V o L u m e I : a d

Following World War II, the Allies agreed that all Russian citizens should

be returned to the Soviet Union. This naturally included Soviet prisoners of

war held by the Germans. The Western Allies also forced anti-Soviet émigrés,

many of whom had fought with Hitler, to return to the Soviet Union. The

vast majority of these were either shot or simply disappeared into a gulag.

In March 1946, the Soviet secret police began incarcerating ethnic minori-

ties, Soviet Jews, and youth groups for allegedly anti-Stalinist conspiracies as

well as people who were viewed as a hindrance to Sovietization campaigns

in Eastern Europe.

The juridical process for sentencing people to a gulag comprised a three-

person panel, which could both try and sentence the accused or simply rely

on Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code. Article 58 deprived Soviet citizens

suspected of illegal activity of any rights and permitted the authorities to

send anyone to the camps for any reason, justified or not. The gulag served

as an institution to punish people but also was meant to fulfill an economic

function, for Stalin sought to deploy workers in remote parts of Russia that

had brutal climates but were rich with natural resources.

In the early 1950s, gulag authorities issued reports revealing that the camp

system was unprofitable. Stalin, however, commanded further construction

projects such as railways, canals, power stations, and tunnels. Thus, thou-

sands of prisoners died, and maintenance costs skyrocketed. To an extent,

the situation changed in the gulags after the war because the inmates had

Gulags

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Barbed wire surrounds the Soviet penal colony at Minsk in the USSR, 16 February 1958. (Bettmann/Corbis)

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changed. These new politicals were well-organized and experienced fighters

who often banded together and dominated the camps. Slowly, authorities lost

control.

Immediately following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Lavrenty Beria

briefly took charge, reorganized the gulags, and abandoned most of Stalin’s

construction projects. Beria granted amnesty to all prisoners sentenced to

five years or less, pregnant women, and women with children under age eight-

een. He also secretly abolished the use of physical force against detainees. In

June 1953, he announced his decision to liquidate the gulags altogether.

However, he was subsequently arrested and executed. The new Soviet lead-

ership under Nikita Khrushchev reversed most of Beria’s reforms, although

it did not revoke the amnesties.

Because neither Beria nor Khrushchev rehabilitated the political prisoners,

they began to fight back with their new and well-organized groups. They

killed informers, staged strikes, and fomented rebellions. The biggest of

these occurred in Steplag, Kazakhstan, and lasted from spring until late sum-

mer 1954. Inmates seized control, but Soviet authorities brutally quashed the

revolt.

In the aftermath of the Steplag rebellion, the secret police relaxed gulag

regulations, implemented an eight-hour workday, and gradually began to re-

examine individual cases. This process was accelerated by Khrushchev’s

condemnation of Stalin’s rule in February 1956. In the so-called Thaw Era,

the gulags were officially dissolved, and the two biggest camp complexes in

Norilsk and Dalstroi were dismantled. Despite the Thaw, certain politicals

were still incarcerated.

Under Leonid Brezhnev, politicals were renamed “dissidents.” In the

wake of the Hungarian Revolution in October 1956, the Komitet Gosu-

darstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB) used two camps in Moldovia and Perm to

incarcerate dissidents. In contrast to former prisoners, these detainees con-

sciously criticized the government and purposely invited incarceration to gain

the attention of Western media. By 1966 Brezhnev, and later Yuri Andropov,

then chairman of the KGB, declared these dissidents “insane” and impris-

oned them in psychiatric hospitals. When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in

1985 and embarked on reform, perestroika brought a final end to the gulags

in 1987, and glasnost allowed limited access to information about their

history.

It is impossible to determine just how many people were imprisoned

and how many died in the gulags. Conservative estimates hold that 28.7 mil-

lion forced laborers passed through the gulag system. There were never more

than 2 million people at a time in the system, although perhaps as many as

3 million people died during the Stalin era in the camps.

Frank Beyersdorf

See also

Andropov, Yuri; Beria, Lavrenty Pavlovich; Brezhnev, Leonid; Glasnost; Gorbachev,

Mikhail; Human Rights; Hungarian Revolution; Khrushchev, Nikita; Perestroika;

Soviet Union; Stalin, Josef

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Gulags

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References

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

Ginzburg, Evgeniia. Journey into the Whirlwind. Translated by Paul Stevenson and

Max Hayward. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967.

Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna, with Donald J. Raleigh. Labor Camp Socialism: The

Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System. Translated from the Russian by Carol Fath.

Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2000.

Khevniuk, Oleg. History of the Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary

Investigation. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1974–1978.

South American nation. Formerly British Guiana, Great Britain’s only colony

on the South American mainland, Guyana covers 83,000 square miles and is

bordered by Venezuela to the west, Brazil to the south, Suriname to the east,

and the Atlantic Ocean to the north. It had a 1945 population of some

370,000 people. Guyana’s major export is sugar, the cultivation of which has

created a multiethnic country as African slaves and then indentured servants

from Portugal, China, and India were brought to work on the sugar planta-

tions. By 1960, East Indians made up about 45 percent of the voting age pop-

ulation and Afro-Guianese a little more than a third.

Nationalism in British Guiana took firm hold shortly after the 1943

homecoming of Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guianese dentist. Jagan had received

his dental training in the United States, where he met and married Janet

Rosenberg, a radical activist who had been a member of the Young Commu-

nist League (YCL). The Jagans immediately began organizing an anticolonial

movement that became the radical and multiracial People’s Progressive Party

(PPP). Afro-Guianese in the PPP were led by Forbes Burnham, a charismatic

lawyer. Under their leadership, the PPP overwhelmingly won the colony’s

first legislative elections held under universal suffrage in 1953 and was ex-

pected to lead British Guiana to independence. Instead, the Jagans and

many of the PPP’s leaders acted with unexpected radicalism. Convinced that

the government was communist, the British government sent a warship

to Georgetown, the colony’s capital, and removed the PPP from power on

9 October 1953, just 133 days after its electoral victory.

Thereafter, Burnham split with the Jagans, claiming that they were com-

munists, and formed a predominantly Afro-Guianese party. Jagan won the

ensuing election with the support of East Indians and radical Afro-Guianese.

He was reelected in 1961, and the British implied that he would lead the

colony to independence.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy did not want Jagan to lead an inde-

pendent Guyana. Following the April 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, the prospect

of a “Cuba on the South American mainland” greatly worried the Kennedy

administration. After an October 1961 meeting with Jagan, Kennedy con-

cluded that Jagan was a communist (or at least a fellow traveler) under his

Guyana

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Guyana

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