Escaping the Gulags: The History of the Most Famous Attempts to Escape the Soviet Union’s Notorious Labor Camps

One of the most idiosyncratic horrors of Soviet Russia was the Gulag system, an extensive network of forced labor and concentration camps. Part of the rationale behind this system was that it could serve as slave labor in the drive for industrialization, while also serving as a form of punishment. The name Gulag is in fact an acronym, approximating to “Main Administration of Camps” (in Russian: Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei) and operated by the Soviet Union’s Ministry of the Interior. The Gulag consisted of internment camps, forced labor camps, psychiatric hospital facilities, and special laboratories, and its prisoners were known as zeks. Such was the closed and secretive nature of the Soviet state that to this day, knowledge of the Gulag system comes mainly from Western studies, firsthand accounts by prisoners such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and some local studies after the fall of communism.

The most recognisable version of the Gulag, a term that was never pluralized in Russia itself, existed from the 1930s-1950s, a period in which a huge network of camps and prisons was established across the vast Soviet federation. Prisoners were often used as forced labor, made to do physically arduous and soul-destroying tasks. Some workers helped to build large infrastructure projects, and indeed the system was partly rationalized in terms of economics.
By the early 1960s, Gulags were synonymous with various forms of punishments, including house arrest, imprisonment in isolated places, or confinement to a mental hospital where a prisoner would be declared insane or diagnosed with a “political” form of psychosis. In its later years, the Gulags held a particular place in the public’s imagination, both within the USSR and in the outside world. They could mean exile, brutal punishment, or simply being banished to Siberia.

The system of repression, imprisonment, and punishment persisted for decades in the Soviet Union and has been primarily associated with Stalin, one of history’s most notorious tyrants, Stalin was a believer in the economic utility of the Gulags’ forced labor, and at the same time, he was so paranoid that he constantly saw potential enemies among his people, particularly his Bolshevik contemporaries. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulags while purging Soviet leadership and society across the decades he held power. For Soviet politicians, the Gulags served as a propaganda disaster, and they were constantly cited by Western leaders. Many nominal supporters of the Soviet Union were forced to reappraise their stance towards the country when reports of Stalin’s Gulag became common knowledge, and the prison camps became an international issue during the Cold War, especially as human rights became a foreign policy priority for the West in the 1970s. A number of Soviet dissidents and prisoners, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, became cause celebres for campaigners outside the country. The USSR collapsed in December 1991, and it can be argued that the labor camps were not only integral to the very existence of the Soviet Union, but also a damning indictment of the Soviets’ failed experiment in communist totalitarianism.

Of course, the Gulag’s grim reputation for being a murderous system also helps explain why so many people tried to escape. It was commonly thought that tens of millions of people died in the system, and it is now estimated that about 1.5 million people died in the Gulag, with another 800,000 executions during the Great Terror of 1936-1938 (many family members, friends, and colleagues of those executed were sentenced to the Gulag). Most of the prisoners were men, even among the political, but the portion of women in the system increased gradually over time. Before 1938, women made up less than 10% of the prisoners. This increased to 13% in 1941, 24% in 1945, and dropped to 19% in the last years of the Gulag.