The Chief Administration of Camps, created in 1930, turned political and criminal imprisonment into an instrument of economic development, concentrating prisoners in remote regions to cut timber, mine gold, coal and nickel, and build canals, railways and cities. The system expanded with each wave of repression, absorbing dekulakized peasants, victims of the Great Terror, deported nationalities, Poles and Balts, returning Soviet prisoners of war and postwar nationalist insurgents. Camp records opened after 1991 show a population that peaked at about 2.5 million in 1953 and roughly 18 million passing through over two decades, alongside a parallel exile system. Recorded deaths in the camps and colonies exceed 1.6 million, concentrated in the famine year of 1933 and the war years of 1942-43. The system was wound down after Stalin's death in 1953, and the Russian Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression of 1991 provided for the rehabilitation of those convicted on political grounds.
The OGPU and later the NKVD and MVD held prisoners under sentence in a nationwide network of forced-labour camps and colonies and in exile settlements
The 1939 census recorded 170,557,093 people, and is the only usable Soviet count near the midpoint of the Gulag's existence (the 1937 census was suppressed and its organisers shot; the 1926 census gave 147 million). Archival work since 1991, chiefly by Zemskov, Getty and Khlevniuk, established that some 18 million passed through the camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953, with several million more in exile settlements.
The range is confined to deaths in the camps and labour colonies; mortality among exiles and special settlers is counted in the atlas's entries on dekulakization, the special-settlement regime and the deported nationalities, not here. The lower figure, about 1.6 million, is the total of deaths recorded in the camp and colony registers between 1930 and 1956 compiled by Zemskov from NKVD-MVD returns, and is close to the 1.5-1.7 million that Healey, Wheatcroft and Rosefielde treat as the archival consensus. The higher figure follows Mikhail Nakonechnyi's Oxford study of early release on medical grounds, which estimates that about a million terminally ill prisoners were released so that their deaths would not be recorded and adds some 800,000-850,000 such deaths, for a total of about 2.5 million. The often-quoted figure of 2,749,163 (J. Otto Pohl, cited by Anne Applebaum) is not used as the bound because it includes special-settlement deaths counted elsewhere. Golfo Alexopoulos's estimate of about six million, which counts lives shortened by detention, is disputed on method and is outside the range.
Compulsory labour under production quotas tied to rations, beatings and punishment isolators, executions of prisoners during the terror of 1937-38 and starvation in the war years are documented in the camp administration's own records and in the survivor testimony collected by Memorial and the Gulag History project.
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