Thursday morning, 9:50 a.m. Stalin dies, succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev. From 1917 to 1953, at least 18 million people passed through the GULag system in the USSR. The death toll from shootings, torture, starvation, cold, and forced labor in the GULag concentration camps is between 1.5 and 1.7 million (Soviet sources and subsequent estimates, including recent ones), in addition to the 30 million deaths in World War II. The GULag system was abandoned only after 1959.
