Editing Gulag (section)

=== History of Gulag population estimates ===
During the decades before the dissolution of the USSR, the debates about the population size of GULAG failed to arrive at generally accepted figures; wide-ranging estimates have been offered,<ref name="Bacon">Edwin Bacon. Glasnost' and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labor around World War II. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 44, No. 6 (1992), pp. 1069–1086</ref> and the bias toward higher or lower side was sometimes ascribed to political views of the particular author.<ref name="Bacon" /> Some of those earlier estimates (both high and low) are shown in the table below.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|+Historical estimates of the GULAG population size (in chronological order)
|-
|'''GULAG population''' ||  '''Year the estimate was made for''' || '''Source''' || '''Methodology'''
|-
|15 million || 1940–42 || Mora & Zwiernag (1945)<ref>Cited in [[David Dallin]] and [[Boris Nicolaevsky]], ''Forced Labor in Soviet Russia'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 59-62.</ref> || –
|-
|2.3 million || December 1937 || Timasheff (1948)<ref>N. S. Timasheff. The Postwar Population of the Soviet Union. ''[[American Journal of Sociology]]'', Vol. 54, No. 2 (Sep. 1948), pp. 148–155</ref> || Calculation of disenfranchised population
|-
|Up to 3.5 million || 1941 || Jasny (1951)<ref>Naum Jasny. Labor and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps. ''Journal of Political Economy'', Vol. 59, No. 5 (Oct. 1951), pp. 405–419</ref> || Analysis of the output of the Soviet enterprises run by NKVD
|-
|50 million || total number of persons<br />passed through GULAG|| Solzhenitsyn (1975)<ref name=GARCH>Solzhenitsyn, A. ''The Gulag Archipelago Two'', Harper and Row, 1975. Estimate was through 1953.</ref> || Analysis of various indirect data, <br />including own experience and testimonies of numerous witnesses
|-
|17.6 million || 1942 || [[Anton Antonov-Ovseenko]] (1999)<ref>{{in lang|ru}} ''Beria'' Moscow, ACT, 1999, {{ISBN|5-237-03178-1}}, page 203.</ref> || [[NKVD]] documents<ref>According to [[Anton Antonov-Ovseenko]], "average number of prisoners [in Gulag] was 17.6 million in 1942, which many times exceeds the "declassified" official (forged) data frequently published in press"; the number was taken from an NKVD document dated January 18, 1945. The number of prisoners in 1943 was estimated as 13 million.</ref>
|-
|4–5 million || 1939 || Wheatcroft (1981)<ref>S. G. Wheatcroft. On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929–56. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr. 1981), pp. 265–295</ref> || Analysis of demographic data.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|10.6 million || 1941 || Rosefielde (1981)<ref>Steven Rosefielde. An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour 1929–56. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jan. 1981), pp. 51–87</ref> || Based on data of Mora & Zwiernak and annual mortality.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|5.5–9.5 million || late 1938 || Conquest (1991)<ref>Robert Conquest. Excess Deaths and Camp Numbers: Some Comments. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 43, No. 5 (1991), pp. 949–952</ref> || 1937 Census figures, arrest and deaths<br /> estimates, variety of personal and literary sources.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|4–5 million || every single year || Volkogonov (1990s)<ref name=Rappaport>Rappaport, H. Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion. ABC-CLIO Greenwood. 1999.</ref> ||
|-
|colspan="6" style="text-align: center;" |a.{{note|ros_note}}''Note: Later numbers from Rosefielde, Wheatcroft and Conquest were revised down by the authors themselves.''<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /><ref name="rosenf" />
|}
The [[glasnost]] political reforms in the late 1980s and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, led to the release of a large amount of formerly classified archival documents<ref>Andrea Graziosi. The New Soviet Archival Sources. Hypotheses for a Critical Assessment. ''Cahiers du Monde russe'', Vol. 40, No. 1/2, Archives et nouvelles sources de l'histoiresoviétique, une réévaluation / Assessing the New Soviet Archival Sources (Jan. – Jun. 1999), pp. 13–63</ref> including new demographic and NKVD data.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> Analysis of the official GULAG statistics by Western scholars immediately demonstrated that, despite their inconsistency, they do not support previously published higher estimates.<ref name="Bacon" /> Importantly, the released documents made possible to clarify terminology used to describe different categories of forced labor population, because the use of the terms "forced labor", "GULAG", "camps" interchangeably by early researchers led to significant confusion and resulted in significant inconsistencies in the earlier estimates.<ref name="Bacon" />

Archival studies revealed several components of the NKVD penal system in the Stalinist USSR: prisons, labor camps, labor colonies, as well as various "settlements" (exile) and of non-custodial forced labor.<ref name="GRZ" /> Although most of them fit the definition of forced labor, only labor camps, and labor colonies were associated with punitive forced labor in detention.<ref name="GRZ" /> Forced labor camps ("GULAG camps") were hard regime camps, whose inmates were serving more than three-year terms. As a rule, they were situated in remote parts of the USSR, and labor conditions were extremely hard there. They formed a core of the GULAG system. The inmates of "corrective labor colonies" served shorter terms; these colonies were located in less remote parts of the USSR, and they were run by local NKVD administration.<ref name="GRZ" />

Preliminary analysis of the GULAG camps and colonies statistics (see the chart on the right) demonstrated that the population reached the maximum before the World War II, then dropped sharply, partially due to massive releases, partially due to wartime high mortality, and then was gradually increasing until the end of Stalin era, reaching the global maximum in 1953, when the combined population of GULAG camps and labor colonies amounted to 2,625,000.<ref name="Anatoly Vishnevsky">[http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema05.php "The Total Number of Repressed"], by [[Anatoly Vishnevsky]], Director of the Center for Human Demography and Ecology, [[Russian Academy of Sciences]], {{in lang|ru}}</ref>

The results of these archival studies convinced many scholars, including [[Robert Conquest]]<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> or Stephen Wheatcroft to reconsider their earlier estimates of the size of the GULAG population, although the 'high numbers' of arrested and deaths are not radically different from earlier estimates.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> Although such scholars as Rosefielde or Vishnevsky point at several inconsistencies in archival data with Rosefielde pointing out the archival figure of 1,196,369 for the population of the Gulag and labor colonies combined on December 31, 1936, is less than half the 2.75 million labor camp population given to the Census Board by the NKVD for the 1937 census,<ref>{{cite journal |author=Steven Rosefielde |journal=Communist and Post-Communist Studies |volume=30 |issue=3 |pages=l-33 |date=1997 |url=http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/rosefielde.pdf |title=Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR During the 1930s |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111113035745/http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/rosefielde.pdf |archive-date=November 13, 2011}}</ref><ref name= Vishnevsky>Vishnevsky, Alantoly. Демографические потери от репрессий (The Demographic Loss of Repression), Demoscope Weekly, December 31, 2007, [http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php retrieved] April 13, 2011</ref> it is generally believed that these data provide more reliable and detailed information that the indirect data and literary sources available for the scholars during the Cold War era.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> Although Conquest cited Beria's report to the Politburo of the labor camp numbers at the end of 1938 stating there were almost 7 million prisoners in the labor camps, more than three times the archival figure for 1938 and an official report to Stalin by the Soviet minister of State Security in 1952 stating there were 12 million prisoners in the labor camps.<ref>{{cite web |author=Robert Conquest |url=https://www.bu.edu/iscip/pubseries/PubSeries1conquest.pdf |title=Knowing the Soviet Union: The Historical Dimension |access-date=January 31, 2017 |archive-date=October 18, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121018091358/http://www.bu.edu/iscip/pubseries/PubSeries1conquest.pdf }}</ref>

These data allowed scholars to conclude that during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG ''labor camps'' and 4–5 million passed through the ''labor colonies''.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> Thus, these figures reflect the number of convicted persons, and do not take into account the fact that a significant part of Gulag inmates had been convicted more than one time, so the actual number of convicted is somewhat overstated by these statistics.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> From other hand, during some periods of Gulag history the official figures of GULAG population reflected the camps' capacity, not the actual number of inmates, so the actual figures were 15% higher in, e.g. 1946.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" />

The USSR implemented a number of labor disciplinary measures, due to the lack of productivity of its labour force in the early 1930s. 1.8 million workers were sentenced to 6 months in forced labor with a quarter of their original pay, 3.3 million faced sanctions, and 60k were imprisoned for absentees in 1940 alone. The conditions of Soviet workers worsened in WW2 as 1.3 million were punished in 1942, and 1 million each were punished in subsequent 1943 and 1944 with the reduction of 25% of food rations. Further more, 460 thousand were imprisoned throughout these years.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939423_23.pdf|author=Andrei Sokolov|publisher=Hoover Press
|title=Forced Labor in Soviet Industry: The End of the 1930s to the Mid-1950s An Overview|date=January 2003}}</ref>