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The Gulag
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That place where Josef Stalin sends you if you don't behave. No, not Hell but the next worst thing.note Some inmates would suggest that this comparison is too easy on the camps. Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovyk Lagerey i Koloniy, which in English roughly means (now take a deep breath) "The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies" and was the name of the NKVD wing that administered the prison labor camps. Note that a similar labor camp system existed in Tsarist Russia, but it was only used to imprison actual revolutionaries (and criminals), not merely tellers of anti-Tsar jokes. It supposedly was also much nicer — Lenin himself noted that it was one of the best times of his life, with the rich Siberian countryside doing wonders for his health and lax policing leaving plenty of time for the revolutionary prisoners to fraternize and catch up on their reading. When he and the Bolsheviks took over, they went out of their way to show those incompetent Tsarists how prison camps are supposed to be run, by basing all sentences on the harshest Tsarist "katorga" regimes. In the post-World War II period, even the actual word "katorga" was revived for a brief time. A term not used much in Russia itself at the time ("the camps" was the most commonly used term), it has expanded to cover the entire system of Soviet oppression. The Gulag's modern successor organization is called FSIN, and is used to hold mostly common criminals, though political prisoners still exist. The system of camps themselves changed little, if became somewhat more lenient. The history of the Gulag system has been covered elsewhere, so a few general points: People could be sent to the labor camps for stuff like anti-government jokes. Another way—all too common, by the way—was to escape from German captivity. The "logic" was that since nobody could escape the Nazi prisons, any "escapees" were actually spies who had made a deal with the Germans. The conditions were horrible, leading to lots and lots of deaths. The guards would summarily execute prisoners for no reason, as many guards were prisoners themselves who'd get years taken off their sentence for killing an "escapee" (leading to them simply choosing someone they didn't like and shooting them). The physical slave labor was beyond exhausting, and in the summer months the prisoners were "fed" only bowls of water so many died of starvation. If you stepped out of line even once (or maybe if the guards were just cranky that morning) you also ran the risk of being thrown in "the hole" note usually an outdoor cell with stone walls and little to no protection from the elements overnight, or even for several nights, and most likely freezing to death. The labor camps did contain many genuine violent criminals and gangsters, which is the main reason why the Russian Bratva ended up in the US. When the US said it would take all the Ashkenazi Jews who'd been imprisoned, the Soviet Union gave them their Jews — some of whom also happened to be gangsters, with the Odessa mob of New York being especially well-represented. Thanks, Uncle Joe! A similar story happened with the Mariel boatlift from communist Cuba in 1980, when Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to emigrate to the United States, including many legitimate hardened criminals released from prisons and mental institutions who promptly unleashed a crime wave on Miami. (Scarface (1983) was based on this.) Not all the camps were up in Siberia. Many inmates would probably be sent off to a camp or prison closer to home before being transferred somewhere else. For example Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was incarcerated inside a fenced-in slum village in southern Kazakhstan, where he almost died from the terrible conditions, lack of fresh water and rampant diseases. The Soviet Union put many peace protesters and dissidents in mental asylums when the labor camps became overpopulated. These people were mixed in with genuine mental patients—and Russia was not the only Warsaw Pact country to do this. Stalin even stated that communism is good for everyone, so anyone who disagrees must be insane. That was actually the main reason. As the dissidents were non-violent and technically weren't committing any real crime, only insisting for the authorities to follow their own Constitution (which in reality was paper-only), they couldn't be realistically tried without the court being an obvious sham, and this was impossible from the PR standpoint. So the only possible solution for removing those annoying pesterers become the insane asylums — after all, it then could be claimed that these people are genuinely crazy. They even made up a special diagnosis for it, called sluggish schizophrenia or slow progressive schizophrenia, on the "logic" that anyone willing to give up their happiness, family, friends, etc. to believe something so different from those around them obviously was insane and probably would show symptoms of schizophrenia eventually, hence the name: a form of schizophrenia suffered by people who have yet to actually show any symptoms of schizophrenia outside of "anti-Soviet thoughts" or "delusions of reformism", because, according to the Soviets, it took a long time for the normal symptoms associated with schizophrenia to start showing. For obvious reasons, this has never been recognized by any country or international organization outside of the Communist Bloc. Sadly, this still pops up from time to time in modern Russia, though sometimes they claim it to be paranoid schizophrenia. This became more and more common as the Gulag system was shutdownnote To the point that the Soviet Union had more "schizophrenic" patients per capita than any Western country by the early 80's, sometimes double or triple the amount, with Moscow being the city with the highest diagnosed prevalence of "schizophrenia" on Earth. To make matters worse, a fair number of psychiatrists were trained in a school of thought that diagnosed a lot of things as schizophrenia, including alcoholism and some fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, which took place over a period of about seven years, starting almost immediately after Stalin's death in March of 1953, and ending on the 25 of January, 1960. Even after the system was shutdown, sentencing convicts (both genuine criminals and dissidents) to penal labour still happened, though on a reduced scale, and it continues to this day. The Special Project Prisons or Sharashkas. Seen in books like The First Circle (based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences at a Sharashka). These were Luxury Prison Suites for useful scientists and engineers. Cryptography, nuclear weapons and the Soviet space program all used Sharashka. While "Siberia" is often used as short-hand for "the Gulag", Siberia is an area larger than Canada, and with about as much diversity when it comes to climate. During the Soviet period, most of the camps had similarly mediocre levels of security, with Mother Nature doing the extra guarding if necessary, and the death penalty working fine for those too dangerous to live. However, in the modern period, with the moratorium on the death penalty, supermaxes for lifetime prisoners were also added to the system. Some of the more well known ones include White Swan Prison in Solikamsk, Black Dolphin in Sol-Iletsk and Fire Island in the Vologda Oblast. Very few managed to escape, and for those that did, anyone caught harboring fugitives would be subject to the same prison sentence as the fugitive (who by the way would almost certainly be executed upon returning to the Gulag). Even so, a lot of Siberian villagers were bitter towards the Soviet government anyway and would do what they could to help escapees, within reason. The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle (about the Sharashka system) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, all by the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, are highly recommended further reading. On the other hand many people criticize Solzhenitsyn for being biased and not entirely truthful, so the most informative author is probably Varlam Shalamov, also a former inmate of the Gulag, but not politically motivated and generally regarded as more accurate. Compare Penal Colony. |
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Nikolai Dante. Being set in a futuristic Tsarist Russia, the Tsar makes use of gulags for political prisoners. Elena Kurakin ends up in one after the war between the Makarovs and Romanovs. | |
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Borat starts the movie here, having been sentenced here for his actions in the previous movie. Only the government's wish to curry favor with Trump (and spread COVID-19) ends up freeing him. | |
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The Way Back (2010) is a story about a group of escaped gulag prisoners trekking entirely on foot through the wilderness of Siberia, Mongolia and China to escape the territory of the USSR and have a shot at returning to their homeland. | |
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The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Red Snow", KGB Colonel Ilyanov is sent to a gulag in Siberia to investigate the mysterious deaths of the local Communist Party secretary Vladimir Borisov and the first KGB investigator Major Yuri Andreev. As soon as Ilyanov arrives, he finds the conditions to be even worse than he imagined as it is wintertime and there is no sunlight from October to April. He later discovers that the townspeople have an arrangement with a group of vampires to protect them from danger and that it was the vampires who killed Borisov and Andreev. | |
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Superman: Red Son: Superman finds his childhood friend has been sent to a gulag, so he goes to free her, but he is too late, and she dies. A young boy from the same gulag becomes enraged that it took Superman so long to stop the atrocities at the camp, and became a vengeful Batman. | |
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In Worldwar, the Lizards who have surrendered to the Soviet Union after rebelling against the Fleetlord are imprisoned a Gulag. | |
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In The X-Files, Mulder and Kryczek are both sent to one of these. (Bizarrely, the series takes place after the Soviet era.) It turns out that the Black Oil is being tested on human subjects there. Mulder and Kryczek are both exposed. | |
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One of the main locations of Muppets Most Wanted, as Kermit is taken there after being mistaken for his criminal doppelganger Constantine. The warden Nadya has watched every prison escape movie ever made, so she's not letting Kermit escape, even if she knows he's not Constantine. Also, there's a whole musical number, and Danny Trejo is there. | |
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The Warlord: Mariah returns to the USSR decdes after she left and is arrested as a Western spy and sent to the Gulag. A later arc involves her escaping and attempting to return to Skataris. | |
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In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Lieutenant Mamiya is sent to a gulag for 10 years after being captured during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. | |
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Team Fortress 2 (a game that takes place around the 1960's-70's) acknowledges this as the backstory of The Heavy Weapons Guy. In 1941, his "counter-revolutionary" father was executed, with Heavy, his mother, and his sisters sent to a Siberian gulag for three months. Details are sketchy, in part because Heavy doesn't like talking about the time, but he and his family escaped along with all its prisoners after it was destroyed in an attack, burnt completely to the ground. It's all-but-stated that Heavy took his time and tortured all the guards to death before he left. | |
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Judge Dredd has the Sov Block still use these. Dredd once led a mission to one to attempt to rescue some Mega City One judges still missing since The Apocalypse War and another time wound up in one as an inmate. | |
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In Enemies & Allies, Superman gets captured and imprisoned there. | |
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Hitman 2's Sniper Assassin mode available as DLC features a mission to assassinate a Russian mobster before he's released from the Gulag. | |
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