Remembering the Soviet Labor Camps

The Gulags were a network of labor camps created by the Soviet Union from the 1920s that reached their apex after the Second World War. The camps remain an enduring symbol of a repressive regime. Events have been held in and around Moscow on October 29-30 to commemorate the victims of repression.
The photos shows a map of the Soviet Union with the location of the 162 camps from Stalin’s rule. The map was a display at a 1988 exhibition during Conscience Week organized by the Memorial civil rights group.

A labor camp of the 1930s-40s: Construction workers’ barracks at the Panyshevsky power plant.

Interior of the barracks at the Panyshevsky Collective Labor Camp.

An isolation ward used to discipline inmates at a labor camp in Vorkuta.

Women’s barracks at a labor camp in Vorkuta.

Maximum security barracks at a labor camp on the Kolyma River.

Butugychag, a word meaning “death valley” in the native Evenki language, was one of the harshest camps, located along the Kolyma River. The camp was named by the nomadic hunters and reindeer breeders who came across a vast plain strewn with human bones.

Inmates worked at the Butugychag uranium enrichment plant without protective gear.

The Solovki Special Purpose Camp on the Solovetsky Islands in the northern Arkhangelsk region was created in October 1923 by a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars. The camp was incorporated within the grounds and buildings of the former Solovetsky Monastery, which was shut down in 1920.

The unmarked graves of political prisoners at Solovki.

A dungeon in the Solovki prison camp.

The remnants of the Simbir-Olchan labor camp in the far eastern province of Yakutia.