Gulag

Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted to administrative positions. As I’ve written, there were also frequent amnesties for the old, the ill and for pregnant women—invariably followed by new waves of arrests. This massive, constant movement of prisoners meant that the numbers were in fact far higher than they seemed to be it first: by 1940, eight million prisoners had already passed through the camps.⁸ Using the inflow and outflow statistics available, and reconciling a variety of sources, the only complete reckoning I have seen estimates that eighteen million Soviet citizens passed through the camps and colonies between 1929 and 1953. This figure also tallies with other figures given by senior Russian security officials during the 1990s. According to one source, Khrushchev himself spoke of seventeen million passing through the labor camps between 1937 and 1953.⁹

Yet in a deeper sense, this figure is misleading too. As readers will also by now be aware, not every person condemned to forced labor in the Soviet Union actually served out his time in a concentration camp run by the Gulag administration. For one, the figures above exclude the many hundreds of thousands of people who were sentenced to “forced labor without incarceration” for workplace violations. More important, there were at least three other significant categories of incarcerated forced laborer: prisoners of war, postwar inhabitants of filtration camps, and above all the “special exiles,” who included kulaks deported during collectivization, Poles, Balts, and others deported after 1939, and Caucasians, Tartars, Volga Germans, and others deported during the war itself.

The first two groups are relatively easy to count: from several reliable sources, we know that the number of POWs exceeded four million. ¹⁰ We also know that between December 27, 1941, and October 1, 1944, the NKVD investigated 421,199 detainees in filtration camps, and that on May 10, 1945, over 160,000 detainees were still living in them, engaged in forced labor. In January 1946, the NKVD abolished the camps and repatriated a further 228,000 to the USSR for further investigation.¹¹ A total of about 700,000 seems, therefore, a fair guess.

The special exiles are somewhat harder to count, if only because there were so many different exile groups being sent to so many different places at so many different times for so many different reasons. In the 1920s, many of the Bolsheviks’ early opponents—Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and the like—were exiled by administrative decree, which meant they were not technically part of the Gulag, but were certainly being punished. In the early 1930s, 2.1 million kulaks were exiled, although an unknown number, certainly in the hundreds of thousands, were sent not to Kazakhstan or Siberia, but to other parts of their native province or to bad land at the edges of their collective farms: since many seem to have escaped, it is hard to know whether to count them or not. Much clearer is the position of the national groups exiled during and after the war to the “special exile” villages. Equally clear, yet much easier to forget, are odd groups like the 17,000 “former people” expelled from Leningrad after Kirov’s murder. There were also Soviet Germans who were not physically deported, but whose villages in Siberia and central Asia were turned into “special settlements”—the Gulag came to them, as it were—as well as babies born to exiles, who surely count as exiles too.

As a result, those who have tried to collate the many statistics that have been published about each of these different groups have come up with slightly different numbers. In Ne po svoei vole, published by Memorial in 2001, the historian Pavel Polyan has added up the numbers of special exiles and got a figure of 6,015,000.¹² In a survey of archival publications, Otto Pohl, on the other hand, counts just over seven million special exiles from 1930 to 1948.¹³ He gives the postwar figures for people living in “special settlements” as follows:

Still, on the principle that the low estimate will satisfy the more fastidious, I have decided to choose Polyan’s number: six million exiles. Adding the numbers together, the total number of forced laborers in the USSR comes to 28.7 million.