Dan Snow's History Hit - History of Gulags

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

On the 16th of February, 2024, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service announced that opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died. He had been imprisoned in the far-flung "Polar Wolf" penal colony, built in the city of Kharp on the ruins of a Stalin-era labour camp.Dan is joined by Alexander Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He lays out the history of exile and the treatment of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and details the vast Gulag system to which tens of millions of Soviets were sent.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 16th of February 2024, the Russian government announced that Alexei Navalny had died in prison in western Siberia. The official statement said that all necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results. but did not yield positive results. Alexei Navalny died in FKU-IK3, a prison, part of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia. It's known as Polar Wolf, a men's maximum security penal colony. It's in the town of Karp. Karp was built by prisoners under Joseph Stalin. Polar Wolf, the penal colony, was founded on the site of a Stalinist concentration camp. The historical roots of Navalny's imprisonment, of his death, of the oppressive system that exiled him,

of Vladimir Putin's rule itself. All of those historical roots are clear to see. On this podcast, I'm going to talk about the gigantic penal infrastructure of the Soviet Union, how it was built on czarist foundations, but then massively expanded by Lenin and Stalin, before being shrunk to a certain extent by Khrushchev and his successors. To help me do that, I've got Alexander Watson. He's a professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research focuses on the global conflicts of the early 20th century, and particular on East Central Europe. He's got a new book coming out soon on the global conflicts of the early 20th century, and particular on East Central Europe. He's got a new book coming out soon

on the death of German democracy in the 1930s. He's going to talk me through the history of Soviet exile, of incredibly harsh treatment of political prisoners, and of the gigantic Gulag archipelago to which tens of millions of Sovietsviets were sent under lenin and stalin it's more important historical context here on the podcast folks enjoy t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima god save the king no-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Alexander, thanks very much for coming back on the pod. Thanks very much for having me. It's just been so interesting talking to you over the last couple of years as we follow the radical and violent swings, in particular the Russian-Ukrainian war. And I guess this is connected with that. It's a question of kind of internal dissent within Russia. Russian history is infamous for these distant Arctic Siberian gulags. Can we trace them right back into the sort of the early days of Muscovy? When does it become a thing to kind of geographically isolate

these dissident voices? So the first mention of exile in any Russian law is in 1649. So it goes way, way, way back. And I guess there's a logic to that, you know, in a country as enormous as Russia, shifting people out from the population centres into the peripheries from the point of view of a ruler it has a lot of advantages and it's maybe worth bearing in mind of course it's not just the the Russians who find that useful as well I mean the Brits as well sending people to Australia in the in the 19th century as well it's uh in some ways this is both a Russian thing but there are elements that go beyond Russia yes I as ever we just like to remember it more when it's done by our strategic adversaries. So even in the 17th century, we associate this kind of organised, well, what does the word gulag mean?

Is that a Soviet term or is that actually a czarist kind of 19th century term? So the term itself is Soviet, and it stands for Guadnia Upravlenia Lagare, or Main Camp Administration. And it's coined in 1930 when Stalin's secret police take over the camp administration that has been growing up in the Soviet Union pretty much from its birth, from 1918. You can look at the Soviet Union as almost a prison state. Ways of controlling people, of oppressing undesirables, of punishing people, of deterring people from stepping away from the main line of the party. These you see already developing right at the start of the regime. and the methods themselves go back way before the regime as well. Tsarist Russia deports people, as we've just talked about, to the peripheries of its empire, especially the unpopulated ones, or the very sparsely populated ones.

But the Soviets take that to a new level. Before we get to the Soviets, I guess, well, the prime mover of that early Soviet state, Lenin, he himself had been to Siberia, hadn't he? I mean, so this was something that the Tsarist state was, they were building this infrastructure. They were building an infrastructure, but there are differences between what the Tsarist state does

and the infrastructure that it has available and what the Soviet state, Lenin's state after does as well. But yeah, you're right. I mean, Lenin was famously a prisoner in Siberia and a lot of so-called undesirables get sent to Siberia by the Tsarist regime. Bolsheviks all end up in Siberia in not too much discomfort. regime. Bolsheviks all end up in Siberia in not too much discomfort. It's not like Lenin is set to hard labour or anything like that. And it's pretty easy for Bolshevik revolutionaries to escape from the places that the Tsarist Empire attempts to deport them to. Stalin escaped several times. So there isn't a kind of barbed wire enclosure. It's more that they send them to this unbelievably remote place and just rely on geography to keep them in prison there. Well, exactly. These things are so far away and transport connections are so poor

that getting away is not necessarily that straightforward. But you're not looking at camps in the same way as later, necessarily, and certainly not on the scale of what we see in the Soviet regime. Okay, so that's interesting. Why the step change? With that in mind, the best thing about the Soviet system in, maybe it's like Dante's Circle of Hell. That's probably the best. You've got execution, you've got the gulag, which are prison camps, but then you've got so-called special settlers who are exiles. And that has some similarity with some of what the Tsarist regime was doing as well in the 19th century.

The Tsarist regime sent peasants and others who stepped out of line into these peripheries and forced them to stay there. And the Soviets take that up and they do that on a much bigger scale as well. And then, of course, you've got the broader empire outside the prison camps, outside these so-called special exile settlements in the far off regions where people still aren't allowed to move freely. You know, there's a system of internal passporting which keeps peasants in their places of location right across the Soviet Union. So this is a really, really controlled society anyway. But the levels of control get harder and harder the closer to the inner circles of hell you get. That's one way of thinking about it. Would it be right to think of them as sort of death camps at any point? I mean,

are people being sent there in order to get rid of them permanently, punish them? Are they work camps? How do they evolve in the 20s and 30s? At the start of the period, as I said, there's a repressive apparatus built up in the Soviet Union right from the very, very beginning. So this is in the DNA of the system. It's not right simply to say, oh yeah, you know, the gulags, that's Stalin's thing. Sometimes you hear this from some people, oh, communism's kind of a good idea, but Stalin perverted it. In 1917, dear, but Stalin perverted it. In 1917, 1918, 1919, the first years of the Bolshevik system, these camps begin to come up. And Trotsky is very important in setting them up. And he actually talks about concentration camps, in the first instance, as a way of disposing of or neutralising Bolshevik enemies, bourgeoisie, people who are opposed to the new regime that the Bolsheviks

are trying to set up. It's worth bearing in mind just how unstable and how fragile the Bolshevik regime appeared at first. I think we often think about the Soviet Union as it was in its kind of like superpower heyday after the Second World War. But in 1918, 1917, 1918, you know, the Bolsheviks are having to blow the doors of the National Bank in order to get the gold because no one is willing to cooperate with them. This is kind of how haphazard their taking over power is. And they have many enemies and they set up camps to put them in. They have prisons, but they also begin to set up these camps. There aren't huge numbers. There's about, I think, 20 by the end of 1919, but they expand quickly. The one that is considered to be like the model for the Gulag, so for the system that's more famous, that really rises under Stalin, is one called Solovetsky, which is in the far north. It's not so far from the Finnish border. It's

in a set of islands, and it's built around what was a monastery. Bear in mind, of course, religion is banned under the Soviet regime. So the monks are thrown out, and this monastery has taken over on these islands, and it's turned into a camp. And these camps are, in disciplinary terms initially, they can be quite lax, they're very poorly organised, but Solovetsky is a bit different. And Solovetsky is different for two reasons. The first is it becomes, in the 1920s, a system in which prisoners are exploited for labour. So the big difference that you've got between the Tsarist regime's camps or the Tsarist regime's exile and the Soviet system is the Soviet system comes to

prioritize labor. Gulags are meant from about the mid-1920s to be self-sustaining. In other words, prisoners are meant to produce more than they cost to feed and maintain. And the rule which comes out of this Solovetsky camp is that those who work more eat more. And of course, those who don't work or aren't able to work because of the bad conditions are left to perish on very, very, very low rations. And that economic framework, the really lethal economic framework that's developed in Solovetsky is transferred right across the system in the late 20s and especially in the 1930s. That's one distinctive aspect of the Gulag. And the other distinctive aspect of the Gulag is the role that prisoners themselves play because prisoners are brought in, in part to help manage it. There are guards,

there is a commander of all these camps, but prisoners as well are brought in to maintain discipline. There's a criminal layer of prisoners called the thieves in law. These are criminals, they're brutal, they keep the other prisoners in check and exploit the other prisoners, and they add to the brutality of this Soviet system too. In answer to the question you asked me specifically, can you consider them to be death camps? Yes and no. No in the sense of the Soviets don't have extermination camps on the model of the Nazis, like Treblinka, for example, where Jews are brought in by rail and they're murdered within the space of half an hour an hour. You know, these camps are simply for execution and nothing more. You don't get that type of system in the Gulag system in the Soviet

Union. So you don't get extermination camps in that sense, but the mortality rates of the Gulag are enormous. So in this other sense, you can absolutely consider them to be death camps. At the high point in the Second World War, you've got a quarter or a fifth of prisoners dying from exploitation, overwork, sometimes outright execution. In 1938, when the camps fill up during the Great Purge, you've got orders sent out to execute prisoners simply to reduce the overcrowding. So these are death camps. They work more in the style of the Nazi labour camps, where it's death through labour. Some people are released. There is the possibility of release from Soviet gulag camps as well for some people. So the death rates in these places are huge.

I mean, maybe the short answer to your question is to give you some statistics. Official statistics say something like 2.7 million people died in the gulag of the perhaps 18 million who went through it. But it's reckoned by most historians that those official statistics are underestimates, in part because sometimes very ill malnourished prisoners would be released just before they died, and then they would come off the books. So the higher figures suggest that up to perhaps 6 million people died in these camps. So you've got between what, a sixth and a third of the inmates dying. So I think you can call them death camps in that

context, yes. Especially since the prisoners as well were humiliated, they were tarred as enemies of the people, and they were pushed out of society deliberately. You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the death of Navalny and the history of the Soviet gulags. More coming up. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And I mean, there were so many people, as you say, but there would have always been an important core of actual genuine political distance and potential rivals to Lenin and Stalin, I suppose. And were they treated differently,

or were they just thrown into the mixer? Yeah, so it varied depending on which parts of the period you're looking at. And it's worth bearing in mind as well that the camp system continues to expand right across the early Soviet period. The high point of the gulag is not in the 1930s with Stalin's famous purges, it's actually after the Second World War in the early 1950s when you've got about two and a half million people, something like that, maybe a few more, even 2.7 million in the camps. At the start of the period in the 1920s in the prison system, when the oppressive apparatus of the Soviet regime is much smaller, there are a lot of political dissidents. And those political dissidents aren't treated as poorly as others

in the 1930s. The camps really begin to get far more lethal from 1913, especially above all from 1937 as they expand. But already from 1930, when the secret police expand their control right over the whole Soviet prison system. In the 1920s, you do have prisoners in places like Solovetsky, this so-called model gulag that I talked about before. And they get all sorts of privileges at the start of the period. They're able to complain, they're able to organise to some degree, and that's clamped down on later in the 1920s. As I said, once this idea gets going that actually gulags are about labour exploitation, then that gets clamped down on. Of course, you get many more people coming in as well, partly because Stalin is paranoid, the economic policies, the five-year plans don't go

well, so he's looking for scapegoats. And so peasants are brought in, managers are brought in, others are brought in, but also simply because the whole system gets taken over by the secret police and it becomes much more about exploiting people to the utmost for work. Again, within the gulag system, I guess apart from political prisoners, you also get scientists. There are some scientists who are arrested simply because the gulag managers need them for these huge, ambitious projects that the gulag is set to work upon. And they end up in some special scientific camps with lab setups. And there the conditions are very different from the hard labour camps where you've got people cutting down timber or mining gold,

or even after the Second World War, mining uranium. So you've got a wide spectrum. Like I said, think about circles of hell, you've got a wide spectrum within this system. But you've got scientists as well being first shifted to hard labour and then moved to science or backwards and forwards. It was a very perilous, very fragile existence that anyone caught up in this very arbitrary prison system. What happens when Stalin dies and Khrushchev takes over and there's a slight, a gentle thawing of the Soviet system? So Khrushchev famously gives this secret speech in 1956 condemning Stalin and the cult of personality, in part, of course, because that makes Khrushchev look better and helps him cement his control on the Politburo and the Soviet Union writ large. the so-called excesses, as I think he terms it. I mean, obviously, they were excesses,

atrocities is a better word, of the Stalin and even of the Lenin period, but Khrushchev is particularly talking about the Stalin period. And prisoners are released. So for example, the most famous prisoner of the Gulag in the West is probably Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And he writes this book called The Gulag Archipelago, which comes out in 1973 and is published in the West and condemns the gulag and the whole Soviet system. He's arrested at the end of the Second World War, given an eight year prison term for for criticising Stalin in a letter. And then he serves that prison term in the gulag, is released in 1953, but is only released into enforced exile, I think from memory in Kazakhstan. So he's released not into Soviet society writ large, but into another layer of the prison system, a special settlement where he's condemned to stay for life. That's 53. And then when Khrushchev comes in, in 56, he's then released from that too and allowed to return to the main Soviet population

centres. So you do get, with Khrushchev, a huge reduction in the gulag system and in the prisons it contains. Bear in mind that it expands to its biggest extent at Stalin's death in the early 50s. And then, yeah, under Khrushchev, those prisoners, lots of prisoners are let free. But it's never entirely disassembled, not by any means. Some camps, for sure prisoners are let free. But it's never entirely disassembled, not by any means. Some camps for sure are closed down. Some of the big projects that are underway, crazy ones in the north are closed down. But the Soviet Union retains its legal and penal structure. It's very arbitrary legal and penal structure, able to imprison dissidents, able to exile people. And that maintains right through to the fall of the regime.

It never really stops. Perhaps maybe one difference, and this is where, if we're thinking about today's Russian system, you kind of can see lots of similarities and continuity stretching back right even to the Tsarist period, but also stepping stones where things change. And the Soviet system adapts as well in the 50s, 60s, 70s. So for example, to imprison political dissidents, where political dissidents in the 20s were put in prison and in the 30s were put in the gulag, by the 70s and 80s, they're instead being condemned to psychiatric hospitals and this is a convenient way of avoiding or trying to avoid anyway western criticism of barbarous punishments by presenting it as medical measures and psychiatric measures while still performing the same function of suppressing all resistance all vocal resistance to the regime. Therefore as

with many aspects of the Soviet state apparatus, it has not been hard for Putin to sort of reconstruct elements of it and the exile of politically inconvenient people continues. Yeah, so back in, when was it, 2011-2012, Medvedev, who is best known now for making all sorts of statements about sending nuclear weapons the way of Russia's enemies. For a time, he was President Putin and he swapped roles. He'd been Prime Minister and then he was President because Putin had had his terms and then Putin came back again. And during his presidential period, there's some evidence that he was interested in prison reform. And he said at that time, I think in 2011, that 90% of the

Russian prison system does come from the Gulag. It's Soviet, he said. So you've got all sorts of continuities. I mean, the prison camp that Navalny has been in was built on the site of an old Gulag camp. So you've got a very concrete physical continuities. There are new buildings, they're brick rather than wood, but the places in many cases are the same. You've got continuities in terms of distance. I mean, the first experience of anybody who's arrested, beyond the arrest, is then transportation. It's transportation which lasts days or weeks, to unknown places in overcrowded conditions. You read Navalny's tweets about his experience. You've got that sense of distance being moved away from Russian centres of habitation

into the peripheries, into no man's land of wilderness. The camps themselves have broadly the basic same structures. In the Gulagag you had an administrative section you had a domestic section you had a productive section where the prisoners work and that's still the same today in in russian camps uh punishment you've got this so-called shizl which is the isolation block and nivalny i think spent about 300 days in 2022 in isolation and this again this punishment goes right back to the gulag so yeah you have all of this maybe where the difference lies is in the use of law or so-called law I mean of course the Soviets used law as well lots of

prisoners Solzhenitsyn among others were condemned on the basis of an article, Article 58, against counter-revolutionary sabotage. And Putin's regime has taken that up and expanded it. So you've got law used for the purpose, not for protecting people and for guaranteeing people's rights, but law perverted to maintain the system. And that took place in Russia. There's dips kind of thing. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there are legal reforms in Russia. Russians do get rights of protest, and those begin to be reined back after the colour revolutions of the early 2000s in other countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and especially from 2012, when there are protests about unfairness and cheating in the presidential election. And from that point on, Russia's rights of protest are reigned back and back and back.

And law is used even more than it was before as a means of maintaining Putin in power. And of course, Navalny is a victim of that. One thing that strikes me that's quite depressing is that the system works, right? Actually, you mentioned earlier the British transporting people. You see that for 1745, Jacobites sent all over the world. You see the charters being sent to Australia. And that is a pretty effective way of dealing with dissent, isn't it? And the tragedy here is that it is a very successful way,

it's a very effective way of isolating, of suppressing, of crushing the voices of those who seek to challenge your regime. It certainly is in the short term, but in the longer term, less so. And maybe that's always the cause of hope. I mean, you think about the Soviet Union, it's also very fragile. It eliminates its opposition through these very, very oppressive methods. It produces huge economic projects, many of which don't work hugely well or in the intended way they do, but which look impressive and give the communist ideology this kind of international gloss. The Soviet Union achieves superpower status after the Second World War, you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and yet it collapses, and it even collapses pretty bloodlessly. So these regimes, they look very hard, and they are very hard. And to oppose them like Navalny did takes huge bravery.

But they do collapse. The Soviet Union, it lasts 80 years, which isn't that long in a historical sense. It satellites East Germany, for example, that lasted, what, 40 years before it eventually collapsed. So it's hugely depressing and it's difficult to see any change with any immediacy in Russia or in Belarus or in any of these places that use these systems inherited from the Soviets, these gulag systems and penal systems inherited from the Soviets. But then of course if you look back at the history of these countries as well, change does generally come very unexpectedly with very few people predicting it. And I think that's perhaps something to hold on to too.

Well, let's definitely hold on to that. Alex, last question is, obviously, as a historian, we certainly don't predict the future. But I've talked to you throughout this conflict, we've discussed the Russian obsession with Ukraine, the importance of Ukraine in Russia's imperial project. We talked about coups and potential revolutions. Last summer in Prigozhin was briefly on the road to Moscow. What are you thinking about at the moment? What bits of history are flashing into your mind? And we're not going to hold each way of this. What should we be thinking about and looking towards if we're trying to work out what's going on at the moment? For me, there's two things that I'm thinking about generally, and then to do with my research.

Generally, I'm thinking about the run up to the Second World War. I'm not for a minute suggesting that there's going to be any big European war anytime soon. But deterrence is a powerful way of avoiding conflict. And it seems to me that Europe, certainly in the context of all sorts of global events now, the Ukraine war, the upcoming US election, does need to think very seriously in a way that it hasn't had to through most of my adult life, depressingly, but I think it's necessary about rearmament, about arming, about its industrial production. And as the experience of the Second and even more of the First World War in Britain shows, these things are very, very difficult to do once a conflict breaks out. And conflicts are more

likely to break out without that deterrent aspect. I'm thinking a lot about Europe, Germany in particular, and the so-called peace dividend that we had for 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, how that's ended. And I'm wondering what our politicians are going to do to respond to that. And in terms of the other thing, I'm working on a book at the moment about the collapse of democracy in Germany in the early 30s. And that internal aspect about how precious democracy is, about how it can be subverted, about why electorates sometimes opt, as they did in Germany in the 1930s, to vote down their own democracies. Sounds remarkable, but that's what the Germans did in the 30s. This seems to me to have quite

a lot of popular resonance at the moment, a lot of current resonance with the rise of populist parties, some parties in Eastern Europe, as well. And this upcoming year is going to be a year of elections. And I think that makes it important. And I think I'd like to see more talk among politicians and historians of actually just how important elections are, and more recognition of the fact that when people lose faith in democracy, when people vote in populists, for sure, they may have very many good and rational reasons from a very narrow short-term perspective, but actually it ends badly. It always ends badly. And understanding that and thinking about the historical presidents,

given this is a year in which much of the Western world will be voting, including in our own country. Yeah, I hope that's talked about more. Alexander, when can we look forward to this book? The book will be out next year, and it's about the collapse of democracy in Germany in the early 1930s. Not just the rise of Hitler, but also the communists, the democrats, and why the Germans in the early 1930s decided to vote down their own democracy. Let's absolutely hope that it's not a timely book. Yeah, sure, definitely. That's a mean thing to say to an author, but thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having me.