What happened to the gulags?

Question

In Russia, during the communist years, there were gulags or prison camps, where christians, jews, and other dissenters were jailed with criminals. What happened to the gulags and the people in them?

Answer 1

russkimuzhik is technically correct -- the vast labor camp system of Stalin began to be dismantled shortly after his death and was officially completed in 1960.

But that is misleading -- the camp system, in a slimmed down form continued to be used to handle dissidents. These camps did not finally close until the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union.

In her definitive work *Gulag: A History* (2003), Anne Applebaum introduces this transition and final stage thus

"As a system of mass forced labor involving millions of people, the camps disappeared when Stalin died. Although he had believed all of his life that the Gulag was critical to Soviet economic growth, his political heirs knew well that the camps were, in fact, a source of backwardness and distorted investment. Within days of his death, Stalin's successors began to dismantle them. Three major rebellions, along with a host of smaller but no less dangerous incidents, helped to accelerate the process.

"Nevertheless, the camps did not disappear altogether. Instead, they evolved. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a few of them were redesigned and put to use as prisons for a new generation of democratic activists, anti-Soviet nationalists--and criminals. Thanks to the Soviet dissident network and the international human rights movement, news of these post-Stalinist camps appeared regularly in the West. Gradually, they came to play a role in Cold War diplomacy. Even in the 1980s, the American President, Ronald Reagan, and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, were still discussing the Soviet camps. Only in 1987 did Gorbachev. .. begin to dissolve the Soviet Union's political camps altogether.

"Yet although they lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself . . . "
http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html

see also:
http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/nps/onlineexhibit/dissidents/

Answer 2

Puh-lease, read the sources, not the Washington Obkom propaganda. You make me laugh.

GULag (ГУЛаг = Главное Управление Лагерей) was the Central Department of Labor Camps, that's a literal translation.
It was liquidated in 1960 during Khruschev's tenure.
At that time, many of 2.2 mln prisoners received the amnesty.

By the way, maximal population of labor camp was 2.5 mln prisoners (1952). It's a little bit less than current population of American gulags.
That's the truth.

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Here are the first 5 directors of GULag:
1. Theodor Eichmans, ethnic Latvian, 1930.
2. Lazar Kohan, ethnic Jew, 1930-32.
3. Moshe Berman, ethnic Jew, 1932-37.
4. Israel Pliner, ethnic Jew, 1937-38.
5. Gleb Filaretov, finally an ethnic Russian, 1938-39

Answer 3

Like all Death camps they faded out. They stopped being used because there was no need for them because democracy came on the stage.
As for the people put into the Gulags they met the same fate as those in concentration camps under the Nazis, worked to death, starved, you name it.

Answer 4

There was a general amnesty declared during Perestroika.