Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

This special issue on “The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations” goes to press at a particular moment, at once promising and troubling. In the first instance, it comes at a time when scholarship on the Soviet camp system, which began to grow relatively slowly after the opening of the former Soviet archives, is now gaining a weight and synergy never before achieved. Scholarship received an important impetus with the publication in 2004–5 of a landmark seven-volume Russian documentary study, The History of the Stalinist Gulag.¹ In recent years, the momentum in Gulag studies has accelerated as new work in Russian, English, French, and other languages has pushed the field forward.² The title of this special issue is intended to underscore how the new empirical work presented here, as well as the growing number of important recent works, goes hand in hand with a broader reconceptualization of the nature of the Gulag and its role in the Soviet system. In the second instance, by contrast, we publish this at a time when the memorialization of Stalin-era crimes in Russia has been curtailed and public discussion there has been shifting toward justifications and even celebrations of aspects of Stalinism. Oleg Khlevniuk, a contributor to this number, felt it necessary to rebut this shift toward apologia, notably the increasingly popular myth of the “modernizing Stalin,” in a concluding section to the Russian edition of his new biography of the dictator.³ It [End Page 469] remains unclear how much the renaissance in scholarship can affect political representations, but we have to believe that in the long run it is important.

The acronym “Gulag” stands for Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel´notrudovykh lagerei i kolonii, or the Main Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps and Colonies of the GPU/NKVD and later MVD.⁴ It was not well known or much used until the 1973 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which had huge resonance outside the USSR (and continues to be discussed, as in Golfo Alexopoulos’s contribution to this issue). Since then, what was originally a bureaucratic contraction has come to denote the entire Soviet system of camps and special settlements, and even more broadly the entire system of unfree labor and repression that peaked in the Stalin period. The metaphor of an archipelago can be traced back to a conversation between Solzhenitsyn and Academician Dmitrii Likhachev. Likhachev was arrested in 1928 and became an inmate for five years at the Solovetskii lager´ osobogo naznacheniia (SLON), also known as Solovki, which became the prototype for the expanding system of camps at the outset of the Stalin period. He recalled sharing his notes on the history of the camp in the White Sea archipelago with Solzhenitsyn, who spent 11 years in the camps, as both were preparing their respective publications on the topic. In the course of those three days, he told Aleksandr Isaevich about the Latvian camp boss Degtiarev, the self-styled “surgeon-in-chief” and “head of the troops of the Solovetskii archipelago.” Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, “That is what I need!” Thus, Likhachev recounted, “in my office the name for his book ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was born.”⁵

As David Shearer discusses in his commentary, Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, so widely adopted and so long-lasting, has been productively called into question in recent scholarship. Although Solzhenitsyn also suggested that Soviet life was made up of bigger and lesser zones, the archipelago metaphor was often taken to assume insular separation from the Soviet mainland, so to speak, and thus presupposed a world that was as separate and closed off as it was physically remote.⁶ By contrast, the new scholarship attempts to draw out connections, interactions, and parallels with the broader Soviet civilization beyond the barbed wire. This line of investigation is pushed quite a bit farther by a number of the articles in this collection. [End Page 470]

When enough new research accumulates in a relatively new historical field, as in the archival study of the Gulag begun in the post-Soviet years, scholarship often wends its way back to first principles and basic concepts. It does so in part because growing empirical knowledge provokes an attempt to match to it suitable conceptual frameworks. Such a moment seems to have arrived in Gulag studies. The question of the Gulag’s relationship to the broader Soviet system, in fact, forms a part of an even more fundamental question. What, precisely, was the Gulag? How should we understand the multiple functions and characterize the nature of the network of camps and colonies that greatly expanded under secret police control in the era of the First Five-Year Plan? Indeed, this deceptively simple problem appears to inform many recent scholarly interventions. The penal and repressive role—which punished and “isolated,” in Soviet parlance, a broad variety of criminal, ethnic, and political categories of people—must be balanced in any analysis with the economic and colonizing agendas that turned the forced labor of the Gulag into an economic empire run by the NKVD.⁷ Politically and socially, the Gulag was the repository for those victimized by terror but also for large numbers of people in the criminal system subjected to increasingly draconian everyday penalties.⁸ The Gulag can be seen as at once a punitive penal system and a prime generator of “developmental violence” aimed at breakneck industrialization and colonization.⁹ But how exactly did these functions interrelate and change over time? And what, then, was the role of ideology, which can be understood in several ways—as the worldview of those in charge of the camps or as the official ideology of “reforging” (perekovka), which waxed especially after early Soviet practices of rehabilitation waned?¹⁰ What were the implications of the design and evolution of the Gulag’s several roles for different parts of the rabsila—a newspeak acronym denoting workforce (rabochaia sila), so common in bureaucratic documents, but which [End Page 471] also contains the word rab, or “slave”? Implicit in any conceptualization of the role and functions of the Soviet Gulag is a comparative dimension, which is needed to address how different or similar this system of camps was to forced labor and slavery in other times and places.

The articles in this special issue can be divided into three groups, although some fit into more than one category. Several are driven by an attempt to expand our knowledge of relatively little-known aspects of the Gulag. In this category falls Asif Siddiqi’s exploration of the sharashki, or camps for scientists, the existence of which has been widely noted but which have rarely been examined in depth. Siddiqi attracts our attention to intelligentsia and other relatively privileged inmates and, by examining scientists and applied “specialists” often working on projects with military applications, highlights the role of intellectual labor more generally in the Gulag. Likhachev, for example, was tasked at Solovki with compiling a dictionary of camp slang in a criminological laboratory in which he worked alongside an inmate with a doctorate from the Sorbonne. As Siddiqi suggests, the sharashka phenomenon was a practice that peaked and recurred during distinct moments in the broader Stalin-era cyclical evolution that periodically turned from consolidation to crackdown—the early 1930s, the Great Terror, and the late 1940s. The fact that imprisoned scientists worked alongside free specialists in these units only underscores the relevance of this discussion for the broader investigation of the Gulag’s place in Soviet society.

Emilia Koustova’s exploration of special settlers from Lithuania and western Ukraine, based on an interview project carried out in Irkutsk, turns our attention to the ethnic dimension of Soviet repression. It also examines a little-known topic: the “mechanisms and limits of the integration of postwar deportation victims into Soviet society” (592), or the question of how special settlements could become a vehicle for Sovietization. Koustova examines the sometimes fluid line between the treatment of spetspereselentsy and Soviet citizens—even though stigma and the discriminatory logic behind the repressions persisted after the special settlements were disbanded. Koustova’s work, therefore, also asks us to look beyond the boundaries of a Gulag strictly conceived.

Finally, Dan Healey devotes his work to the history of a topic that is only beginning to be recovered: the history of medicine in the camps and the Gulag’s large-scale Sanitation Department, which was often staffed by prisoners. Healey adapts the notion of biopolitics to the Stalinist case, seeing it as the optimization of populations for industrial production, and examines Gulag medicine through its lens. Healey suggests, in an endeavor much in [End Page 472] keeping with the other contributions, how “Soviet civilian biopolitics and the Gulag version came to resemble each other in important ways” (534).

A second category of articles here might be called big-picture essays that attempt to reconceptualize the Gulag’s functions. Here the prime example is Oleg Khlevniuk’s think piece, “The Gulag and the Non-Gulag as One Interrelated Whole.” This turns into a major investigation of the Gulag’s relationship to the broader Soviet system, or the “non-Gulag.” Khlevniuk approaches this big problem by offering four ways of analyzing it: the Gulag’s boundaries, its channels of interaction with the outside world, its role as a model for the non-Gulag, and its place in a stratified, hierarchical Soviet society. This hierarchy and its contemporary division into beneficiaries and victims, he argues, later reproduced itself in the guise of apologists and critics of Stalinism and has left a legacy lasting until the present day.

Golfo Alexopoulos, like Healey using material from Gulag physicians but in a different fashion, delivers an interpretive tour d’horizon of her forthcoming book with a hard-hitting thesis about the medico-economic exploitation of the rabsila. What she describes is a ladder-like and evolving system by which weaker inmates whose work abilities declined were allocated fewer calories. The class of inmates at the bottom of the ladder, the “goners” (dokhodiagi), were routinely released from the camps before death, affecting our understanding of Gulag mortality rates. The professionally administered systematization of this regime of extreme physical exploitation, which Alexopoulos calls “destructive by design” (500), necessarily affects our understanding of the Gulag’s modernity, even though much of the labor was carried out using the most primitive of tools. No less significant, Alexopoulos’s thesis has ramifications for the old comparison between the Gulag and Nazi concentration and extermination camps. She maintains that the deliberate depletion of human “raw material,” as embodied by the Gulag’s evolving List of Illnesses, made the Gulag not only an institution of “mass death,” as commonly accepted, but also of “mass murder” (500).

The third category of articles represented in this issue is comparative. As it stands, the history of the Gulag is not much informed by comparative history. Perhaps the most promising avenue for refining and developing new interpretations, therefore, will be the addition of explicitly comparative, international, and global dimensions to Gulag studies.¹¹ Aidan Forth’s work on British camps, exploring the behavior of a “liberal empire” in the long [End Page 473] 19th century, well before the era of “high modernism,” was quite deliberately selected for inclusion here. Certain uncanny parallels with the Gulag—what Forth terms a “family resemblance (if only a distant one)” (653)—may well be the most revealing and, perhaps, unexpected finding for Soviet historians, who rarely look beyond 20th-century history and who have grown up for so long on the Nazi–Soviet comparison.¹²

In addition, this issue contains two articles that promote temporal comparisons: Daniel Beer’s work on tsarist exile and Judith Pallot’s analysis of the afterlife of the Gulag in the post-Soviet Russian penal system. It is noteworthy that both articles pay primary attention to the phenomenon of exile—beginning with the harsh physical process of deportation that, as Pallot puts it, “has been a defining feature of Russia’s punishment culture from the earliest times up to the present” (686). In the tsarist context, Beer maintains that the cruelties of the notorious journey to Siberia were not part of the intentional plans of the imperial center, explaining their persistence with reference to state weakness. In Pallot’s cultural interpretation of Russian penology in the post-Soviet context, the harshness of demeaning rituals associated with “traditional” practices forms a major purpose of the system of punishment, even when the penal personnel involved are not under explicit instructions to carry it out.

As Beer brings us deep into the world of tsarist deportation, striking parallels between the 19th and 20th centuries are frequently in evidence. The colonizing mission of the tsarist state in Siberia was succeeded by the Soviet state’s ambitions to use special settlers and the Gulag to colonize remote northern regions. Both the tsarist system and the Gulag not only prioritized economic functions and colonizing agendas but justified them explicitly in terms of rehabilitation. Even Mikhail Speranskii’s technocratic Siberian reforms of 1822 had their latter-day analogue in the meticulous and scientistic Soviet plans for special settlers, which differed so much on paper from the horrors on the ground.¹³

Pallot’s article, the most methodologically explicit of the collection, draws on the cultural turn in penology to explain the partial persistence of the Gulag in post-Soviet Russia. In particular, she explains how coerced exile can be linked to symbolic rituals of purification. On a more concrete [End Page 474] level, Pallot’s article focuses on a number of the Gulag’s legacies for today’s Russian Federation: a “distinctive geographical division of labor” (682) in the penal system as well as distinctive ways of managing prisoners. These include “a collectivist approach to living arrangements and to rehabilitative interventions, the compulsory use of prison labor, reliance on prisoners’ self-organization … and disciplinary practices such as mutual responsibility, competition, and prisoner-on-prisoner informing” (683). In recent years, as the article makes clear, Russian commentators have turned away from internationally minded reform and toward the reassertion of the value of “traditional” practices associated with the Russian and Soviet past.

This issue of Kritika has been in the works for approximately three years, since the editors began to organize a conference on the Gulag, held at Georgetown University on 25–27 April 2013. The conference was made possible by a generous gift from Elisabeth Salina Amorini, who founded the Jacques Rossi Memorial Gulag Research Fund at Georgetown. It was also supported by Georgetown College and its dean, Chester Gillis, and the School of Foreign Service and its dean, the late Carol Lancaster, who was primarily responsible for bringing Kritika to its present home at Georgetown in 2011. The Jacques Rossi initiative, which was launched at the 2013 conference, supports research at all levels and on all topics related to the Gulag. It is named in honor of the French–Polish polyglot and sometime Comintern operative, Gulag inmate for over 20 years, Georgetown University teacher, and early scholar of the Gulag who wrote a number of seminal works still consulted by specialists. Indeed, Jacques Rossi is mentioned or cited in some of the articles that follow. An English translation of the acclaimed 2002 biography and interviews with Rossi by the writer and Georgetown professor emerita Michèle Sarde, Jacques, le Français, is also underway with the support of Ms. Salina Amorini.¹⁴ It will be annotated and introduced by Golfo Alexopoulos.

The editors would also like to thank Aglaya K. Glebova, assistant professor of art history and of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, for her assistance in obtaining images and permission to republish for the art in this issue and the forthcoming book based on it. [End Page 475]