The Gulag reached its peak after Stalin's great victory
Most people assume the Soviet camps were worst in the purge years of 1937. Anne Applebaum found the opposite.
The image of the Gulag frozen in popular memory is 1937: the midnight knock, the show trials, the mass executions. But the camps were still expanding more than a decade after that. By 1950–1952, the system held a larger population of forced labourers than at any other point in its history. Soviet victory in World War II had swollen the prisoner rolls with captured soldiers, displaced nationalities, and fresh waves of political suspects.
At their height, the camps produced roughly a third of the country's gold and forty percent of its timber. Prison labour built railways through permafrost, dug canals across the steppe, and staffed secret design bureaus where engineers like Andrei Tupolev worked on military aircraft from inside the wire. All twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones held at least one camp complex.
What finally ended the Gulag was not humanitarian pressure but arithmetic. When Stalin died in 1953, his successors began dismantling the camps within days, recognising them—in their own words—as a source of economic backwardness. At least eighteen million people had passed through by then. Anne Applebaum spent years reconstructing this accounting from archives that had been sealed for half a century.