Talk of concentration camps was first heard in Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918 in connection with the Czech uprising and the induction of former Imperial officers.* At the end of May, Trotsky threatened Czechs who refused to surrender arms with confinement to concentration camps.† On August 8, he ordered that, for the protection of the railroad line from Moscow to Kazan, concentration camps be constructed at several nearby localities to isolate such “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators” as were not executed “on the spot” or given other penalties.126 Thus, the concentration camp was conceived of as a place of detention for citizens who could not be specifically charged but whom, for one reason or another, the authorities preferred not to execute. Lenin used the term in this sense in a cable to Penza of August 9, in which he ordered that mutinous “kulaks” be subjected to “merciless mass terror”—that is, executions—but “dubious ones incarcerated in concentration camps outside the cities.”‡ These threats acquired legal and administrative sanction on September 5, 1918, in the “Resolution on Red Terror,” which provided for the “safeguarding of the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolating them in concentration camps.”
It seems, however, that few concentration camps were built in 1918 and that those which were owed their existence to the initiative of the provincial Chekas or of the military command. The construction of concentration camps began in earnest in the spring of 1919 on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii. Lenin did not want his name linked with these camps, and the decrees establishing them and detailing their structure and operations came out in the name not of the Council of People’s Commissars but of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and its chairman, Sverdlov. They implemented recommendations contained in the report by Dzerzhinskii of February 17, 1919, on the reorganization of the Cheka. Dzerzhinskii argued that the existing judiciary measures to combat sedition were not sufficient:
Along with sentencing by courts it is necessary to retain administrative sentencing—namely, the concentration camp. Even today the labor of those under arrest is far from being utilized in public works, and so I recommend that we retain these concentration camps for the exploitation of labor of persons under arrest: gentlemen who live without any occupation [and] those who are incapable of doing work without some compulsion; or, in regard to Soviet institutions, such a measure of punishment ought to be applied for unconscientious attitude toward work, for negligence, for lateness, etc. With this measure we should be able to pull up even our very own workers.127
Dzerzhinskii, Kamenev, and Stalin (the co-drafters of this decree) conceived of the camps as a combination “school of work” and pool of labor. In accord with their recommendation, the CEC adopted the following resolution:
The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.128
For reasons that are not clear, in 1922 and subsequently, the term “concentration camps” was replaced by “camps of forced labor” (
On April 11, 1919, the CEC issued a “Decision” concerning the organization of such camps. It provided for the establishment of a network of forced labor camps under the authority of the Commissariat of the Interior—now headed by Dzerzhinskii:
Subject to internment in the camps of forced labor are individuals or categories of individuals concerning whom decisions had been taken by organs of the administration, Chekas, Revolutionary Tribunals, People’s Courts, and other Soviet organs authorized to do so by decrees and instructions.129
Several features of this landmark decree call for comment. Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also “categories of individuals”—that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the “bourgeoisie.” Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost. The network of camps was run by the Commissariat of the Interior, first through the Central Administration of Camps and later through the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lageriami), popularly known as Gulag. One can perceive here, not only in principle but also in practical detail, Stalin’s concentration camp empire: it differed from Lenin’s only in size.
