On a frigid December morning in 1917, just weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin signed a decree establishing the Cheka—the first Soviet state security organization. Led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as "Iron Felix," this new security force operated from the imposing Lubyanka building in central Moscow, which would later become synonymous with interrogation and terror. This act, seemingly bureaucratic in nature, would lay the groundwork for one of history's most extensive systems of forced labor and political repression. The Soviet Gulag—an acronym for Main Administration of Camps—would eventually spread across the Soviet landscape like a vast archipelago, to borrow Solzhenitsyn's famous metaphor, forever altering millions of lives and the course of 20th century history.
The origins of the Gulag system were rooted in the earliest days of Soviet power. Lenin, facing civil war and economic collapse, saw forced labor as both a practical necessity and ideological tool. "We must cleanse Russia for long," he wrote in 1918, authorizing the creation of the first concentration camps for "unreliable elements." In August 1918, he telegraphed officials in Penza regarding a kulak uprising: "Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, parasites." These early camps, established during the Red Terror period, primarily housed political opponents, former Tsarist officials, and members of the bourgeoisie. The Kholmogory camp near Arkhangelsk became notorious for its extreme mortality rates, where hundreds of officers from Admiral Kolchak's White Army were executed in 1921. Unlike Stalin's later industrialized system, Lenin's camps were relatively small-scale and decentralized, though no less brutal in their treatment of prisoners.
What began as expedient measures during wartime gradually evolved into a permanent feature of Soviet governance. By 1923, the Solovki prison camp, established in a former monastery on remote islands in the White Sea, became the prototype for future Gulag installations. Prisoner Dmitry Likhachev, later a famous cultural historian, recalled how monks' cells were converted to house dozens of inmates, while the island's isolation made escape virtually impossible. Here, Soviet authorities first tested the economic potential of forced labor while isolating political enemies in harsh conditions. One prisoner described Solovki as "a place of no return," where inmates worked logging operations and construction projects while enduring extreme cold and systematic abuse. The camp commandant, Naftaly Frenkel, pioneered the system of food rations tied to work output—a practice that would become standard throughout the Gulag and cause countless deaths.
00:00 Birth of the Soviet Gulag System
12:13 The Brutal Reality of Daily Life in the Soviet Gulag
26:01 Brutal Punishment System
37:45 The Unraveling of Stalin's Prison Empire