Gulag 2.0 — Russia Reopens the Camps

Russia’s FSB is working to build a new gulag. It’s recreation, and the loud echoes of the Stalinist era may mark the moment the country returns to the status of an unashamed dictatorship (if it hasn’t already passed that grim milestone).

Since February, the State Duma has been preparing three bills — expected to pass in July, and become law in January — that would create a new prison and detention archipelago across Russia.

The first bill was submitted in February. It will allow the FSB to create its own pretrial detention centers, or more accurately, prisons. In the Russian legal framework, those who were detained and arrested are held in prison, and those convicted are sent to penal colonies. In reality, both pre-trial prisoners and convicts are held in prison for months and years

Why the legal changes? After all, the FSB is not short of legal powers. The answer is extremely troubling. The FSB is anticipating a steep rise in repression. The explanatory note to the legislation states: “With the beginning of the special military operation, the number of suspects and [those] accused of treason, confidential cooperation with a foreign state, international or foreign organization, and espionage has increased significantly.”

It’s been a long road for Russia’s secret police. In the 1990s, as a result of Yeltsin’s reforms, the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, lost its prison empire, including its crown jewel—Lefortovo, the old Tsarist military prison in eastern Moscow with five wings shaped like the letter K.

The prison gained a horrible reputation in the 1930s, when executions were routinely carried out in its basement. In the post-Stalin era, it became the place where political prisoners and espionage suspects were held. (The inbuilt prison at the security service’s Lubyanka headquarters had been closed in the 1960s.)

President Yeltsin tried to weaken the KGB behemoth by stripping its main successor of both investigative powers and control over detention facilities. All KGB detention centers, including Lefortovo, were handed over to the Interior Ministry. But when two prisoners escaped from Lefortovo — the first such incident in the prison’s history — and the facility was returned to FSB control. Quietly, the FSB also restored its investigative department. 

In 1996, when Russia joined the Council of Europe, the Kremlin pledged to “revise the law on federal security services in order to bring it into line with Council of Europe principles and standards within one year of accession.”

Specifically, Russia promised to strip the FSB of the right to run pretrial detention centers. The Europeans insisted on a separation between investigative bodies and detention facilities to prevent undue pressure on inmates.

The FSB resisted for years, and ever-more ferociously after Putin came to power in 2000. But in July 2005, with great fanfare, Vladimir Putin signed a decree transferring all FSB prisons — including Lefortovo — to the Ministry of Justice.

But, as in Soviet times, appearance and reality were not the same. The decree was a classic disinformation operation — it was never meant to be implemented. As the authors of this article discovered at the time, FSB prison personnel were simply reassigned to the penal service “on temporary assignment.” Though formally employed by the penal system, they remained subordinate to the FSB — as so-called attached undercover officers. The FSB never confirmed nor denied our reporting.

Over time, the system was refined to near-perfection. Officers serving at Lefortovo were routinely assigned from the FSB — often from its Investigative Department, which is conveniently headquartered within the Lefortovo prison complex. That remains true today: Dmitry Yelkin, appointed head of Lefortovo in 2022, previously served in the Investigative Department’s infamous First Section, which handles espionage cases. In other words, the system never posed any real problems for the FSB.

Lefortovo prison, for one, has fully preserved its peculiar atmosphere as a facility reserved for the state’s enemies — something the authors can personally attest to, having been interrogated there multiple times over the course of the 2000s.

Under the new plans, the FSB wants not only to reclaim the Lefortovo but also to establish new detention centers across the country, along with the creation of a new and in-house logistical system for moving detainees between these facilities.

One of the bills stipulates that the penal service must, in coordination with the FSB, develop a draft schedule for special carriages that can be attached to passenger, mail, and baggage trains. It also requires the penal service to provide the FSB with vessels and aircraft to transport convicts and prisoners in pre-trial detention. These inmates would be escorted by a newly established FSB guard service.

Another bill gives the FSB the power to investigate and punish in-house those who cause trouble within detention facilities.

Special carriages, vessels, aircraft, the power to escort suspects, and the full authority to discipline and control inmates — all housed, protected, and supervised within the growing FSB empire — clearly indicate preparations for repression on a scale beyond anything we’ve seen so far.  

The logistical response the FSB has devised is unmistakably Stalinist. In the 1930s, it was the scale of repression that prompted Stalin’s NKVD to set up the department of Railway and Water Transport, not to mention the Main Directorate of Highways of the NKVD, which oversaw all the highways in the vast Soviet Union.

Putin may be hesitant to increase his war effort even further, apparently wary of torpedoing his economy, but his beloved security service shows no hesitation at all in returning to large-scale repression. Now it’s getting ready for that. 

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book ’Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation’ by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov was published in the US on June 3 and June 26 in the UK.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.