This thesis examines the development of the first system of concentration and labour camps established by the Bolsheviks during the Civil Wars. It focuses on the role of the security services in shaping early Soviet penitentiary practices and philosophies, presenting an institutional socio-history of camp administration from an internal administrative perspective.
The thesis analyses the camps’ role in Soviet political violence and their social and economic impact on the civil war and subsequent state-building efforts. Beyond the Soviet context, the thesis repositions the early penitentiary system within the global development of modern statecraft. It highlights the active role of Soviet criminologists, penitentiary experts, decision-makers, and theorists during a period when scientific ideas and penal philosophies circulated widely across borders. This multidimensional history explores key aspects of camp formation, including administration, camp sociology, gendered repression, re-education, and the forced labour economy. It focuses on the period up to the NEP reforms when Soviet policymakers took stock of years of camp management and the repressive practices of the Red Terror. The thesis argues that the camps were politically and economically dominant in securing Bolshevik victory. However, these practices came to a threshold, and wartime techniques and practices, far from being abandoned, they were institutionalised to fit the modernisation of the Soviet state.
Using archival materials from Georgia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine, the thesis combines quantitative analyses, such as the study of NKVD budgets and camp demographics, with an anthropological investigation of the operational practices of the Cheka and NKVD. This approach provides a foundation for understanding the evolution of the Gulag, the massive camp, exile, and forced labour system developed under Stalin. The thesis innovates by incorporating Civil War sources into the broader historiographical debate on the Gulag’s function and the intentions of its designers. It credentials a multilayered conceptual framework between economic, destructive, functionalist, and structuralist interpretations. It argues that while Soviet penal policy in the 1920s aimed for financial efficiency and modern rationality, Stalin’s next generation exploited the camps for their destructive and social engineering potential.