↑ Werth, Nicolas (20 January 2009). "STATE VIOLENCE IN STALIN's REGIME : OUTLINE FOR AN INVENTORY AND CLASSIFICATION" (PDF). Stanford University.
6. ↑ Gregory, P. "An Introduction to the Economics of the Gulag".