The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous. The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore.

The origins of the gulag system lie not with Joseph Stalin, but in the tumultuous years following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The new Soviet government, led by Vladimir Lenin, grappled with consolidating their rule, and constructing a new society out …

Mar 23, 2018 · The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. The notorious prisons, which incarcerated about 18 million...

Mar 18, 2025 · Gulag, system of Soviet labor camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed the political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. At its height, the Gulag imprisoned millions of people.

Jul 18, 2022 · Started by Vladimir Lenin, and expanded by Joseph Stalin, gulags made up a defining part of life in the Soviet Union. As many as 30,000 camps operated across the USSR, where prisoners served years-long sentences for offenses as innocuous as making a drunken joke or showing up late to work.

Sep 23, 2018 · The empire of concentration camps, which Solzhenitsin labeled the “Gulag Achipelago,” was not the work of Joseph Stalin, to whom it is usually attributed, but of Lenin and Trotsky. The first camps were established as early as 1918, during the Civil War. They were gradually expanded until by the early 1920’s they numbered in the hundreds.

Dec 21, 2021 · 2. The Gulag was created by Lenin, not Stalin. Although the Russian Revolution transformed Russia in a multitude of ways, the new government was much like the old tsarist system in its desire to ensure political repression for the best functioning of the state.

Creation of the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoye upravleniye lagerey, GULAG – an acronym that has appeared sporadically since 1930) under the USSR’s People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which takes over the management of practically all Soviet prison facilities.

Sep 2, 2022 · After taking the control of the Russian Empire in 1917, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) established a system of forced labor camps in Siberia. The predecessors of the gulags were the tsarist punishment camps in Siberia. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) himself was imprisoned in such camps four times.

Lenin: the Source of Soviet Labor Camps. Many historians see Lenin as the evil genius who laid the "blueprint" for Stalin and Stalinism and was the source of the Soviet Union's tragedies and eventual demise.