List of Gulag Camps - Camp System Operation

Camp System Operation

There were a number of particular categories of victims that were imprisoned there including:

1. Any person convicted to a term of imprisonment of more than 3 years (all those convicted to less than three years were to be sent to "corrective labor colonies").
2. Soviet dissidents. Initially these were dubbed "class enemies" (White Army combatants, members of opposition parties, nobility, etc.). Later, when the full victory of the Revolution was declared and there were supposedly no more "class enemies" left, a more flexible term of the enemy of the people was introduced, as well as an infamous Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) that covered "counter-revolutionary activities".
3. Soviet combatants returned from captivity. As a rule they were held liable under Article 58, their obvious anti-Soviet offense being not dying in the defence of the Soviet Motherland.
4. Poles. These nationals populated Gulag camps in three major waves, see Polish minority in Soviet Union article.

The so-called prisoners of war were generally imprisoned in special POW camps, which existed independently from the network of corrective labor camps, and were subordinated to a separate administrative apparatus within the NKVD (since 1946: MVD). However, a fair number of POWs ended up in the regular camp system eventually. Unlike Gulag camps, located primarily in remote areas (mostly in Siberia), most of the POW camps after the war were located in the European part of the Soviet Union, where the prisoners worked on restoration of the country's infrastructure destroyed during the war: roads, railways, plants, etc., a topic of a separate article, POW labor in the Soviet Union. Polish citizens and members of other nationalities who were imprisoned at the Soviet forced labour camps during WWII worked also for the Soviet Army, digging trenches, employed in lumber and cement works, airport runway construction, and unloading of transport goods.