One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich takes place in a "special" camp run by the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Settlements, better known by the Russian acronym: GULAG. The new rulers of Russia after the violent overthrow of the Czars dealt very harshly with their former, as well as with their new, political adversaries, and, rather than sending their enemies to prison, they began sentencing offenders to "corrective labor" soon after the revolution of 1917. In the following years, concentration camps were built and were combined with corrective labor camps in Siberia, under the administration of the secret police. It is estimated that by 1929, there were already more than 1 million prisoners in these camps, mainly for political reasons.
The establishment of the Five-Year Plans for the economic reconstruction of the Soviet Union created heavy demands for workers to achieve this drive toward changing the Soviet Union from an essentially agricultural society to an industrial society, and it was difficult to find willing and qualified workers for the construction of canals, railroads, highways, and large industrial centers. Thus, from 1929 on, the Soviet rulers began to depend more and more on forced labor. There were hardly any traditional jail terms handed out any longer; instead, criminals and political enemies were sent to labor camps. These sentences, initially for three-year terms, were based mainly on convictions for violations of the infamous Article 58 of the 1926 Criminal Code (see the essay on Article 58).
The first large wave of forced laborers consisted mainly of kulaks, disowned farmers who had resisted collectivization, but soon religious believers of all denominations, members of minority groups and nations, socialists, and engineers (who failed to perform their assigned industrial tasks and were classified as industrial saboteurs) followed them to the camps. It is estimated that in 1940, over 13,000,000 (thirteen million) people slaved in these forced labor camps. In 1937, when many Russians had believed that an amnesty would be declared to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin instead increased the length of the sentences from ten years to fifteen and twenty years, a procedure which was repeated for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution, when the twenty-five-year sentences became standard, and ten-year terms were reserved for juveniles.
