The Stalin Project

“Here, there is a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own manners and customs, and here is the house of the dead—life as nowhere else and a people apart.” Dostoevsky—The House of the Dead

Courtesy of the David King Collection

The Gulag

The GULAG was a set of prison camps that spread across the whole of the Soviet Union. After early experiments on Solovets in the White Sea, Soviet officials decided that it could be economically profitable to use slave labor to develop the country. This slave labor led to the first massive public works project where prisoners dug the White Sea Canal. Although the project was ultimately a failure, it spawned a huge number of projects over the next twenty years. Gold was mined in Kolyma, nickel in Norilsk, and coal in Vorkuta. Conditions in the prison camps were atrocious. The labor was backbreaking and it was impossible to successfully fulfill the norms. The hardened criminals in the camps were put in charge of the others and they created a reign of terror where they brutalized the rest of the prisoners. The food rations and housing were pathetically insufficient. After Stalin’s death, the number of prison camps decreased, although they were not totally eliminated until the 1990's.

The Gulag

- Overview of the GULAG

- Fear and Denunciation

- Arrest

- Interrogation

- Prison

- Deportation

- Living Conditions

- Survival in Camps

- Work

- Prisoners

- Solovki

- White Sea Canal

- Vorkuta

- Karaganda

- Kolyma