Eighteen Million Lives

The people swept into the camps were not mainly criminals. They were engineers, teachers, farmers, writers, and members of ethnic minorities. You could be arrested for almost anything — even telling a joke about Stalin.

Stalin used the Gulag as both a labor pool and a political weapon. Anyone denounced by a neighbor, a rival, or a spurned lover could vanish for a decade. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned for criticizing Stalin in a private letter, turned his ordeal into The Gulag Archipelago — a book that helped erode Soviet legitimacy from within.