List of Gulag camps


The list below, enumerates the selected sites of the Soviet forced labor camps of the Gulag. Most of them served mining, construction, and timber works. It is estimated that for most of its existence, the Gulag system consisted of over 30,000 camps, divided into three categories according to the number of prisoners held. The largest camps consisted of more than 25,000 prisoners each, medium size camps held from 5,000 to 25,000 inmates, and the smallest, but most numerous labor camps operated with less than 5,000 people each. Even this incomplete list can give a fair idea of the scale of forced labor in the USSR.

List history

Initially, the list of Gulag slave labor camps in the USSR was created in Poland from the personal accounts of labor camp detainees of Polish citizenship. It was compiled by the government of Poland for the purpose of regulation and future financial compensation for World War II victims, and published in a decree of the Council of Ministers of Poland.
Camps listed were not designed specifically for the Poles. Citizens of the USSR and people of other nationalities were also detained there. In total, more than 18 million people were sent to the Gulag from 1929 to 1953.

Camp system operation

There were a number of particular categories of convicts that were imprisoned there including:
  1. Any person convicted to a term of imprisonment of more than three years.
  2. Soviet dissidents. Initially these were dubbed "class enemies". Later, when the full victory of the Revolution was declared and there were supposedly no more "class enemies" left, a more flexible term of the enemy of the people was introduced, as well as an infamous Article 58 that covered "counter-revolutionary activities".
  3. Soviet combatants returned from captivity. As a rule they were held liable under Article 58.
The so-called prisoners of war were generally imprisoned in special POW camps, which existed independently from the network of corrective labor camps, and were subordinated to a separate administrative apparatus within the NKVD. However, a fair number of POWs ended up in the regular camp system eventually. Unlike Gulag camps, located primarily in remote areas, most of the POW camps after the war were located in the European part of the Soviet Union, where the prisoners worked on restoration of the country's infrastructure destroyed during the war: roads, railways, plants, etc., a topic of a separate article, POW labor in the Soviet Union. Polish citizens and members of other nationalities who were imprisoned at the Soviet forced labour camps during World War II worked also for the Soviet Army, digging trenches, employed in lumber and cement works, airport runway construction, and unloading of transport goods.

Main camp directorates with acronyms

Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKVD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKVD camps, and the Russian Карта ГУЛАГа - Мемориал
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Polish Dziennik Ustaw complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.
Continued from the Russian Карта ГУЛАГа - Мемориал listing of NKWD camps, and the Polish Dziennik Ustaw listing of camps.
Continued from the Polish complete listing of NKWD camps with Poles.