Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin's Gulag

Abstract

Memoir literature suggests that Iosif Stalin's gulag was largely populated by political prisoners and that release from detention was extremely rare. In this article, Golfo Alexopoulos notes that most gulag inmates represented criminal offenders who cycled through Stalin's labor camps and colonies in vast numbers. She argues that the gulag formed a dynamic system in which the majority of prisoners came and went and uses Stalin's largest single release of gulag prisoners to expose the movement and tension of this revolving door. Surprisingly, Stalin's amnesty occurred over the objections of the NKVD leadership and despite great cost to the gulag system; the law was not designed to address postwar labor shortages, relieve overcrowded facilities, or remove less productive prisoners. Rather, the postwar prisoner exodus constituted a political act, and one consistent with Stalinist penal practice in which most prisoners cycled through the camps, connecting the world of the gulag with the larger society.