On April 15, 1919, by decree of the Soviet government, the labor-educational camps, called the Gulag (Main Directorate of Camps), were created.
They were a division of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the USSR in 1934-56, managing the labor-correctional camps. Under the system of mass repressions and arbitrariness, many politically inconvenient people for the Soviet government ended up in the camps.
The prisoners worked for free on the construction of roads and industrial facilities in Siberia. Due to the harsh working conditions, hunger and disease, the mortality rate was extremely high. The truth about the non-observance of elementary human rights in the camps was revealed by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1973. in the book "The Gulag Archipelago".
The first decision of the Soviet People's Commissars to shoot or deport class enemies was made in September 1918, in the midst of the civil war, "Deutsche Welle" recalls. In parallel, the first camps for criminals were built, but the differences between them were extremely blurred. The "Red Terror" in Soviet Russia was followed by a brutal war against the peasant population, in which over 6 million people died. The sadistic arbitrariness of the Cheka (the commission for combating counter-revolution) was eventually replaced by a penal system with slave labor rules, which in 1929 became part of the reform of criminal law, which led to the creation of the Gulag - the main administration of the camps, which the world community learned about thanks to the work of Solzhenitsyn.
The history of the Gulag is the history of a war against its own people, which lasted several decades. Russian society has not yet fully recovered from it, explains the writer Jörg Barbovsky, author of a book on the subject. Workers were sacrificed in the name of senseless gigantic projects (25,000 people died in the construction of the ultimately unnavigable White Sea Canal alone). In the culminating times of the Gulag - from 1929 to the beginning of de-Stalinization - up to 20 million people passed through the camps. The number of victims is unknown, as tens of thousands died during the deportation, and a large part of the archives were lost.