When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms, they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение, volnoye poseleniye) outside the confinement of the camp. They were known as "free settlers" (; not to be confused with the term , "exile settlers"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land in the general vicinity of the place of confinement. The Gulag inherited this approach from the katorga system. It is estimated that of the 40,000 people collecting state pensions in Vorkuta, 32,000 are trapped former Gulag inmates, or their descendants.

Economics

According to a 2024 study, areas near Gulag camps that held a larger share of educated elites among its prisoner population have subsequently been characterized by greater economic growth. According to the authors, it demonstrates long-run persistence of human capital across generations. Political prisoners in particular attracted heightened attention from security organs and workplace security departments, which monitored former inmates and other individuals deemed politically suspect.

Many released Gulag prisoners, particularly those convicted on political charges, were prohibited from returning to major cities and instead subjected to administrative exile in remote regions.

Memorials

thumb|Memorial in Astana, Kazakhstan, dedicated to the Akmola Female Labor Camp prisoners

thumb|right|Map of Stalin's Gulag camps in Gulag Museum in Moscow

thumb|Memorial in [[St. Petersburg, Russia|St. Petersburg]]

Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials to the victims of the Gulag made of boulders from the Solovki camp. Moscow's memorial is on Lubyanka Square, the site of the headquarters of the NKVD. People gather at these memorials every year on the Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30).thumb|Gulag Museum in Moscow, founded in 2001 by historian [[Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko]]

Gulag survivor Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko was the first director of the State Gulag Museum in Moscow.

In 2015, the was opened in Moscow. In November 2024, the museum was ordered to close for an indefinite period due to alleged "fire safety violations" after its director reportedly refused to censor its exhibits. On December 13, 2025 Romanov was dismissed and his position was assigned to Anna Trapkova, director of the Museum of Moscow. At the same the section about Stalinist repressions was removed from the Museum of Moscow. , the Gulag History Museum remained closed for visitors.

See also

  • List of concentration and internment camps#Russia and the Soviet Union
  • List of Gulag camps
  • Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
  • Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union
  • Human rights in the Soviet Union
  • Memorial (society) (a Russian human rights organization)
  • Xinjiang internment camps

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: A History. Broadway Books. hardcover, 720 pp., .
  • Ciszek, Walter. 1997. With God in Russia. Ignatius Press. 433 pp., .
  • Ertz, Simon. 2006. Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935–1953. Duncker & Humblot. 273 pp., .
  • Figes, Orlando. 2007. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Allen Lane. hardcover, 740 pp., .
  • Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. 1999. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 635 pp., .
  • Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. 2010. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile, (Palgrave Studies in Oral History). Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Rawicz, Slawomir. 1995. The Long Walk.
  • Gregory, Paul R., and Valery Lazarev, eds. 2003. The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. .
  • Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. 1996. A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II. Penguin. 284 pp., .
  • Hochschild, Adam. 2003. The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 304 pp., paperback: .
  • Khlevniuk, Oleg V. 2004. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. hardcover, 464 pp., .
  • Kizny, Tomasz. 2004. Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917–1990. Firefly Books Ltd. 496 pp., .
  • Kozlov, V. P., et al., eds. 2004–5. Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach, 7 vols.. Moskva: ROSSPEN.
  • Rossi, Jacques. 1989. The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps. .
  • Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1973. The Gulag Archipelago. Harper & Row. 660 pp., .
  • —— The Gulag Archipelago: Two. Harper & Row. 712 pp., .
  • Tobien, Karl. 2006. Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag. WaterBrook Press. .
  • Werth, Nicolas. 1999. "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union." Pp. 33–260 in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, edited by S. Courtois et al. Harvard University Press. .
  • —— 2007. Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity) with an introduction by J. T. Gross. Princeton University Press. 248 pp., .
  • "Remembering Stalin." Azerbaijan International 13(4). 2005.
  • "The Literature of Stalin's Repressions." Azerbaijan International 14(1). 2006.

Articles

  • Barenberg, Alan. 2015. "The Gulag in Vorkuta: Beyond Space and Time." Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 7(1)
  • Barenberg, Alan, Wilson T. Bell, Sean Kinnear, Steven Maddox, and Lynne Viola. 2017. "New directions in Gulag studies: a roundtable discussion." Canadian Slavonic Papers 59(3/4):376–95.
  • Bell, Wilson T. 2013. "Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De‐Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia." The Russian Review 72(1).
  • Kravchuk, Pavel. 2013. Gulag far and near. The story of the penitentiary system.
  • Viola, Lynne. 2018. "New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note." Canadian Slavonic Papers 60(3/4):592–604. .
  • Hardy, Jeffrey S. 2017. "Of pelicans and prisoners: avian–human interactions in the Soviet Gulag." Canadian Slavonic Papers 60(3/4):375–406. .
  • Healey, Dan. 2015. "Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag." Kritika 16(3)

Memoirs

  • List of Gulag memoirs

Fiction

  • Amirejibi, Chabua. 2001. Gora Mborgali. Tbilisi, Georgia: Chabua. 650 pp., .
  • Amis, Martin. 2006. House of Meetings. New York: Vintage Books. 242 pp. .
  • Booth, Martin. 1998. The Industry Of Souls. United Kingdom: Dewi Lewis Publishing. 250 pp., .
  • Huseyn, Mehdi. 1964. Underground Rivers Flow Into the Sea (Azeri)." AZER.com at Azerbaijan International, Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 96–99 (excerpt in English). First novel about exile to the Gulag by an Azerbaijani Writer.
  • Müller, Herta. 2009. Everything I Possess I Carry With Me.
  • Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1962. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Signet Classic. 158 pp., .
  • —— 1968. In the First Circle. Northwestern University Press. 580 pp., .
  • GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
  • Gulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition, Blinken Open Society Archives
  • The website of the Virtual Gulag Museum is no longer accessible (January 2025). See, instead, the Map of Memory produced by the same organisation.
  • Map of Memory: Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag (2016)
  • "The Gulag in Northwest Russia, 1931–1960", Map of Memory (2016)
  • GULAG History Museum in Moscow
  • Sound Archives. European Memories of the Gulag
  • Gulag prisoners at work, 1936–1937 Photo album at NYPL Digital Gallery
  • The Gulag, Revelations from the Russian Archives at Library of Congress
  • Brutal! Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard (YT)