When the Soviet Union rose to power,  millions of people believed it was the beginning of something better. But within  months, the new government quietly began building a system to deal with anyone who  didn’t fit its vision. What started as a handful of makeshift prisons slowly grew into  something almost impossible to comprehend.

It all started with a single order. On September 5, 1918, Vladimir  Lenin, Soviet revolutionary leader, signed the Decree on Red Terror. It gave  the Soviet government the power to arrest, imprison, and execute anyone considered  a threat to the revolution. It was not presented as a temporary wartime  measure. It became official policy.

And unlike many political promises, this  one was carried out exactly as written. The camps appeared almost immediately. By  November 1918, the Cheka, the secret police created by Felix Dzerzhinsky, had already set  up forced labor camps inside old monasteries, factories, and military barracks  across Soviet Russia.

 They were not yet called Gulags. The Bolsheviks  openly called them concentration camps. These camps were different from ordinary  prisons because prisoners were expected to work. They dug trenches, built roads, cut  timber, and mined coal. The camps existed to produce labor and resources for the state.  Human suffering was treated as secondary.

By 1922, the Solovetsky Islands in the White  Sea had become the Soviet Union s first major camp complex, known as SLON. Former officers,  priests, political enemies, and common criminals were all imprisoned together inside a frozen  monastery complex. Guards there developed many of the methods later used across the entire  Gulag system. Solovetsky became the model.

The word Gulag officially entered the Soviet  system on April 25, 1930, when Stalin created the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps as  part of the OGPU, the organization that replaced the Cheka. The system now had directors, budgets,  offices, yearly targets, and official paperwork. The arrests almost always happened at night.

Usually between 2 and 4 in the morning.  NKVD officers understood that people were weakest and most disoriented  before dawn. A knock at the door. Two or three men in dark coats.  Sometimes they carried a real warrant. Sometimes it was a little more than a  blank form with a name added later. The arrested person usually had only minutes to get  dressed. Many were told they would return soon.

Most never did. In 1937 alone, the NKVD arrested around  1.5 million people. Around 681,000 were executed. The rest disappeared into the  camp system. These arrests happened during peacetime, carried out by the Soviet  government against its own citizens. The arrests followed Order No.

  00447, signed on July 30, 1937, by NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Moscow assigned  each region arrest quotas. Category One meant execution. Category Two meant ten years  in the camps. Local officials competed to exceed their targets just like factory  managers competed to exceed production goals. Human beings became statistics. After arrest, prisoners were sent to  holding prisons.

 Moscow s Lubyanka prison, the headquarters of the NKVD, processed  thousands during the Great Terror. Butyrka prison became so overcrowded in  1937 and 1938 that prisoners reportedly slept in shifts because there  was not enough floor space. Soviet law required a confession. That rule shaped almost everything inside  the interrogation rooms of Lubyanka, Lefortovo, and other NKVD prisons.

 If  a conviction required a confession, interrogators were expected to get one by  whatever methods worked. In January 1937, Stalin personally approved the use of physical  pressure against enemies of the state. The most common method was sleep deprivation,  known as the conveyor. Interrogators rotated in shifts while the prisoner stayed  awake under bright lights for days at a time. Some interrogations lasted  48 hours. Others lasted more than 100.

After several days without sleep, the human brain  begins breaking down. Prisoners hallucinated, lost track of reality, and became  vulnerable to suggestion. Interrogators used this moment to feed prisoners false  memories about meetings, conspiracies, and crimes until many eventually  believed the stories themselves.

Aleksandr Weissberg, an Austrian physicist  arrested in 1937, later described how four days without sleep left him unable to trust  his own memory. The interrogators insisted he had attended secret meetings. Eventually,  he started believing them and signed part of a confession before later withdrawing it.  Most prisoners never recovered that clarity.

Violence was used alongside sleep deprivation.  Prisoners were beaten with rubber batons, metal rods, and fists. Some were tortured  using falanga, where guards beat the soles of the feet. Others were repeatedly slapped  across the ears until their eardrums ruptured. Stress positions became routine.

 Prisoners were  forced to stand facing walls for hours or crouch in painful half-squat positions until their  legs collapsed. Cold was also used as torture. Prisoners in northern prisons were stripped naked and left in freezing cells or  outdoor yards during winter. At that point, even a blanket or  cup of warm water became leverage. The confessions produced were often absurd.

  Nikolai Bukharin, one of Lenin s closest allies, confessed to terrorism and spying. Marshal  Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the Soviet Union s top military commanders, confessed to working  for Germany before being executed in 1937. Pyotr Yakir was arrested at fourteen  years old and spent seventeen years in the Gulag. His crime was being the son  of a man the state had already executed.

After a confession was made, it led to a  sentence, and that sentence led to transport. Prisoners were usually moved in Stolypin rail  cars, modified prison wagons with barred windows, almost no heating, and terrible ventilation.  Prisoners were packed so tightly that many could not lie down at the same time. Buckets  served as toilets. Water was limited.

The train ride from Moscow to Vladivostok could  take three weeks. Prisoners heading to Kolyma, the camp, were then loaded onto old cargo  ships like the Dzhurma and the Indigirka. In 1933, the Dzhurma became trapped in Arctic ice  while carrying more than 3,000 prisoners. Soviet authorities called the deaths an accident  but never released the true death toll.

Another disaster came in 1939 when  the Indigirka sank near Japan while carrying around 1,000 prisoners from  Kolyma. Roughly 740 people drowned after being locked inside the cargo hold.  Japanese fishermen rescued 105 survivors. Prisoners arriving at Magadan, the gateway  to Kolyma, first passed through overcrowded transit camps. During 1937 and 1938, many slept  on open ground because there was no space left.

Food shortages were common, and guards maintained  order through beatings. Large numbers died before even reaching their final camps, meaning many  deaths were never included in official records. By the time prisoners reached their assigned  camps, most had already spent months in custody. They had survived arrest, interrogation, brief  trials, transport across thousands of kilometers, and overcrowded transit camps. Many were  starving. Many carried injuries from torture.

Almost none were prepared for  the forced labor that came next. One of the first giant projects built  by Gulag labor was the White Sea Canal, or Belomorkanal. Construction lasted from 1931 to  1933, with around 126,000 prisoners working on it at its peak.

 The canal stretched 227 kilometers  through hard Karelian rock, mostly dug by hand because the Soviet government provided  little machinery. Prisoners used pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Soviet records  admitted around 12,000 deaths, though many historians believe the true number was at least  25,000. When Stalin visited the finished canal, he reportedly discovered it was too shallow  for large ships and strategically useless.

The Kolyma gold mines became the deadliest  part of the Gulag. Mining began there in 1932 under Dalstroy, a state organization that  controlled both the mines and the camps. By 1937, around 500,000 prisoners were spread  across dozens of camps in the region, mining gold in temperatures that  often dropped below minus 50 Celsius.

Officially, the workday lasted 10 hours. In  reality, prisoners often spent 14 to 16 hours outside once the long marches through deep  snow were included. During special shock work campaigns, shifts became even longer. Prisoners  who collapsed on the march were dragged back by other inmates because guards needed every prisoner  accounted for at roll call, alive or dead.

In the logging camps of Karelia and the Ural  Mountains, prisoners cut forests with two-man saws while wearing poor clothing and broken boots.  Missing quotas meant less food. Trees crushed prisoners regularly. Saw blades snapped.  Medical stations had almost no supplies. Gulag labor was also used on giant Soviet  construction projects.

 More than 200,000 prisoners helped build the Moscow Volga  Canal. Parts of the Baikal Amur railway were built through forced labor. The  mining city of Norilsk, now one of the world s biggest nickel centers, was built almost  entirely by Gulag prisoners beginning in 1935. The food system was also one of the  Gulag s main tools of control and death.

A prisoner who met the daily work quota  received around 800 grams of bread and balanda, a thin soup made from water, rotten  cabbage, and fish scraps. Altogether, it provided roughly 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day.  But heavy labor in extreme cold required closer to 4,000 or even 5,000 calories just to survive. From  the start, the system guaranteed slow starvation.

If a prisoner failed to meet the  quota, the food ration dropped. Half the quota might mean 600 grams of bread.  Worse performance could mean only 400 grams and water. This was called the penalty ration.  Some camp doctors estimated that prisoners kept on these rations for more than three weeks  usually died. Even so, camps used them repeatedly.

The quotas themselves were often  impossible. In the Kolyma gold mines, a healthy worker could normally move around 4 or  5 cubic meters of ore a day. Gulag prisoners in 1937 were expected to move 8. A starving prisoner  had no realistic chance of reaching that target. Malnutrition destroyed the body slowly.

 Pellagra  caused cracked skin, diarrhoea, dehydration, and mental collapse. Scurvy made gums rot,  and wounds reopen. Many prisoners developed night blindness from vitamin deficiencies,  especially those forced to work at night. Camp doctors recorded these  illnesses, but treatment was rare. Prisoners near death from starvation were  called dokhodiagi, meaning the dying ones.

Guards and prisoners recognized them  immediately by their slow shuffle, swollen legs, and severe exhaustion. Some  were moved to lighter work, not from mercy, but because collapsing prisoners created  problems in the mines and forests. To survive, prisoners searched constantly  for extra food.

 Some traded clothing for bread. Others stole from kitchens despite  the risk of brutal punishment. Some formed relationships with guards, kitchen workers,  or criminal prisoners in exchange for food. The camp administration did not always need  to terrorize political prisoners directly. The system already had another  layer of violence built into it.

Soviet authorities deliberately mixed  political prisoners with violent criminals. Political prisoners were called 58ers,  named after Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. Criminal prisoners, known as  the blatnye, became an unofficial enforcement force inside the camps.

 In exchange  for easier work and better treatment, they helped control other prisoners  through intimidation and violence. At the top were the vory v zakone, or  thieves-in-law. They followed a criminal code that rejected cooperation with the state  and rejected ordinary work. Inside the barracks, they often controlled daily life.

 They decided  who slept near the stove, controlled gambling circles, and sometimes gambled with other  prisoners clothing, bread, or even lives. New prisoners were usually tested within hours  of arrival. Political prisoners like teachers, engineers, doctors, and officers  usually could not defend themselves against hardened criminals. Many lost their  coats, boots, and food on the first night.

The camp authorities knew exactly  what was happening. They allowed it because weaker prisoners became  easier to control and easier to work to death. Prisoners stripped of food  and warm clothing collapsed faster. Political prisoners were trapped between violent  criminals below them and the camp administration above them. Complaining to guards rarely helped.  Guards were often involved or simply did not care.

Protection usually came only through attaching yourself to a stronger prisoner in  exchange for food, labor, or favors. Women entered the Gulag  through the same system as men, but they faced additional forms of punishment. One common charge was ChSVN, meaning  Member of a Traitor s Family. It was mostly used against women.

 If a man was arrested, his wife was often arrested soon afterwards,  even if she had committed no crime. Simply being married to the wrong person could  lead to five or eight years in the camps. Their children were usually taken away during  the arrest. Children under twelve were sent to NKVD orphanages. Older children were  sometimes arrested as well.

 Nadezhda Joffe, the daughter of a well-known Bolshevik  revolutionary, was arrested at eighteen, one year after her father s arrest.  After finishing one sentence, she received another and remained  imprisoned through much of World War Two. Pregnant women were not protected from arrest  or transport.

 Women gave birth inside poorly equipped camp medical units. Babies were usually  separated from their mothers within weeks and placed in camp nurseries so the mothers could  return to labor. Soviet records later showed infant death rates between 30 and 50 percent  in some nurseries during the early 1940s. Se*ual violence was widespread.

 Guards  held total power over female prisoners, while prisoners had almost no way to report  abuse. Historians examining Soviet archives after 1991 found almost no records of guards being  punished for se*ual assault during Stalin s rule. Some women entered relationships  with guards or camp officials because it improved their chances of  survival.

 Extra food, lighter work, or protection could mean the difference between  life and death. Gulag survivor Hava Volovich later described women making these choices carefully  because survival left them very few options. Another woman, Evgenia Ginzburg, was  arrested in Kazan in February 1937. She was a Communist Party member, lecturer,  and journalist who had committed no real crime. She spent eighteen years in the Gulag,  including eight years in Kolyma.

 Over time, she secretly wrote down her experiences and  eventually smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union. In 1967, it was published  in the West as Journey into the Whirlwind. She survived long enough to tell the story. Many others did not. One of the harshest punishments inside the Gulag  system was the ShIZO, the punishment isolator.

It was usually a tiny cell kept barely warmer  than the outside air. In Kolyma winters, that could mean temperatures close  to minus 40 degrees Celsius inside the cell itself. Prisoners locked  in the ShIZO received only around 300 grams of bread and water each day. A  standard sentence there lasted ten days.

At those temperatures, ten days in isolation could  easily cause permanent frostbite, nerve damage, or death. Even prisoners who survived often  came out too physically destroyed to recover. Another common punishment was transfer, known  as etap. Camp authorities could move prisoners to harsher camps, more remote regions,  or deadlier work assignments without any court review.

 Prisoners who complained,  caused trouble, or were accused by other inmates of criticizing the administration  often disappeared into these transfers. One of the cruelest psychological  punishments involved false promises of release. Prisoners nearing the end  of a ten-year sentence were sometimes told they were finally going home. In some cases, officials even returned their old civilian  documents.

 Then, on the expected day of release, the prisoner was handed new paperwork with another  sentence attached, often another ten years. This became especially common after World War  Two. Soviet authorities feared surviving political prisoners had become dangerous simply because  they had lived through the camps and seen too much. Between 1945 and 1950, many prisoners who  expected freedom instead received fresh sentences.

Some prisoners who survived years of starvation, cold, and forced labor broke completely  after hearing they would never leave. A number of them died soon afterward, not from violence or disease, but from losing  the last piece of hope keeping them alive. The Gulag system finally began shrinking  when Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after suffering a stroke four days earlier.

His closest associates, including  Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, and Vyacheslav Molotov,  gathered at Stalin s dacha after the stroke. Doctors were not called immediately, and  historians still debate whether the delay was intentional. But regardless of the  reason, Stalin died a few days later.

On March 27, 1953, only weeks after Stalin died, the Soviet government announced a major amnesty  that released around 1.2 million prisoners. The release mainly covered people convicted of  smaller crimes, along with pregnant women, mothers with young children, juveniles,  the elderly, and the seriously ill.

Political prisoners were excluded. The prisoners convicted under  Article 58 remained inside the camps. What followed was not immediate freedom  but resistance. In the summer of 1953, around 16,000 prisoners at the Norilsk  camp complex went on strike. They refused to work and demanded shorter hours, case reviews, and the removal of the identification numbers  sewn onto their clothing.

 The strike lasted 67 days before Soviet authorities ended  it through negotiation and force. More uprisings followed. Prisoners rebelled  at Vorkuta in 1953. At Kengir in Kazakhstan, prisoners held control of the camp for over  40 days in 1954 before Soviet troops entered with tanks. Around 500 prisoners were  killed when the uprising was crushed.

On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous Secret Speech to Communist  Party officials. Behind closed doors, he openly described many of Stalin s crimes,  including torture, false confessions, executions, and the destruction of Soviet  military leadership before World War Two. The speech was supposed to remain secret, but  copies quickly leaked and spread across the world.

Between 1956 and 1958, large numbers of  political prisoners were finally released. Many returned home only to discover their  apartments had been given to other people, their jobs were gone, and their families  had been destroyed or scattered. The Soviet government  offered no real compensation. Most survivors only received a document  stating that their original conviction had been unjustified.

 Then they  were expected to continue living as if nothing had happened.  Many never fully recovered. The Gulag was not built by monsters  alone. It was built by administrators, paperwork, quotas, and ordinary  officials following orders inside a massive bureaucracy. That is  what makes it so disturbing. Not just the horror itself, but how normal  the system looked while it was happening.

And systems built by ordinary  people can always be built again.