Russia moves to replace Gulag museum: How did the Stalin-era labour camps operate?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly framed Russia’s war in Ukraine as a fight against Nazism, portraying the government in Kyiv as a modern-day extension of the historic Nazi threat. While the immense suffering inflicted on Soviet citizens by Nazi Germany is well documented, critics say the Russian state has increasingly sidelined public discussion of repression carried out by Soviet authorities against their own people.

“Any reminder of the crimes of the Russian state is very inconvenient for the current authorities,” historian Nikita Sokolov, now based in Germany, told The NYT. “A victorious people can only have a victorious history — there should be no dark pages in it.”

The word “gulag” has become shorthand for state terror. But behind the acronym lies one of history’s most methodical and devastating systems of human punishment — one that shaped modern Russia and left scars that haven’t fully healed.

What was the gulag?

Gulag stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey — the Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps. Established under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and formalised by a decree in 1930, the system expanded rapidly into a vast network of forced labour camps spread across the Soviet Union, from Siberia’s tundra to the deserts of Central Asia.

Extent of the Gulag camps in the erstwhile USSR (Wikimedia Commons)

At its peak, the gulag was a sprawling empire. “Camps which had contained nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire had become true industrial giants,” American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum says in her book Gulag: A History (2003). She says the first camp appeared in the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea and then spread to various parts of the erstwhile USSR.

Who were put in gulags?

Anyone who remotely offended the administration landed in the camps. These included political dissidents, religious believers, petty criminals, engineers accused of sabotage, writers who wrote the wrong poem, thieves and rapists.

Arrests became almost entirely arbitrary during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936-1938, even as innocents were imprisoned without trial. Neighbours denounced neighbours; entire ethnic groups were deported en masse. The camps essentially became Stalin’s dumping grounds for dissenters.

Nearly 18 million people were imprisoned in Gulag camps during its existence, while up to 15 million deaths were recorded due to harsh conditions.

Seeking rest from work, prisoners cut off their limbs

The prisoners worked 10-16 hours a day in brutal weather, mining coal, logging forests, and building infrastructure, including railways and canals that still exist in Russia. Rations were tied to work output. Those too weak to meet quotas simply received less food, accelerating their decline.

Applebaum quotes Kiselev, a prisoner at a gulag camp on Anzer, one of the smaller islands. He says that the camp commander, Vanka Potapov, gave prisoners no break at all and little food. “Desperate for a few days’ rest, they [prisoners] cut off their hands and feet,” Applebaum writes.

Gulags were not just forced labour camps; they were also torture sites. Quoting an investigation into the gulags, Applebaum writes that the guards at the Solovetsky camps regularly left prisoners naked out in the old, unheated cathedral bell towers in the winter. Their hands and feet would be bound and they would be put “to the bench”, “meaning they were forced to sit on poles for up to eighteen hours without moving, sometimes with weights tied to their legs and their feet not touching the floor, a position guaranteed to leave them crippled”.

Mortality rates spiked during World War II, when rations were slashed further. Historians estimate roughly 1.5 to 1.8 million people died directly within the camps, though the true toll, accounting for those who died shortly after release, is likely far higher (Orlando Figes, The Whisperers, 2007).

Year-wise death figures curated by Anne Applebaum. The stats, however, may not present the complete picture.

In her book, Anne Applebaum says: “… the Soviet secret police did not, for the most part, use their camps in order to kill people. When they wanted to kill people, they carried out mass executions in forests: surely these are victims of Soviet justice too, and there were many of them. Using archives, one set of researchers cites a figure of 786,098 political executions from 1934 to 1953.” According to her, the number doesn’t include the thousands who died during transit, interrogation, immediately after release, or who were killed on “spurious” grounds.

After Stalin: the thaw that never fully came

Stalin died in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the terror in his famous 1956 “Secret Speech” and began releasing prisoners. The gulag formally dissolved — but Russia never fully reckoned with it. Memorial International, the human rights group that spent decades documenting victims, was forcibly liquidated by Russian courts in 2021 and 2022 — a decision widely seen as politically motivated.

That closure sent a chilling signal. Officially, the gulag is history. Unofficially, its memory remains contested, suppressed, or selectively rewritten depending on who holds power in Moscow.

Why it still matters

Understanding the gulag isn’t just a history lesson. It explains Russia’s deep institutional culture, which remains relevant even today. Since the 2022 Ukraine war broke out, there have been several reports of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians being sent to “Putin’s Gulags”.

The Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) said in its October 2025 report: “Russia is holding and torturing Ukrainian civilians, though they are not charged, have had no due process and no release date.”

Russia has always tried to portray itself as a victim of oppression. While the US, Ukraine, and the rest of Europe have accused it of causing violence on soldiers and civilians alike, Russia has maintained that its own soldiers and civilians have been victims of Nazi and Ukrainian violence. However, as much as it may try to wipe off its history of Gulag camps, the world is unlikely to forget.