Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

To what degree Guillaume influenced Brandt is open to debate: the

German chancellor had already decided to push rapprochement with

the East before his association with the Gillaumes. There is no doubt,

however, that they were important agents with access to German and

NATO secrets, and their information helped Moscow carefully craft

its policy toward Germany. Following their betrayal by a Soviet de-

fector, Guillaume was sentenced to 13 years in prison, his wife to

nine. Both were later traded for Western agents.

The Guillaume case became—paradoxically—a defeat for the

KGB. Following the Guillaumes’ arrest, Brandt was forced to resign,

and his policy was attacked as naïve at best and treasonous at worst by

his opponents on the right. The net result was that Moscow lost the

one West German politician able to push rapprochement with the East.

GULAG.The term gulag is derived from Glavnoye upravleniye is-

pravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, or Chief Directorate of Corrective La-

bor Camps, a sector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). No-

bel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the network of

forced labor camps as an “archipelago” dotting the Soviet Union. At

the height of the gulag system in the early 1950s, there were 476 la-

bor camp clusters scattered across the territory of the Soviet Union.

According to Nikita Khrushchev, 17 million people passed through

the camps between 1937 and 1953.

While camps were established in the early 1920s at Solovetsky in

northern Russia on the White Sea, the use of mass prison labor for

economic projects was established by a Communist PartyPolitburo

resolution of 27 June 1929. Party leader Joseph Stalinand his col-

leagues saw the opportunity to use imprisoned and exiledpeasants on

projects in the far north and Siberia. The number of prisoners grew

from 179,000 in 1930 to 1.6 million in 1938, and they were employed

in the building of railroads and canals (such as the Belomor Canal),

in timbering in Siberia, in mining gold in the KolymaRiver camps,

and in building major mining and industrial centers at Norilskand

Vorkuta. During and after World War II, prison labor was engaged

in building military airfields, electro-power plants, and facilities for

the nuclear weapons program. Lavrenty Beriacreated a “nuclear gu-

lag,” a network of camps mining uranium and building secret nuclear

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