1951 French Socialist Party Propaganda Map of the Gulags in the Soviet Union

This is a c. 1951 Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers' International) campaign propaganda poster of the Gulag labor and prison camp network in the Soviet Union. The map depicts the Soviet Union from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait, highlighting in red the location and extent of the Soviet Russian forced labor camps. The Soviet hammer and sickle mark locally administered camps, while the red dots mark camps under centralized control. The lighter red shades broader forced labor regions.

An Anti-Soviet Propaganda Map

Perhaps the most widely circulated piece of anti-Soviet Cold War-era propaganda, this is not the first iteration of a Western map of the Gulag network. That work is credited to Polish soldiers Sylvester Mora and Pierre Zwierniak, who created a map to accompany their 1945 book Sprawiedliwość Sowiecka [Soviet Justice].

The present map goes far beyond Mora and Zwierniak's work. Influenced by Mora and Zwierniak, a committee of the AFL-CIO (backed by the CIA) commissioned Don Levine, a Russian-American journalist, to create a map that detailed the Gulag network with much more precision. Levine's final product (the central map presented here) first appeared in the September 17, 1951, issue of TIME. Subsequent, separately issued posters were published later, and the central map was distributed around the world. Per the P.J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography at Cornell University, 'thousands of copies were distributed in Latin America (in Spanish) and in Europe (in German, French, and other languages).'

Publication History and Census

This map was published c. 1951 by the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. It is not cataloged in OCLC and is not part of the P.J. Mode Collection at Cornell. We have found only a handful of other instances when it appeared on the private market.