David-Fox, Michael (ed.) The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 581 David-Fox, Michael (ed.). The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies; Kritika Historical Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2016. xi + 434 pp. Map. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $49.95. Expanding on the articles presented in a special issue of the journal, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (2015), this new collection of essays brings together some of the most important new scholarship on the Gulag. Focusing broadly on questions such as the productivity of the Gulag, its significance as a representation of modernity and the applicability — or otherwise — of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the ‘state of exception’ to the Sovietcamps,theessaysmarktheshiftinemphasisofrecentresearchawayfrom Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘archipelago’ model. The nebulous borders between Gulag and ‘non-Gulag’, as defined in Oleg Khlevniuk’s contribution, provide a fruitful framework for the analyses by several authors. Golfo Alexopoulos and Dan Healey explore different sides of the question of debilitated and disabled convicts. Alexopoulos, taking Solzhenitsyn’s coinage, ‘destructive labour camps’, as her starting point, documents the catastrophic effect of hard labour on convicts’ health and the use of early release to maintain camp mortality figures at an artificially low level, to argue that the Gulag was ‘more lethal than corrective’ (p. 42). Healey, conversely, examines moves to both accommodate and exploit the labour of disabled prisoners as a factor that fundamentally undermined the economic viability of the Gulag. Equally revealing of the contradictory imperatives governing the Gulag, and likewise taking disabled prisoners as a major focus, is Wilson T. Bell’s local study of the Western Siberian Gulag during the Second World War. Asif Siddiqi’s exploration of Stalinist sharashkas shows how these specialist institutes became a source of agency for scientists, who could regain a degree of control over their lives by agreeing to work on the state’s projects. Renamed and placed under new leadership after the death of Stalin, many of these operations exist to this day, one way in which the contours of the Gulag remain visible and continue to impact on Russian society and institutions. Alloftheabove-mentionedessaysrelyforevidencetoagreaterorlesserextent on Gulag memoirs, both published and unpublished. As an abundant and stillgrowing source, written testimonies by survivors have always been a mainstay of Gulag research and cannot be ignored. However, none of the essays discuss the methodological questions raised by using such sources, an omission that is underlined by the last two articles in the first section. Emilia Koustova’s examination of integration in special settlements gives a clear account of her analysis of oral testimonies and their construction as narratives, while Aglaya K. Glebova’s thought-provoking ‘Nine Theses’ explicitly shapes a methodology for a visual history of the Gulag. A similar consideration of the use of memoir SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 582 material and the problematics of deploying narrative as historical evidence, either as a separate essay or within one or more of the other contributions, would have been a welcome addition to the collection. As part of the current trend towards transnational histories, the second, comparative section of the book addresses concentration camps and mass detention in the British Empire, Nazi forced labour camps and the Chinese and North Korean camp systems. The latter two articles, by Klaus Mülhahn and Sungmin Cho respectively, represent emerging fields of research, facing similar obstacles regarding access to sources and verification that confronted students of the Gulag half a century ago. On this basis alone the inclusion of these topics is welcome. Yet although this section may be the most innovative feature of the collection, the comparative elements in these essays are on the whole quite weak and generalized, with a few unfortunate inaccuracies and an over-reliance on popular histories — notably Ann Applebaum’s Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London, 2004) — rather than more recent, specialist works, not least by several of the authors represented in the previous section. As a result, these essays, while interesting and informative in their own right, do not shed the sort of further light on the Gulag that one might hope for. Even Dietrich Beyrau’s careful negotiation of the potential minefield of comparing the Soviet Union and Nazi...