The most striking differences between the gulags in Lenin’s days and those in Stalin’s days were as follows:
- Prisoners in the gulags did not have to work for food in Lenin’s days
- As a general rule, prisoners did not starve
- The gulag population was very small
Some readers may interpret this to mean that Lenin had a softer personality than Stalin, though this is not necessarily true.
One of the main reasons as to why the gulags were far more lenient in their earlier years was because they were largely reserved for intellectuals, academics, and former Tsarist government officials and military officers.
These were the people Lenin was desperate to win over, and not just because it would win him credibility and help tip the scales of the Russian Civil War heavily in his favour, but because he realised that he still needed competent people to run his government, even if they had fought against him.
Meanwhile, regular offenders were often subjected to public humiliations — such as being locked in a barn or forced to run naked in the snow — for acts as simple as failing to meet a grain quota.
In other cases, there were wide reports of some of the following types of tortures — most of them carried out by the CHEKA:
- The crucifixion of priests and nuns
- Peeling off of human hand skin to make gloves
- Subjecting naked prisoners to being placed inside a barrel filled with nails
- Pulling out a piece of intestine and forcing a prisoner to walk around a tree trunk while being flogged from behind
- Forcing a rat or other type of rodent to claw its way into a prisoner’s belly
- Crushing a victim’s skull with metal instruments
- Making a prisoner run naked in the winter while being poured with water until they turned into an icicle
According to Vasili Mitrokhin — a KGB defector and Kremlin archivist who reported on many of these documents — Lenin was himself personally opposed to these atrocities, though he did little to nothing to prevent them, for he felt that the end justified the means, and so he left it to the discretion of his CHEKA personnel to do what they felt was best to achieve his long-term goals.
Other people were simply shot for “crimes” as simple as stealing more than a couple of grains of seeds — something which Lenin had far less reservations about.
Meanwhile, others died from famines, mass executions, political prisons, and labour colonies that were at least as bad as they were during the Stalinist era.
Perhaps it was coincidental that the gulag system quickly expanded and matured during the mid-1920s, shortly after Lenin’s death, though it must be noted that contrary to popular belief, people were executed far less often — especially for non-political crimes — during the Stalinist era than during the Leninist era.
Whereas during the Leninist era somebody could be executed for taking even a handful of grains, during the Stalinist era this punishment was typically limited to a maximum of four years — in other words, the offender would not even be sent to a gulag, but would instead be sent to a political prison, which were often even worse, but at least the prisoner was kept in a “local” area, and his or her sentence was typically much shorter.
Though rarely enforced in practice, most forms of physical torture — which Lenin himself had always been against — were likewise abolished, at least in theory, by Stalin in 1927.
In the book Shallow Graves in Siberia by Michael Krupa there was one incident in which a camp commander at Pechora took it upon himself to subject two prisoners to a grisly torture execution, only to shortly thereafter be summoned to Moscow and shot for the act, though other officials at the camp were never even reprimanded — including one female interrogator whom Krupa witnessed castrating one of his fellow inmates and pouring alcohol on his wounds (he later died from the infections and shock).
The attitude in the Soviet camps were similar in that regard to those in the German camps, which also forbade torture and other acts of deliberate cruelty towards prisoners, even though officials seldom acted on it — a few notable exceptions were the cases of Karl-Otto Koch, Ilse Koch, and Amon Goth.
Though direct executions were largely ended for non-political offences in the Soviet Union by the 1930s except for rape and murder — these were likewise abolished in 1947 — executions for political prisoners between 1936–1946 was likely in the range of several million.
This number included at least 681,692 executed during a purge between 1936–1938, as many as 500,000 shot in Eastern Poland between 1939–1941, tens of thousands in the Baltic States, Bukovina, and Besserabia, and an unknown but certainly far larger number executed during and immediately after the war — some of the larger sites of this nature include Bykivnia and Kurapaty are estimated to have upwards of 200,000 and 300,000 victims respectively, while other sites throughout Europe each contain graves number in the thousands to tens of thousands of victims each.
In conclusion, the gulags between Lenin and Stalin differed not only in scale and nature, but also in the demographics who were sent there — high-ranking officials under Lenin, and peasants under Stalin.
Whether one believes that the gradual elimination of capital punishment in exchange for an industrial scale gulag system where mortality rates were often higher than in concentration camps is a matter of perspective.
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