The forced-labor and internal-exile complex was not one institution but two overlapping ones, and most popular accounts show only the first. This is a brief reference to both — a companion to the reading (Figes, Applebaum, and Solzhenitsyn above all). Figures come from the post-1991 archival scholarship, given as ranges where the sources disagree.
Plate 18 — the major camp complexes (red) and the special-settlement / exile destinations (hatched), with the deportation routes that fed them.
What the Gulag was
The word is an acronym — Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, the "Main Camp Administration" — that came to stand for the whole Soviet system of forced labor. Its prototype was Solovki (SLON), opened in 1923 in a former monastery on the White Sea islands; from that seed the system exploded during the First Five-Year Plan, as Stalin discovered that convict labor could be thrown at projects — canals, mines, railways, whole cities — in places so remote and lethal that no free worker would go. Over roughly 1929–1953 some 18 million people passed through the camps, with perhaps 2.5 million held at the peak in the early 1950s.
Two systems — the distinction that matters
The key that Anne Applebaum insists on: the Gulag was two machines, not one, and the second is the one maps and memories usually omit.
Sentenced prisoners
People who had been arrested, tried (however farcically), and given a term of "corrective labor" behind barbed wire. This is the Gulag of the popular imagination — the watchtowers and the work brigades.
Deported peoples
People who had simply been deported — whole families and whole nations loaded onto cattle trains and dumped in the taiga or the Kazakh steppe with no sentence and no fence, forbidden to leave, and left to survive or not on their own labor. At its height in 1953 it held about 2.7 million exiles.
A short chronology
Lenin's regime builds the first "concentration camps" of the Red Terror; the Cheka runs Solovki from 1923 as the model.
The first mass wave of special settlers — perhaps 1.8 million "kulaks" stripped of property and exiled north and east as collectivization is forced through.
The White Sea–Baltic Canal (1931–33) and the Moscow–Volga Canal are dug by prisoners; the Kolyma goldfields open. The Great Terror of 1937–38 pours a new flood into the camps.
The camps feed the war economy under brutal conditions; the deportations of "suspect" nations begin in earnest.
The system reaches its greatest extent, swollen by returning POWs, Baltic and west-Ukrainian nationalists, and fresh arrests.
Stalin dies in March 1953; a broad amnesty follows within weeks, and after Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" the camps are largely dismantled.
A smaller network of political camps (Mordovia's Dubravlag, Perm-36) holds dissidents until the Gorbachev era.
The show trials
Alongside the mass, secret shootings of the Great Terror ran a handful of choreographed public spectacles — the Moscow show trials — in which Stalin's defeated rivals confessed, after coercion and torture, to fantastical conspiracies before being shot. They were theatre, staged to justify the wider slaughter; the overwhelming majority of the Terror's victims never saw a courtroom. The Trial of the Sixteen (Aug 1936) condemned Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's old comrades; the Trial of the Seventeen (Jan 1937) took Pyatakov and Radek; a secret trial of the generals (June 1937) shot Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Red Army's high command, decapitating the officer corps two years before the German invasion; and the Trial of the Twenty-One (Mar 1938) took Bukharin, Rykov, and — grimly — Yagoda, the former secret-police chief who had staged the earlier trials. Andrei Vyshinsky prosecuted; the confessions were extracted, the verdicts foregone.
The major camp complexes
Kolyma (Dalstroy)
The deadliest — a vast gold-mining empire in the Far Northeast, reached only by sea through Magadan and served by the "Road of Bones." The byword for the worst of the system.
Vorkuta & Norilsk
Arctic coal and nickel, mined and smelted by prisoners in cities the prisoners themselves built.
The canals (Belomorkanal, Dmitlag)
Showcase projects dug largely by hand, with heavy loss of life — for propaganda as much as engineering.
Karlag & Steplag (Kazakhstan)
Huge steppe complexes; Steplag's Kengir camp saw a major prisoner uprising in 1954, crushed by tanks.
BAMlag / Ozerlag (Taishet)
Railway-building camps along the route of the later Baikal–Amur Mainline.
Dubravlag & Perm-36
The late "political zones" that held the dissidents of the 1960s–80s; Perm-36 is now a museum.
The punished peoples — the deportations
Alongside the camps ran a program of ethnic exile that emptied whole homelands. Entire nations were declared collectively guilty — usually of alleged wartime collaboration — and shipped east in a matter of days.
The toll and the return. Death rates in transit and the first exile years were catastrophic — commonly a fifth to a quarter of a deported nation. In his 1956 Secret Speech Khrushchev named five of these nations; from 1957 the Karachai, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars were allowed home and their republics restored. The Crimean Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans were not — most could not return until the USSR itself was ending.
Scale & the death toll
The honest ranges: roughly 18 million through the camps and some 6 million through the special settlements over the system's life; documented deaths within the camps on the order of 1.5–1.8 million, with the deportations and settlements adding many hundreds of thousands more. Cold War estimates ran far higher (Conquest's 20-million-plus); the opening of the archives after 1991 lowered the camp figures while confirming the system's staggering reach. The numbers remain contested at the edges; the scale is not.
Adapted from Russia & Siberia — A Reader's Companion, Part IV. A companion piece, Perpetrators & Comparative Confinement, asks who ran the camps and why. Part of the Russian History guide.