The purges necessitated a further social and economic component of the Stalinist system: the expansion and development of labour camps, or the Gulag (an abbreviation of the Russian words for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps), which housed political prisoners and criminais.
A system of forced labour had begun in Russia soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, and was established by decree on April 15, 1919. It underwent a series of administrative and organizational changes in the 1920s, ending with the founding of the Gulag in 1930 under the control of the secret police, OGPU (later, the NKVD and the KGB). But expansion was rapid: in the late 1920s the Gulag had a total inmate population of about 100,000; by 1936, mopping up "political" prisoners from Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, among others, the total had risen to 5 million, a number that was probably equalled or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died, in 1953. In the mid-1930s the camps were located largely in the Arctic (such as Kolyma and Vorkuta) but also in Kazakhstan and elsewhere.
Besides rich or resistant peasants arrested during collectivization, persons sent to the Gulag included purged Communist Party members and military officers, German and other Axis prisoners of war (during the Second World War), members of ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty, Soviet soldiers and other citizens who had been taken prisoner or used as slave labourers by the Germans during the war, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals, and many utterly innocent people who were hapless victims of Stalin's purges.
Inmates filled the Gulag in three major waves: in 1929-32, the years of the collectivization of Soviet agriculture; in 1936-8, at tlie height of Stalin's purges; and in the years immediately following the Second World War, The Gulag was largely unknown in the West until the publication in 1973 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 "some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago". Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The Gulag reached its height in the years of collectivization of Soviet agriculture (1929-32), during Joseph Stalin's purges (1936-8), and immediately after the Second World War. At its extreme it consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000-10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railways), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed off at least 10 per ccnt of the Gulag's total prisoner population each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.
The Gulag started to shrink soon after Stalin's death: hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied from 1953 to 1957, by which time the camp system had returned to its proportions of the early 1920s. Several times the Gulag was officially disbanded; its activities were absorbed by various economic ministries, and the remaining camps were grouped in 1955 under a new body, GUITK ("Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies").
Life in a typical camp is incisively described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago (see also Chapter 3).
Ethnic Minorities
Stalin's nationality policy had promoted native cadres and cultures, but this changed in the late 1920s. Stalin appears to have perceived that the non-Russians were becoming dangerously self-confident and self-assertive, and he reversed his policy by the mid-1930s. The Soviet constitution of 1936 in effect rearranged the political and nationality map. The boundaries of many autonomous republics and oblasts were fashioned in such a way as to prevent non-Russians from forming a critical mass - Moscow's fear was that they would circumvent central authority. For example, Tatars found themselves in the Tatar (Tatarstan) and Bashkir (Bashkiriya) autonomous republics, although Tatars and Bashkirs spoke essentially the same language. Tatars also inhabited the region south of Bashkiriya and northern Kazakhstan, hut this was not acknowledged, and no autonomous republic was established. On security grounds, Stalin also deported some entire small nationality groups, many with their own territorial base, such as the Chechen and Ingush, from 1944 onwards. Altogether, more than 50 nationalities, embracing about 3.5 million people, were deported to various parts of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these were removed from European Russia to Asiatic Russia, as Moscow played off the various nationalities to its own advantage. This policy was to have disastrous long-term consequences for Russians, because they were seen as imperialists bent on Russifying the locals. With industrial expansion Russians spread throughout the union as welclass="underline" by 1991 there were 25 million living outside the Russian republic, including 11 million in Ukraine. President Boris Yeltsin, in apologizing for these deportations, later identified them as a major source of inter-ethnic conflict in Russia in the late twentieth century.
The Second World War and Its Aftermath
During the Second World War Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the combatant nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin the war. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the west, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941 Stalin, recognizing the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet Union, appointed himself chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental office since 1923.
Stalin's pre-war defensive measures were exposed as incompetent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of J une 22,1941. Khrushchev later claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and appointed himself supreme commander-in-chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of 1941, he remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter) and the battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the Soviet Army under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battle-fronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as did Hitler, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.
Stalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of the "Big Three" with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these foreign statesmen; his superior skill was acclaimed by Anthony Eden, then British foreign secretary.