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the first year of the Bolshevik seizure of power
in 1918. Labor camps were known to be in exis-
tence as early as mid-1918 and were legalized by
decrees in September 1918 and April 1919. The
widespread use of labor in prisons, however, was
sanctioned only in the late 1920s under Stalin.
The labor camps built and administered by the
gulag served a dual function: as a place to put
the masses of detainees (commonly known by
the Russian term
zeks
) and to help curtail an
immense shortage of labor that resulted from
Stalin's industrialization policies. Gulag prisons
were originally centered in Karelia, along the
White Sea coast, and in Vorkuta and Pechora, in
the Arctic regions of European Russia. By the
late 1930s gulag labor camps were set up just
about everywhere in the Soviet Union, includ-
ing Moscow. The gulag's role in industrializing
the Soviet Union became increasingly more
important and by the end of the 1930s was
responsible for much of the country's logging
and extraction of copper, gold, and coal. Millions
were sent to the gulag camps and about 900,000
died in them. The majority sent to the camps
were so-called political prisoners—intellectuals,
party and army officials who had been (usually
falsely) accused of being “enemies of the peo-
ple,” spies, or saboteurs. The harsh and often
deadly conditions in the gulag camps have been
attested to by a number of survivors, perhaps the
most noteworthy being Aleksandr
SOLZHENITSYN
,
whose book
The Gulag Archipelago
(translated
into English in 1974) was one of the first com-
prehensive accounts of the Soviet camps.
of poetry,
Put Konkvistadorov,
in 1905, then trav-
eled to Paris, where he studied French literature
at the Sorbonne (1907-8). He married the noted
poet Anna
AKHMATOVA
, in 1910; their son, Lev
Nikolaevich, was born in 1911. By 1914, Gumilev
was a well-known literary personality in St.
Petersburg, and with his wife and Osip
MANDEL
-
STAM
, a leader of the influential Acmeist school of
poetry that developed in opposition to the Sym-
bolists. A lifelong interest in Africa, especially
Ethiopia, led to several voyages, most notably in
1913 as part of an expedition organized by the
Russian
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
. When World War
I broke out, Gumilev served in cavalry regiments
and was twice awarded the St. George Cross. His
Notes of a Cavalryman
stems from this period. After
the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
of 1917, he went on a
military mission through Scandinavia and Britain
to France, trying to get to the eastern front. He
returned in April 1918 through London and
Murmansk to Petrograd. His marriage to Akhma-
tova ended in 1918, and the following year he
married Anna Engelhardt. An active lecturer,
translator, and editor during the chaotic revolu-
tionary years, he was elected chairman of the
Petrograd Union of Poets over the more pro-
Bolshevik Aleksandr
BLOK
. He was arrested in
August 1921, charged with participating in an
anti-Bolshevik monarchist conspiracy, and shot
by the Cheka, together with 61 others. For the
next six decades he became a nonperson in Soviet
literature, excluded from all major anthologies,
despite his obvious importance. The new political
environment promoted by
GORBACHEV
after 1985
and the centenary of Gumilev's birth provided an
opening for the reappearance of his work.
Gumilev, Nikolai Stepanovich
(1886-1921)
poet
One of the major Russian poets of the 20th cen-
tury, Gumilev was born on April 3, 1886, in Kro-
nstadt, the naval base outside St. Petersburg, the
son of a naval doctor. He spent his youth alter-
nating between Tsarskoe Selo and Tbilisi (Tiflis),
where he first came under the influence of revo-
lutionary Marxism. He published his first volume
Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich
(1874?-1949)
(George Gurzhiev)
occultist
A highly charismatic and controversial figure,
worshiped by some as a mystic teacher, derided
by others as a charlatan, Gurdjieff played an
important role in the reawakening of interest in
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