List of Concentration and Internment Camps - Russia and The Soviet Union

Russia and The Soviet Union

See also: List of Gulag camps, Katorga, List of Soviet Union prison sites that detained Poles, Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union

• Syretzk concentration camp in the outskirts of Kiev.
• Darnitza concentration camp. "Over 68,000 Soviet prisoners of war and peaceful citizens."

In Imperial Russia, labor camps were known by the name katorga.

First Soviet camps were organized in June 1918 for Czechoslovak soldiers. Solovki prison camp existed since 1923.

In the Soviet Union, labour penitentiary camps were called simply camps, almost always plural ("lagerya"). These were used as forced labor camps, and had small percentages of political prisoners. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book they became known to the rest of the world as Gulags, after the branch of NKVD (state security service) that managed them. (In the Russian language, the term is used to denote the whole system, rather than individual camps.)

In addition to what is sometimes referred to as the GULAG proper (consisting of the "corrective labor camps") there were "corrective labor colonies", originally intended for prisoners with short sentences, and "special resettlements" of deported peasants. At its peak, the system held a combined total of 2,750,000 prisoners. In all, perhaps more than 18,000,000 people passed through the Gulag in 1929-1953, with further millions being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. The survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see Order No. 270). Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag.

After World War II, some 3,000,000 German soldiers and civilians were sent to Soviet labor camps, as part of war reparations by labor force. Less than 1,000,000 returned to Germany.

An extensive List of Gulag camps is being compiled based on official sources.