Gulag in Kazakhstan: 20 camps by region and year, 1930–1959

The Gulag in Kazakhstan, as counted here, means 20 camps and camp divisions between 1930 and 1959. The count peaks at 9 in 1953. Six of the twenty stood in today’s Karaganda region, and the largest dated headcount in our table belongs to Peschanlag: 39,612 people on 1 January 1952.

How to read it: a camp counts as active for the whole of its opening and closing years, so a camp and its successor can share a year. In 1953 that applies to Construction 790 and the Yermakov division. ALZHIR is counted separately even though it was a division of Karlag.

Gulag in Kazakhstan: the full table of 20 camps

Years and headcounts come from the Russian Wikipedia article on each camp. Many of those articles cite the 1998 reference book on the Soviet labour camp system compiled by Smirnov. A dash means the article gives no usable number.

How to read it: “recorded figure” is the largest dated prisoner count we took from the article and may not be the true peak. For Karlag it is 25,000 in 1934. The same article quotes a chief agronomist’s account of 40,000 people in farm work in 1939–1941, which we left out because it is not a camp count. Seven units lasted no more than one calendar year, and the Guryev camp was never really set up. Karlag ran longest, 28 years.

Where the camps were, by region today

The distribution is uneven: Karaganda and Pavlodar regions hold 10 of the 20 units. Region names are current ones, so Zhezkazgan and Kengir appear under Ulytau.

These are the eight largest recorded figures. Their dates differ, so you cannot add the bars together. Prisoners could move between camps, and Luglag became a division of Peschanlag in 1951.

Places you can visit today

For a trip, what matters is where a museum or memorial exists. Three of these have their own guide pages.

Check opening hours before you go, since each guide page says what we could and could not confirm.

The whole table is a CSV file under CC BY 4.0, with the article link on every row.

Method and limits

We took the entries located in the Kazakh SSR from the Russian Wikipedia list of Gulag camps, captured on 6 November 2026. We added Prorva, which had camp points on the Caspian, and ALZHIR as a separate division, then copied dates and headcounts from each camp’s article. A script does the yearly count. This is Wikipedia-level evidence and not archive work.

Search interest is a separate measure. It describes queries, not visits to memorials. According to Ubersuggest on 6 November 2026, gulag kazakhstan gets 90 searches a month worldwide.