What was the purpose of the Gulag in Russia?

The Gulag was a system of Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons. From the 1920s to the mid-1950s it housed political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. At its height, the Gulag imprisoned millions of people.

How many died in the Russian gulags?

The tentative historical consensus is that of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million died as a result of their incarceration.

How many died in Stalin’s camps?

20 million
A Soviet weekly newspaper today published the most detailed accounting of Stalin’s victims yet presented to a mass audience here, indicating that about 20 million died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions.

How did people died in gulags?

Conditions at the Gulag were brutal: Prisoners could be required to work up to 14 hours a day, often in extreme weather. Many died of starvation, disease or exhaustion—others were simply executed. The atrocities of the Gulag system have had a long-lasting impact that still permeates Russian society today.

What was the Gulag system?

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. The word “Gulag” is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main…

How many prisoners were amnestied in the Gulag?

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied from 1953 to 1957. The Gulag was officially disbanded, and its activities were grouped in 1955 under a new body, GUITK (Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Kolony, or “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies”).

What is the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn?

The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag Archipelago, history and memoir of life in the Soviet Union’s prison camp system by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in Paris as Arkhipelag GULag in three volumes (1973–75). Gulag is a Russian acronym for the Soviet government agency that supervised the vast network of labour camps.

What kind of jobs did prisoners in the Gulag work on?

Prisoners at the Gulag camps were forced to work on large-scale construction, mining and industrial projects. The type of industry depended on the camp’s location and the area’s needs. Gulag labor crews worked on several massive Soviet endeavors, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Kolyma Highway.