Corrective Labor Camps Research Articles

Labor contingent of the Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in 1947-1953: number, employment, composition of the working fund.

The article is devoted to the study of the labor contingent in the South Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in the period from 1947 to 1953. The purpose of the publication is to identify the composition and number of workers involved in the production sector of labor camps and their employment. The chronological framework of the study covers the period from the formation of the camp until the beginning of a radical restructuring of the Soviet Gulag system. When studying this issue, the author used general scientific and special historical methods (methods of quantitative analysis and statistical processing of materials). The novelty of the work lies in the use of unpublished archival documents and addressing local history issues that have not received widespread scientific coverage. Based on archival materials from the current archive of the Main Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Kemerovo Region, the dynamics of changes in the number of both forced labor camp prisoners and civilian workers, as well as the degree of their employment, are examined. A comparative analysis of the quantitative composition of the working fund of the South Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs predecessor, the Yuzhkuzbassles trust, showed that the transition to the use of forced labor in the logging industry in the south of the Kemerovo region made it possible to solve the problem of labor shortage. Particular attention is paid to the issues of employing the camp contingent in the production sector of the Corrective Labor Camp. The reasons why labor functions were not always performed by the prison population were identified, and statistics for each of them were also provided. Particular attention is paid to the processes of transformation of the labor fund in 1953.

Economic aspects of the effectiveness of forced labor in the Soviet camp system in the first half of the 1950s. (based on the Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR materials).

Using the example of the Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, some economic aspects of the effectiveness of forced labor in the Soviet camp system in the first half of the 50s are considered. The twentieth century particular attention is paid to the issue of expenses and income of the forced labor camp. Based on archival materials from the current archive of the Main Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Kemerovo Region, a list of expenses is given, as well as the amount of money spent by the state on the maintenance of the prison population and the forced labor camp as a whole. Data on the costs required to maintain the camp economy are correlated with the amount of money for which the contingent produced marketable products annually. Information is provided on the amount of financial assistance received by the forced labor camp from the state budget and from the departmental unit under the jurisdiction of which it was located. The novelty of the research lies in the appeal to unpublished archival documents of the current archive of the Main Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Kemerovo region and in local history topics that have not received widespread scientific coverage. The author comes to the conclusion that the income received from the labor activities of the prison population not only did not compensate for the costs of servicing the activities of the correctional labor camp, but also significantly exceeded them. Analysis of documentary material clearly showed that the use of forced labor was not cheap for the state, much less free. The state spent significant sums to organize camp production and maintain the prison population. The camp existed thanks to annually received government grants and subsidies.

Жанровые доминанты поэзии ГУЛАГа (на материале стихотворных текстов БАМлага)

The paper aims to reveal genre specificity of censored Gulag poetry. The study is conducted by the material of publications in newspapers and magazines of Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp (Bamlug). The author introduces into scientific circulation previously unpublished literary and publicistic sources, for the first time analyzes genre paradigm of Bamlug poetry, reveals its interrelation with socialist realistic literature, which constitutes scientific originality of the study. As a result, it is proved that genre forms of Bamlug official poetry are determined not so much by current literary processes, but by corrective labor camp cultural and ideological policy. The research findings can be used when studying genre specificity of poetry of other Gulag camps.

카를락 추모 박물관의 ‘카라간다 교정-노동 수용소’ 재현의 특징

This article is a study of Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp (Karlag in Russian) and its representation in the Karlag Memorial Museum. Karlag is a large concentration camp established in Kazakhstan during the Stalin period. It is a camp built to create industrial complexes that collect mineral resources such as coal and copper, which are needed during the Soviet industrialization.<BR> The industrial complexes had been built by the camp prisoners in the central Kazakhstan and the Camp laid the foundation for agriculture and animal husbandry. It also worked as the foundation for the artistic development of Kazakhstan. In Karlag, experts in various fields and artists were imprisoned. And the cultural and artistic works were carried out to fulfill the correctional functions of the concentration camps during the Stalin period, in spite of the suffering of the imprisoned women and children from the harsh conditions of life.<BR> Kazakhstan is currently in the process of establishing a new independent nation-state. And the memory of the Camp is used as a tool for establishing Kazakhstan national identity cutting from the Soviet identity by maximizing and reproducing it far more miserably and tragically than it actually existed.

Повседневная жизнь обитателей БАМлага 1930-х годов (по дневниковым записям заключенного и конвоира)

The present study attempts to characterize the features of a daily life of people who built the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway in the 1930s. In 1932, in order to finish the building of the railway as soon as possible, a special corrective labor camp was organized in the system of Stalin's GULag (Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Incarceration) which was called Bamlag. In the camp there were many extraordinary people, some of them managed to keep diary entries even in such inhumane conditions. This epistolary heritage allows us to recreate to some extent the features of daily life of Bamlag inhabitants. The two main categories of any penitentiary institution are warders (guards) and prisoners. Just few of them are prone to sentimentality and desire to documentation of their own and surrounding life. However, even among these people there were the ones who sought to depict their daily lives. The study analyzes the diary entries of the guard I. Chistyakov and the prisoner N. Gapanovich.

The space of unfreedom: GULAG and its society

This paper analyzes the GULAG as a social phenomenon of the Soviet society and as a specific type of the Soviet unfree space. In particular, it considers social constructs and the relation between the camp administration, prisoners, hired workers and the local population. Paying close attention to the analysis of the social groups which a camp population was comprised of, their gender and social structure, this paper explores the living conditions, mode of life, customs and mores of the social environment in a camp. Based on the large database of various historical sources, such as governmental acts, statistical evidence, archival documents, publications in the camp press and memoirs, this paper also relies on the video interviews of former prisoners collected by the GULAG History Museum. Without denying the authoritarian nature of the corrective-labor camp system, the author came to the conclusion that the established organizational model of camp complexes determined the lack of distinct borders between the camp social space and the public space of the free world. Such blurred structure of corrective-labor camps leads to the fact that the camp culture with its archaic social principles dominated by the thieves culture extended its considerable influence over the whole society of the Soviet Union.

Трудовое использование заключенных в Южнокузбасском исправительно-трудовом лагере МВД СССР (1947–1950 годы)

The article considers the issues of use of prison labour in the “Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs”. The chronological framework of the study is set between 1947 and 1950. The camp was located in the south of the Kemerovo region in the Gornaya Shoria district. The Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp was established according to the resolution no. 409 of the Council of Ministers from March 1, 1947. The main activity of the camp was logging. However the penal labor was used not only in the logging industry, but also in the timber processing, construction, and agricultural sectors. Based on archival documents, this article shows the features of the organization of labor activity of prisoners, working conditions, methods of stimulation and encouragement. The author explains challenges that were faced in the process of implementation of measures aimed to improve the working and living conditions of prisoners, their general physical condition and their work motivation. Among them there were difficulties in carrying out measures for labor protection, calculation of wages for prisoners, determination of their employment category, use of mechanized equipment in production activities, ensuring satisfactory sanitary and living conditions. Despite this, the analysis of indicators of labor productivity for individual logging phases in the camp demonstrates a positive trend.

Неизвестные страницы Великой Отечественной войны: советская и постсоветская историография проблемы нацистских концентрационных лагерей

The history of the Great Patriotic War is of paramount importance for all generations of Russian people. The tens of millions of our compatriots who died in combatting with the Third Reich cannot be forgotten. The remembrance about the heroic feats of the Soviet people in the struggle against Nazism is one of the fundamentals in the historical memory of Russia. However, the recent years have seen growing attempts to cast doubt on the decisive contribution brought by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Attempts to revise the course and results of World War II and Great Patriotic War are used primality for political purposes to discredit the past and, as a consequence, the present of our country. On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory of Soviet people over fascism, these attempts are scaled up. One of the tragic pages of the Great Patriotic War is the theme of Nazi concentration camps, through which hell millions of Soviet people passed. In the Soviet historiographic space, this topic was silenced for a long time, also due to fear that the system of Nazi concentration camps could be compared to GULAG — the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, which operated in the Soviet Union. The investigations that were carried out in the period from the 1960s to the first half of the 1980s were mainly devoted to the struggle of prisoners against the camp system, whereas the matters concerned with setting up and operation of concentration camps and the actions of their administrations were beyond the topics being studied. It is only from the middle 1980s that the Soviet historical science could update the source, theoretical, and methodological bases and start an open dialogue with representatives of foreign historical thought. And it is since the late 1990s — early 2000s that a stable interest has emerged — now in the Russian historiography — to the history of Nazi concentration camps that were set up on the temporarily occupied territory of the Soviet Union as part of the Great Patriotic War history. This was encouraged by the fact that a much wider scope of documental sources from the national and foreign archives became available, and due to the fact that Russian historians joined the European historiographic context. At present, the scope of new research areas being developed (historical anthropology, the history of everyday life, etc.) includes scientific projects aimed at studying the everyday life of concentration camp prisoners, their “survivability strategy”, and setting up of active and passive resistance to violence in camps. The aim of the article is to analyze the main trends in studying Nazi concentration camps in the Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. It is exactly the history of the system of Nazi concentration camps that shows the inhuman nature of Nazi ideology in its entirety. Besides, this topic demonstrates the huge role the Soviet Union played in freeing the prisoners of concentration camps. By addressing this problem, the researchers will get a broader vision of the Great Patriotic War, and students will gain new knowledge about this tragic but at the same time heroic page of our history.

Особливості залучення засуджених до праці у виправно-трудових колоніях та виправно-трудових таборах у 30–60 рр. ХХ століття

Особливості залучення засуджених до праці у виправно-трудових колоніях та виправно-трудових таборах у 30–60 рр. ХХ століття

Biopolitics of Camp: The Body in Eugenia Ginzburg’s and Varlam Shalamov’s Gulag Testimonies

The objective of this study is to present intersections between biopolitics that intends to benefit from biological potential and capabilities of the individual in favor of the state by keeping population under surveillance and politics of death (thanatopolitics) in Soviet corrective labor camps. It discusses the process from constructing persona-grata to destructing persona-non-grata as “enemies of the people” through contemporary Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben’s conceptualisations “bare life” and “state of exception”; and contemporary French historian Annette Becker’s “animalization” and “reification”. The relevant concepts are evaluated within the testimonies of Gulag survivors -Yevgeniya Ginzburg's “Journey into the Whirlwind” and Varlam Shalamov's “Kolyma Stories”. It has been concluded that the phenomenon of camp was not left behind as an anomaly of the past; it has correspondence in theory and practice as the matris and the nomos of current political life as Agamben prescribed. Keywords: Zoē and bios, politics of the body, inhuman condition (conditio inhumana), Ginzburg, Shalamov

Deserters from the Labor Front: The Limits of Coercion in the Soviet War Economy

Deserters from the Labor FrontThe Limits of Coercion in the Soviet War Economy Oleg V. Khlevniuk (bio) Translated by Aaron Hale-Dorrell During World War II, a special system of crisis management took shape in the USSR. Its defining characteristics included a high degree of mobilization of human and material resources to meet the demands of the front, as well as a related centralization of management and employment of repression. Detailed study of the basic parameters and mechanisms of how the system functioned at the front and in the rear unavoidably leads to a new series of questions.1 How effective was the Soviet model of military mobilization? To what degree were the extreme centralization and severe repression in their fullest form able to achieve the required results? What contribution did other, nonrepressive methods make? In addressing such questions, historians are examining many phenomena and processes that corrected for the negative consequences of the extreme centralization and harsh coercion and therefore improved the operation of the system of crisis management. These include changes in Soviet ideology, especially the concessions by the Stalinist government to religious traditions as a whole and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular; the introduction of one-person command and the heightening of the authority of the Soviet corps of officers and generals; the partially spontaneous localization [End Page 481] of management, the relative rise in producers' economic self-reliance, and more.2 Taken as a whole, these works show that it is important to examine the Soviet military mobilization system together with its harshly repressive and "soft" corrective components. This article applies this approach to study the actual practices for implementing the extraordinary wartime laws in the realm of labor. Here we are speaking, above all, about the decree of 26 December 1941, on deserters from war industries, which was one of the basic mechanisms of coerced labor during wartime.3 The widespread employment of various forms of forced labor, as well as the centralized distribution of the labor force, were characteristics of the Soviet economy from the moment it emerged. The ideal of Soviet socialism was the principle that each should labor where and as much as the state deemed necessary. The harshly regulated distribution of labor resources was caused not so much by inadequate quantity as by low quality: that is, insufficient labor productivity and a high rate of turnover. Crash industrialization was forced via a rapid decline in living standards, as well as the collapse of agriculture and the social sector. This significantly weakened both wages and attractive living conditions as methods for incentivizing labor. To a considerable degree, compulsory labor was to compensate for the limited opportunities to employ economic incentives.4 The system of coerced labor functioned in its fullest form in the Gulag economy. On 1 January 1941, there were 1,500,000 prisoners in People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) corrective labor camps, almost [End Page 482] 429,000 prisoners in labor colonies, and about 488,000 in prisons.5 At that time, laboring internal exiles numbered an additional 930,000.6 As researchers have noted, mass repressions not only provided labor power for the forced-labor economy but also served as an important means of disciplining workers in the Soviet economy as a whole.7 However, for the threat of repression to actually function as a labor incentive, it was necessary to criminalize labor, transforming into a crime any violation of discipline or the independent choice of a job. After the outbreak of World War II, the Stalinist state solved this problem by publishing a decree by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on 26 June 1940. It stipulated harsh punishments: for late arrival to work, up to six months corrective labor with a portion of wages garnished by the state; for unauthorized leave from a workplace—up to four months of prison. Enterprise managers who responded to violations of discipline with insufficient alacrity could similarly find themselves in court. Because of this growing pressure from above, the campaign for labor discipline attained enormous proportions. As Table 1 demonstrates, in the period of less than a year preceding the beginning of the war with Germany...

ALEKSANDR ISAEVIČ SOLŽENICYN: THE REALIST

The word amnesia history can be considered as a representation of the anxiety of writers when the Soviet Union regime came to power. The regime launched atrocities against its citizens through a system of repression. The atrocities committed by the government against its citizens were "recorded" through words by writers. The form of literary resistance to the nation's repression caused the world of words have the power to influence the course of history. One of the 20th century Russian writers known for their resistance to the Soviet Union's communist regime was Aleksandr Isaevič Solţenicyn (1918-2008). The communist government regarded Solţenicyn as a dissident who was against anti-humanism according to Marxism-Leninism. Solţenicyn can not be separated from the snares of repression of the government of the Soviet Union. Various searches about Solţenicyn's authorship show that he was a realist author and part of the Soviet Union literary group who opposed government interference with literature. Arxipelag Gulag which popularized Solţenicyn was documentation as well as a reflection of the atrocities that occurred in the Soviet Union during the communist regime in power. The terror system - as part of the system of state repression - narrated in the novel makes the story of the Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovyx 'Directorate General of Corrective Labor Camp') in Solţenicyn version has an appeal that is sought by readers and reviewers of literature.

Производственная деятельность Южнокузбасского исправительно-трудового лагеря МВД СССР (1947–1948 годы)

The article considers the process of formation of industrial activity of the Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. The chronological framework of the study is set between 1947–1948. Particular attention is paid to the development of the road infrastructure of the camp and additional areas of production activities such as timber processing and agriculture. The main issues of material, housing and food security for convicts are also examined. The main activity of the camp was logging. The camp was located in the south of Kemerovo Oblast in the Gornaya Shoria district. The Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp was established based on resolution № 409 of the Council of Ministers dated 1 March 1947 and replaced the previously existing Southern Kuzbass Logging Trust. At first it was difficult to undertake a major restructuring of the principles of economic activity which were inherited by the camp from the Southern Kuzbass Logging Trust. Although the workforce of the Southern Kuzbass Corrective Labor Camp was based primarily on the use of forced labor, civilian workers still continued to work there. Difficult working conditions, harsh climate conditions, spatial dispersion of manufacturing sites, supply issues, lack of human resources along with inflated state plans led to significant difficulties in the labor camp. The camp was in desperate need of warm clothing for the prisoners, special tools, food, personnel and paramilitary protection for spare parts and fuel for vehicles, traction power, and so on. However, the amounts of procurement, transportation and removal of wood by the camp was significantly higher than previous results of the Southern Kuzbass Logging Trust. This allows us to conclude that the use of forced labor resulted in the increase of overall volume of logging in Kuzbass and reduce the need for timber in coal mines.

To the Editors

To the Editors Benjamin Nathans My thanks to Jonathan Daly for an intriguing glimpse into the lives, works, and mutual relations of Leopold Haimson, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Marc Raeff, and Nicholas Riasanovsky.1 Daly notes (797) that, after spending the academic year 1962–63 in the Soviet Union, Malia was denounced in the Soviet press for showing excessive interest in "the locations of corrective labor camps" and the "attitude of the creative intelligentsia." What the Soviet press did not say was that Malia had also served as a conduit between the émigré Gleb Struve, son of Petr Struve and at the time Malia's colleague at Berkeley, and Iulian Oksman—like Struve a literary scholar, and unlike him a survivor of the Gulag. According to a 1965 KGB memorandum, Malia had brought Oksman tamizdat works by Abram Terts and Nikolai Arzhak, who would soon be famously revealed—and sent to the Gulag—as the Soviet writers Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel´.2 Daly writes that another of Malia's Berkeley colleagues, the labor historian Reginald Zelnik, "tried to keep his graduate students away from Malia's 'corrupting' influences" (797). I was one of Zelnik's graduate students, and I took courses with both him and Malia (and Riasanovsky) in the late 1980s. It was no secret that Malia and Zelnik were far apart politically, but it is simply untrue that Zelnik tried to keep his graduate students away from Malia (a charge Daly repeats on 816)—on the contrary. I have contacted half a dozen former Berkeley history graduate students from the 1970s and 1980s, and none of them corroborated Daly's claim. In fact, when I took Zelnik's seminar on Soviet history, he assigned Malia's book Comprendre la Révolution russe.3 [End Page 682] Those of us who knew Reggie Zelnik know that he didn't simply preach the values of tolerance and pluralism—he practiced them. Dept. of History University of Pennsylvania 208 College Hall Philadelphia, PA 19104-6379 USA bnathans@history.upenn.edu Jonathan Daly responds: I am grateful to Benjamin Nathans for making public Martin Malia's hitherto-secret role as an intrepid and active ally of Soviet dissidents. This is not surprising, because the highlights of his research year in the USSR were meetings with intellectuals and cultural elites, like Boris Pasternak, Kornei Chukovskii, and Anna Akhmatova. As for Nathans's second point, graduate students are not always privy to their mentors' inmost thoughts and intentions. Moreover, the work of Malia that Zelnik objected to most was surely not Comprendre la Révolution russe, which interprets the Russian Revolution as a "grande revolution" in the European tradition, but rather The Soviet Tragedy, which condemns the regime that emerged from the revolution as an unmitigated disaster for Russia and the world, a disaster caused above all by the Bolsheviks' strict adherence to Marxist principles.4 It is hard to believe now, decades after the collapse of the USSR, the extent to which many Russian historians in the English-speaking world execrated Malia for this intellectual position, yet we do a disservice to our profession and to historical memory to forget. [End Page 683] Benjamin Nathans Dept. of History University of Illinois at Chicago 601 S. Morgan St., M/C 198 913 University Hall Chicago, IL 60607 USA daly@uic.edu Footnotes 1. Jonathan Daly, "The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in the United States," Kritika 18, 4 (2017): 785–826. 2. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI) f. 5, op. 33, d. 218, rolik 4821,l. 152. 3. Martin Malia, Comprendre la Révolution russe (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 4. Malia, Comprendre la Révolution russe; Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (New York: Free Press, 1994). Copyright © 2018 "Kritika" and Benjamin Nathans

The political use of psychiatry: A comparison between totalitarian regimes.

After the end of Second World War, the recent experience of the Nazi horrors stimulated a debate about the political use of psychiatry. Over the years, the focus shifted on major dictatorships of the time and especially on Soviet Union. This article aims to provide a critical review of the ways in which psychiatry was used by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We summarized relevant literature about political use of psychiatry in totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, with particular focus on Fascism, Nazism, Argentina dictatorship, Soviet Union and China. One of the features that are common to most of the dictatorships is that the use of psychiatry has become more prominent when the regimes have had the need to make more acceptable the imprisonment of enemies in the eyes of the world. This for example happened in the Nazi regime when sterilization and killing of psychiatric patients was explained as a kind of euthanasia, or in the Soviet Union after the formal closure of the corrective labor camps and the slow resumption of relations with the capitalistic world, or in China to justify persecution of religious minorities and preserve economic relations with Western countries. Psychiatry has been variously used by totalitarian regimes as a means of political persecution and especially when it was necessary to make acceptable to public opinion the imprisonment of political opponents.

1930년대 중반 소련 강제노동수용소의 변화: 백해-발트해 산업다지의 수용소 신문에 드러난 수감자관(觀)의 변화를 중심으로

1930년대 중반 소련 강제노동수용소의 변화: 백해-발트해 산업다지의 수용소 신문에 드러난 수감자관(觀)의 변화를 중심으로

INDUSTRIAL BUILDING IN THE SYSTEM OF GULAG IN THE EUROPEAN NORTH OF RUSSIA IN THE 1930 – EARLY 1940s: SCOPE, TRENDS AND CHALLENGES

The article discusses the activities of the GULAG in the field of industrial building in the European North of the country. The study is based on the source database, which includes materials from both Central and regional archives, such as engineering documentation of corrective labor camps and colonies, and the materials from the Chief administration of camps for industrial building. The chronological framework of the issue encompasses 1930s – the beginning of the 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the pre-war development stage of the mobilization economy, during which comes the final formation of the contours of construction production in this region. The article reveals multi-sectoral direction of the activities of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the field of industrial building, covering the objects of mining-metallurgical, fuel, timber industries. The article gives an analysis of the complex problems of the industry based on the analysis of reporting documentation and accounting and control materials of Central directorate of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Almost all of the problems were permanent, despite of the reorganization processes in the GULAG system of forced labor. This approach to the topic gives a deeper and comprehensive assessment of Stalin's special colonization of the periphery of the USSR. The analysis of the processes taking place in the industrial building sector of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, illustrates the serious difficulties faced by the GULAG, departing from solving problems of extensive development and intensifying their production activities.

Destructive-Labor Camps: Rethinking Solzhenitsyn’s Play on Words

Destructive-Labor CampsRethinking Solzhenitsyn’s Play on Words Golfo Alexopoulos (bio) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been called “one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century,” and a breaker of the Soviet regime’s “blockade of silence.”1 The writer, who first revealed to his countrymen and the world the inhumanity of the Soviet penal labor system, was also a master of language. Like Jacques Rossi, whose Gulag Handbook exposed the camps’ alternative conceptual universe, Solzhenitsyn focused attention on the Gulag lexicon.2 He rejected the Stalinist term for the slave labor system, corrective-labor camps (ispravitel´no-trudovye lageria), in favor of his own term: destructive-labor camps (istrebitel´no-trudovye lageria).3 This pun or play on Soviet words stressed that Gulag labor was more lethal than corrective. According to Solzhenitsyn, “the camps were designed for destruction” (izobreteny lageria—na istreblenie).4 The writer highlighted the Gulag’s destructive elements, like the inhumane transport of prisoners and the draconian rules governing food and work. Solzhenitsyn did not have access to official Soviet sources, yet the archives support his assertions regarding the Gulag’s destructive capacity. I argue that Stalin’s Gulag constituted an institution of extreme physical exploitation at [End Page 499] its core, and that human exploitation in the camps was destructive by design. Moreover, as the present work illustrates, the system of physical exploitation in the camps grew more severe from the 1930s to the 1950s. Under Stalin, the Gulag produced an enormous population of prisoners on the verge of death, the so-called goners (dokhodiagi). To unburden the camps, conserve resources, and artificially reduce Gulag mortality rates, the Stalinist leadership routinely released these nearly dead inmates. Not only was Stalin’s Gulag destructive, but it deliberately concealed its destructive capacity. Gulag literature catalogues the causes of human suffering and mortality, but scholars do not generally argue that the Stalinist camps were designed for destruction.5 We know that the Soviet security police (Unified State Political Administration, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Internal Affairs [OGPU–NKVD–MVD]), which managed the arrest, deportation, and detention of millions in labor camps and settlements, was distinctly uninterested in preserving human life. Nonetheless, no plan of destruction has emerged from our initial reading of declassified state and party documents. Thus, although historians have emphasized the brutality of the system, few have argued that the Gulag was deliberately destructive.6 More common is the view that the Gulag represented an institution of mass death but not mass murder. Scholars have demonstrated that people died from the brutal journey in sealed railcars to their remote camps; the hostile Arctic environment; and the neglect, incompetence, and cruelty of camp officials and fellow inmates. Memoirs and the historical literature underscore the nonsystemic causes of Gulag mortality: deaths resulting from underdevelopment (poor sanitation and infrastructure), violent criminal gangs, shortages and theft of food, sadistic guards, or factors external to the system, such as the harsh climate and war. Taken together, these do not produce an image of a labor camp system that was destructive by design. Although Solzhenitsyn remains the towering figure in Gulag studies, his analysis of “destructive-labor camps” has not been widely embraced in the historical literature. [End Page 500] There are many reasons why. As noted, no statement from the Stalinist leadership has emerged that expresses a high-level intention or state-sponsored plan to destroy prisoners; quite the contrary, we have found many official complaints concerning elevated rates of illness and mortality and attempts by party leaders to incentivize forced labor and improve productivity through material rewards. Moreover, the Nazi–Soviet comparison looms large. There exists a legitimate desire to avoid false equivalencies between the Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet labor camps.7 Moreover, a vast memoir literature appears to underscore the survivability of the Soviet camps; some memoirists, like Eugenia Ginzburg, endured nearly two decades in detention.8 The Gulag maintained hospitals and clinics, and camp doctors were not tasked with experimental and “mercy” killing, as in the Nazi case.9 Rather, many camp doctors viewed themselves as healers and often struggled to improve prisoners’ chances of survival.10 The NKVD–Gulag leadership regularly...

Georgiy Nikolaevich Frederiks (1889-1938), Paleontologist, Stratigrapher, Tectonicist—Biography and Bibliography

In a brief career, 1911-early 1930s, Georgly Nikolaevich Frederiks swiftly became a leading authority on the paleontology and stratigraphy of the Late Paleozoic of the USSR. Tireless in field and laboratory, he contributed importantly to unraveling the structure of the Urals, and established an international reputation as a paleontologist and stratigrapher, notably for his numerous contributions on Late Paleozoic stratigraphy and paleontology, especially brachiopods. One of the most impressive Soviet paleontologist-geologists of the inter-war era, Frederiks, like so many of the intelligentsia in the USSR, was believed by many to have perished in one of Stalin's 'corrective labor camps'. He was in fact shot, like legions of others, on the charge of conspiring to kill the leaders of the USSR and for personally planning to kill Stalin. His career and fate exemplify what befell the cream of the intelligentsia in the USSR during the Stalin epoch.

The Structure of the Camps and Archetypes of Consciousness

Lev Samoilov has achieved something rare in our country—he made constructive use, sociologically and ethnographically, of his forced stay in a corrective-labor camp by analyzing the environment in which he had to live. He approached the camp as a researcher armed with professional knowledge and literary talent. This world is indeed still poorly known and almost completely unresearched. I was forced to spend several years—an incomparably long term—in a camp, and not in the 1980s, but from 1949 to 1954. With great interest I read Samoilov's essays in Neva (1988, no. 5; 1989, no. 4), and in Sovetskaia etnografiia both as a person with comparable experience and as an ethnographer devoted to the study of early human society. We both were offered an opportunity to study camp society by the optimal method of "immersion," and moreover the interval of three decades permits us to examine this society dynamically in historical perspective.