The terror of the gulags: Stalin’s iron-fisted control over Soviet society

After the Bolsheviks had seized power in 1917, the new regime faced armed uprisings and sabotage during the Russian Civil War, along with foreign intervention.

To suppress internal enemies, Lenin authorised the Cheka to detain suspects without trial.

By 1918, isolated prison camps had begun to appear. One early example was the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp on the remote islands of the White Sea.

Solovki, which had been converted into a model for later camps in 1923, had held over 10,000 inmates by the mid-1920s.

Initially, these camps operated as tools of counter-revolutionary punishment rather than structured institutions of forced labour.

However, from 1921 onwards, state orders allowed the use of inmate labour for economic projects that the government claimed were necessary.

The 1922 RSFSR Criminal Code further enabled repression by legalising detention based on political criteria.

Administrators sent prisoners to clear forests, dig canals, or construct military facilities in remote locations where conventional workers refused to settle.

By the time Lenin died in 1924, over 50,000 people had passed through early detention sites, and the foundations had been laid for a larger and more organised Gulag network that would follow.

After Lenin’s death, Stalin had gradually defeated his political rivals, most significantly Trotsky, who had been his most prominent opponent.

He formed alliances and promoted loyalists who supported his position, and he discredited opponents as enemies of the revolution.

By 1928, he had secured significant power within the Communist Party. Formal supremacy came later in official titles.

As his authority grew, so did his conviction that ideological enemies surrounded him.

He no longer saw opposition in terms of policy disagreements but increasingly viewed it instead as a threat to the survival of the Soviet system. 

Under this belief, Stalin expanded the powers of the secret police and encouraged mass surveillance and a culture of denunciations that encouraged preventative arrests.

He directed suspicion at wealthy peasants and former tsarist officials, and he also extended it to intellectuals, military commanders, national minorities, and Party officials.

Early in his rule, he labelled anyone who criticised collectivisation, hesitated to meet quotas, or failed to denounce others as a saboteur.

As a result, repression became a permanent feature of Soviet life rather than a wartime measure.

From 1929 onwards, Stalin’s government shifted the purpose of forced labour camps from punishment to economic exploitation.

He launched mass deportations of so-called kulaks and arrested perceived political enemies, then created new facilities across remote regions.

The Main Administration of Camps (GULAG) formed in 1930. This new body gave Moscow centralised control over the growing network of penal colonies.

During Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), prisoners became a key source of labour for many large-scale infrastructure projects.

They dug the White Sea–Baltic Canal and built industrial plants in Magnitogorsk, and many also worked in metal mines across the Urals and Siberia, especially deposits of copper and gold.

Over 12,000 prisoners are estimated to have died during the White Sea–Baltic Canal’s construction, although some accounts suggest the figure may have exceeded 25,000.

Camp authorities received output targets, and quotas for materials often took precedence over human survival.

Projects such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the gold mines of Kolyma helped to expand this system further.

By the mid-1930s, the Gulag system had become both a tool of repression and a main part of state-directed industrialisation.

Legal protections for the accused collapsed. Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code listed vague charges such as “anti-Soviet activity” and “counter-revolutionary thought,” which enabled authorities to arrest thousands without credible evidence.

Often, a neighbour’s denunciation or a misinterpreted joke resulted in a ten-year sentence.

The poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested for a satirical poem and died in transit to a camp in 1938, for example.

Many never saw a courtroom, and others faced military tribunals that delivered sentences within minutes.

By 1935, hundreds of thousands had disappeared into the camps, and few returned.

Across thousands of isolated camps, prisoners often endured cruel conditions and violent treatment under punishing labour routines.

Winters brought sub-zero temperatures, often without proper shelter or clothing.

Summers exposed inmates to swarms of insects and spoiled food that often carried waterborne diseases.

Regardless of season, guards drove them to meet unrealistic work quotas, and failure meant reduced rations or beatings.

Food distribution followed a strict system that tied survival to productivity. Those who met daily targets received a few slices of bread and thin soup.

Others were already too weak to work and starved to death. Infectious diseases spread rapidly due to overcrowding and contaminated water, made worse by the near absence of medical supplies.

Inmates died from pneumonia, gangrene, typhus, and exposure without any medical treatment.

For many, the journey to the Gulag was the beginning of a slow execution.

Inside the camps, clear layers of power usually developed, as hardened criminals, known as urki, often held more power than guards and took advantage of political prisoners.

Women faced constant threats of sexual assault and forced labour during pregnancy that frequently ended in death from medical neglect, especially for those arrested during mass purges.

Children who were arrested with their parents or born in captivity grew up surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, trapped in a world of constant malnutrition.

Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin increased political repression until it became a national campaign known as the Great Purge.

The NKVD was under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov and received quotas for arrests and executions, and failure to meet targets led to arrests of the officers themselves.

False confessions, often extracted through beatings, sleep deprivation, or threats to family members, justified the mass imprisonment of teachers, engineers, factory managers, Red Army generals, and loyal Party members.

As arrest numbers soared, the Gulag population exploded. Many inmates had committed no crime at all, or had fallen victim to political feuds and petty rivalries.

Entire regions lost their local officials overnight. In the middle of the chaos, Stalin insisted the purges were necessary to root out spies and traitors.

As a result, loyalty became meaningless, and fear became universal.

Inside the camps, the flood of new prisoners overwhelmed already strained systems.

Housing shortages forced inmates into tents or barracks with dirt floors and no insulation, while sanitation broke down completely.

Camp death rates rose from starvation and cold, and also from the mental strain of isolation and a widespread sense of hopelessness that felt like betrayal.

Even those who had once enforced the system now found themselves in chains, which showed that no rank offered protection from Stalin’s purges.

After Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet regime increased its use of forced labour.

Many prisoners were transferred to wartime construction sites or forced into penal military units.

Others, weakened from hunger or illness, died during chaotic evacuations as the front lines shifted.

Some were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to camps deeper into Siberia, where disease and hunger quickly took their toll.

Although the war required vast resources, Stalin refused to scale back repression.

He authorised new arrests, targeting groups accused of treason or sabotage.

Entire populations were deported on a large scale under accusations of disloyalty, such as the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, and Volga Germans.

Over 191,000 Crimean Tatars were deported in 1944, primarily to Uzbekistan and other remote areas of Central Asia.

Thousands died en route due to exposure, dehydration, and starvation. Those who survived the journey were placed in “special settlements” under military guard, with no right to leave or appeal.

At the same time, Red Army soldiers who returned from German captivity and had survived those years often faced accusations of betrayal instead of welcome or gratitude.

Many received long sentences in Gulags or internal exile. Stalin believed exposure to the West had corrupted their minds, and he treated their survival as a sign of weakness or compromise.

Prisoner intake surged once again, and the Gulag resumed its role as both a dumping ground for inconvenient individuals and a supply base for the Soviet war economy.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the new leadership, which was initially under Beria and later Khrushchev, moved to reduce the prison population and reform the legal system.

Many prisoners were released, especially those held on political charges. In 1956, Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress publicly condemned Stalin’s abuses, and it also acknowledged the mass arrests, show trials, and executions that had devastated the nation.

The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 further exposed the horrors of the camps to a wider audience. 

Even so, the pain continued as survivors returned to families that had suffered in their absence and communities that often feared their presence.

State secrecy prevented public discussion, and many camp sites became industrial towns or were quietly abandoned.

Victims received little compensation, and in many cases official records remained sealed or incomplete, which left historians dependent on memoirs and scattered files alongside oral testimonies to reconstruct the full extent of the terror.

By most estimates, over 18 million people had passed through the Gulag system, and between 1.5 and 1.7 million had died from abuse, neglect, or execution.

At its peak in 1953, the Gulag population reached approximately 2.5 million.

Stalin’s use of the Gulags had erased dissent and criminalised disagreement so that mass suffering became an accepted instrument of state policy.

The fear created by the Gulag outlived the camps themselves, altering the relationship between citizen and state for generations to come.