The Bolsheviks started creating the first concentration and forced labour camps in 1918, soon after taking power in Russia. The organisation and subordination of the camps were changed several times. After the end of the civil war, the number of prisoners was relatively low, in the middle of 1929 it was 22,848. The rapid growth of the camp system and the increase in the number of prisoners were the result of the decision to utilise prisoner labour from July 1929. In barely a year, the number of prisoners in the camps grew more than sevenfold. The new system was administrated by the Camps Administration, from 1931 known as the Main Directorate of the Corrective Labour Camps (Главное Управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей). Despite the later changes, the acronym of this name (GULAG) became synonymous with the Soviet camp system.

The demand for a workforce, along with the growing repressions, led to the development of the GULAG camps system. Already in 1934 the number of prisoners surpassed half a million, and in 1936 there were over a million of them (1,296,494). After the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and parts of Poland, Finland and Romania, the number of prisoners rose to nearly 2 million (1,929,729 at the beginning of 1941). In the following years it fell (partially due to Germany taking over a part of Soviet territory), then started rising again after the end of the war. The system achieved its peak development in 1950 – there were 2,614,203 prisoners in the GULAG then. Cumulatively, circa 18 million people passed through the camps system.

Both criminal and political prisoners were held in the camps. The percentage of the latter varied from 12.3% (1936) to 52.9% (1947). The backbreaking labour, hunger, and disease caused the deaths of over 1.6 million prisoners, according to incomplete data. After Stalin’s death (1953) mutinies broke out in some camps, and were bloodily suppressed. The Soviet authorities decided to declare an amnesty; over half of the prisoners were released. The dismantling of the system began in 1955, and the centralised administration of the camps ceased to exist at the beginning of 1960. However, some of the camps continued to function. The last camp where political prisoners were held (Perm-36) was dissolved in 1987. The camps system, called the “Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, comprised at its peak 146 main labour camps and 2,555 camps and penal colonies subjected to the structures of the repressions apparatus. When including subcamps, staging points, transitional prisons etc., it is estimated the whole “Gulag Archipelago” comprised as many as 30,000 locations.

It is worth mentioning that camps independent from the GULAG existed. In 1939, after the invasion of Poland, the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees (Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных, GUPVI) was created. In camps subjected to it, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were held. After the end of the war, that number rose to millions, along with tens of thousands of interned civilians, who were also slated for forced labour. Moreover, NKVD filtration camps existed during the war and right after its end (also outside of the Soviet Union). Forced labour was also not limited to camp prisoners – some of the deported were put to it along with people taken into so-called “work columns” and construction battalions, or sentenced to forced labour without simultaneous detention.

Representatives of all the nations of the Soviet Union were imprisoned in the GULAG camps. Already in the 1930s thousands of representatives of nearly all European nations were among them. They were communists and other idealists, who came to the USSR to help with building the “Country of Councils”, and then fell victim to repressions. After the Soviet aggressions of 1939-1941 this “European representation” in the GULAG grew. Near and after the end of World War II, representatives of nations that found themselves in the Soviet sphere of influence appeared in the camps.