Gulag

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, Anchor Books, 2004. 

Summary

GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, which means Main Administration Camp. The book describes the origin of the gulag as the forced labor camps set up by the Bolsheviks to house their political enemies.  The gulag started in 1918-1919 during the Bolshevik Red Terror as concentration camps. The initial inhabitants were White Guards, counter-revolutionary priests, former Czarist officials, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionaries. The system was implemented by Felix Dzerzhinsky and his secret police (the Cheka). From 1929 through 1953 about 18 million people passed through or died in the gulag. 

Solovetsky Monastery

The first major camp was at the Solovetsky monastery in the White Sea in the Karelia province in 1928. It housed White Army officers, Orthodox and Catholic priests and strikers from the Kronstadt rebellion. In 1929 Maxim Gorky wrote a review praising the Solovetsky labor camp. It was closed in 1939. 

Kinds of Slave Labor

• Gold mines

• Coal mines

• Nickel mines

• Railway construction

• Canal construction

• Arms factories

• Chemical factories

• Logging of timber

White Sea Canal

The White Sea Canal to St. Petersburg was 141 miles long and was built with slave labor during 1931 to 1933. The Moscow-Volga canal was build with two hundred thousand slave laborers during 1933 and 1934.

Mining

The Vorkuta coal-mining camps were located in the Komi Republic, south of the Arctic Sea, during the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. The Norilsk nickel-mining camps were located north of the Arctic Circle, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. 

Kolyma

There were camps near the Kolyma River, northwest of the Kamchatka Peninsula. They were reached from the city Magadan on the coast. They contained slave laborers who mined gold in the region. Henry Wallace, vice-president of the United States, visited Magadan in May of 1944. He was shown a false story; he went away positively impressed.