As journalist George Kennan descended into hell, he noticed the words of Christ hammered above the vermin-infested planks serving as beds: “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The air, Kennan recorded, was “saturated with the strong, peculiar odour that is characteristic of Siberian prisons”. The stench of excrement mingled with that from the rotting wood floorboards, and “pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies.”
The promise of the Son of God went unfulfilled, except for those released by disease or despair. Historians Michael Haynes and Rumy Hasan estimate that 18 million people passed through the Gulags, with the bodies of some 1.7 million ending up in unmarked pits, claimed by the cold, sodden earth of the Taiga.
Last week, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in Federal Penitentiary 3, or the ‘Polar wolf’, located in the town of Kharp within the Arctic Circle. The institution previously housed prisoners of the 301st Gulag, who were condemned to work on Joseph Stalin’s doomed effort to build a railway line through northern Siberia.
Since 2003, the Gulags have again become the pillars upholding the regime. Tens of thousands of neo-Gulag prisoners feed the frontlines of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and sustain his military-industrial infrastructure, noted investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov. In some cases, pardoned convicts were guilty of such brutal crimes that their communities refused to allow their burial as war heroes.
The Russian prison population, estimated at roughly 420,000 two years ago, has fallen to a historic low of about 266,000—but only because convicts are released to aid the war effort. Even as prison camps empty, the number of political prisoners has reached record levels.
Alexei Navalny’s story illustrates that Putin’s neo-Gulags are also instruments of political terror—raising the question of how distant post-Soviet Russia is from its brutal past.
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The state of Market Stalinism
Encircled by three layers of barbed wire fences and punctuated by watchtowers, Federal Penitentiary 6—also known as Perm-36—was the only Gulag to survive the Soviet Union. Located near the city of Perm, the Gulag was painstakingly preserved by a group of historians and political activists, who opened it to the public in 1995 as the Museum of the History of Political Repression. However, the government took over the museum in 2015. Exhibits on the terrors of the Stalin era were taken down and museum guides were instructed to educate visitors on the heroic contributions of camp labour to the Second World War.
The blossoming of freedoms after the Soviet Union collapsed has often been seen as holding historical opportunities. However, President Boris Yeltsin’s regime concentrated powers in his person, sidelining institutions and Parliament. Laws were flouted, and corrupt oligarchs pillaged the state’s resources, even as ordinary people’s incomes were savaged.
As Haynes observes, Five-Year-Plan Stalinism gave way to a state of Market Stalinism.
Former KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Putin’s rise to power in 2000 marked the consolidation of the Market Stalinist order. “Talk of Stalinist terror became increasingly unfashionable and even unpatriotic,” historian Masha Gessen has written. Though Putin was willing to concede excesses had taken place under Stalin, he criticisedthe “excessive demonisation” of the dictator.
Famously obsessed with national greatness—and convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union reversed a millennium of Russian civilisation—Putin ordered the rewriting of Russian school textbooks. The new books, historian Anya Free notes, included some content on Stalin’s terror but whitewashed his worst crimes. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, was praised for his “creation of the professional educational system” and “restoration of the railroads.”
Large-scale protests in 2012 led Putin to crush the oligarchs who were the only force with the resources to resist him. Energy oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at one time Russia’s richest man, was despatched to a Soviet-era prison camp in the remote uranium-mining town of Krasnokamensk. Khodorkovsky’s deputy, Platon Lebedev, also ended up in Federal Penitentiary. Economist and former minister Alexei Ulyulayevreceived five years too. Historian Yuri Dimitriev, who discovered Stalin-era graves, was convicted as a paedophile..
Filmmaker Oleg Sentsov said that during the five years he served in Kharp’s Federal Penitentiary 8, he was subjected to “beatings, humiliation, electric shocks, being kept in a cold cell naked”. “You can be sealed in the fetal position in an iron box where you can hardly breathe and have to urinate on yourself,” the filmmaker recalled. “They routinely threaten to rape you when they are bullying you.”
“I do not know when death will come for the others,” Nobel Prize-nominated poet Vasyl Stus wrote in his secret prison journal in 1985, “but I feel it coming for me.” Alexei Navalny, earlier believed to have been poisoned by Putin’s intelligence services, almost certainly saw the angel of death above him too.
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The rise of the Gulag system
Since the reign of Pyotr I Alekseyevich—the Tsar who laid the foundations for modern Russia after taking the throne in 1682—penal labour has played a key role in building the Russian state. Labour battalions built Peter the Great’s navy, cities, and forts. Later, prisoners mined the silver, gold, and lead that provided much of the court’s wealth. Typhus, smallpox, and syphilis regularly scythed through the camp populations. Even minor offences could earn 200 lashes of the birch rod or 25 lashes of the knout, a rawhide whip.
The Gulag was, clearly, not invented by Putin. Kennan’s account was published in 1891 during the reign of the arch-reactionary emperor Aleksandr III Aleksandrovich Romanov. Tsarist-era prisoners included historian Nikolai Kostomarov, botanist Grigory Nikolayevich Potanin, and famous writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Empress Catherine II, influenced by Enlightenment liberalism, sought to end some of the worst savageries of the system, like the slitting of nostrils and the use of knouts against women. However, executioners, guards, and administrators often ignored her new-fangled rules.
The full savagery of the camps, Kennan revealed, was unleashed against political dissidents—among them, revolutionary Nadezhda Konstantinovna Sigida. Like cultural activist Maria Alyokhina, jailed under Putin at a prison camp in Krasnoyarsk, Sigida had staged hunger strikes to protest brutal corporal punishments. In 1891, Sigida and six others committed suicide by poison. Fortunately, Alyokhina was released and left the country.
For the most part, scholar Andrew Gentes records, the brutal regime did little to deter actual criminals. In 1872, a local newspaper reported the grisly murder of three nuns and a Jewish family in Tobolsk, observing that “a significant number of exiles are damaged people; many here do not shed their former criminal professions, [but] commit new crimes and flee from punishment.”
True control of the Tsarist camps lay with gang leaders, known as Ivans, to whom power was subcontracted. This would continue even under Stalin, criminologist Federico Varese writes, when an élite caste of prisoners bound by quasi-monastic rules, the Vory-v-zakone, ruled the camps.
Following the Great Terror unleashed by Stalin in 1936, millions of survivors were dispatched to his Gulags—and made slave labourers for development projects in the country’s East. After the Second World War, prison conditions slowly improved, with Gulag authorities understanding that sick workers could not mine the earth or lay tracks.
Like most systems of slave labour, though, the Gulags were an economic failure, as journalist and author Anne Applebaum shows. Targets were rarely met by prison labour, and sabotage-by-inaction was rampant. Stalin’s projects were also ill-conceived. For example, the Arctic railway line was meant to connect nickel mines to a port near Igarka. However, that port could not be built because of the region’s unsuitable marine geography.
Even though most prisoners at the camps were small-time criminals, Stalin’s Gulag also housed intellectuals and dissidents, like rocket scientist Valentin Glushko, geneticist Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky, ballerina Nina Anisimova, and writers Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Gulag survivor Yevgenia Ginzburg wrote: “In all that was happening in the country at that time, we were confronted with the monstrous and puzzling violation of human logic and total absence of common sense.”
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An Endless Tyranny
Late one afternoon in March, 1953, journalist Lev Razgon—held in Stalin’s Gulags from 1938-1942, and again from 1952—heard the sounds of heaven on the prison loudspeakers. There was, Razgon wrote, “Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and then we heard the health announcement.” “The bastard is finished”, a prison doctor said, “No hope for him. And we began kissing one another.” Within months, Aleksei Tikhonov records, 1.5 million people were released on the orders of Stalin’s infamous intelligence chief, Lavrentiy Beria.
Even though intellectuals and dissidents were slowly freed, Gulag authorities guilty of egregious crimes were also amnestied. Convict VE Milchikin, serving time for murdering a fellow prisoner, wrote an irate letter to Solzhenitsyn in 1962: “Why are we, murderers, inside? People who have hanged and executed Soviet citizens were released under Article 58 [the Amnesty], while we have to stay in prison.”
Playwright Bertolt Brecht said of Stalin’s prisoners: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” In the rear-view mirror provided by history, it is impossible to distinguish Putin’s face from those of the many tyrants who preceded him.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)