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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast,

fascinating historical conversations

from the makers of BBC history magazine.

The Soviet Gulag was a place of brutality, exploitation and death. So it might surprise you to discover that it was also home

to tens of thousands of medical personnel who had to overcome limited facilities, appalling conditions and political menace in a battle to save the inmates lives.

Professor Dan Healy has researched these Gulag doctors for his new book and he spoke to Rob Atta about their complex role at the heart of Stalin's labour camps.

Dan, you've spent many years researching Gulag doctors for this book. Before we go into more depth about

Goula medicine itself, I wonder if you could just describe for our listeners what the Goulaic actually

was. A very good question.

First of all, you have to think about it as an enormous penal system

that was set up under Stalin to actually incarcerate millions of people over a very long period of time

and crucially it was intended to make a contribution to the Soviet economy, to Soviet industrialization.

And this was not unusual in other penal systems had drawn on the labor of prisoners to perform various tasks, but very much

the Gulag's contribution to the Soviet economy was baked into planning, was baked into infrastructure,

opening up remote spaces of the Soviet Union through prison labor.

So the Gulag formally begins in 1930 when the secret police take over

the management of all prisons in the Soviet Union and begin to distribute

prisoners around the Soviet Union to big construction projects and big

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