What I hoped to do with the book, and what I think I have accomplished judging from the collected comments here, was to change the conversation about the Gulag and the role that it played in the Soviet Union. I wanted us to understand the Gulag was much more complex than Anne Applebaum would have it. I wanted us to think about more than the merely repressive or merely economic elements of the Gulag, while never forgetting the repressive and the economic in our analysis. I wanted us to start thinking about the Gulag as a penal system both similar to other modern detention institutions but with its own Soviet particularities.¹ When we learned in the late 1980s and early 1990s that a huge percentage of the Gulag population was released every year and that a minority of Gulag prisoners were politicals, previous explanations for the Gulag’s role in the Soviet Union seemed, if not wrong, certainly incomplete. Understanding what these new facts meant for our understanding of the Gulag has driven my research for more than a decade. Who was released, and when, and why? Who was not released? Did Soviet authorities care what became of the millions who would spend time in the camps but then return to Soviet society?

My interest in “reeducation” follows from these questions, but so too does my interest in the categorization of prisoners and the development of differentiated institutions and practices aimed at prisoners in accord with these categories. Though Jeff’s comments really grasp and explain quite well why I focus on both death and redemption, one of the things I worry about sometimes is that the unexpectedness of my argument that Soviet authorities pay real attention to the questions of reeducation can obscure the equally important element of my argument that mass death may not have been the intended outcome for all Gulag prisoners, for Soviet authorities it was an expected and easily accepted outcome for many. Granted, the redemption angle is the more surprising part of the book, but mass death must also be understood or we really miss a big piece of the explanation for this system’s operation. A big part of the question then revolves around who will die and who will survive and whether we can make any sense of this at all. It is here that I argue that prisoner categorization is absolutely critical.

However, we must understand that prisoner categorization was by no means simple. No formulas existed whereby various aspects of a prisoners’ identities and behaviors were plugged in to determine their fate. We can certainly identify some categories as more important than others for determining prisoners’ fates. Thus, one’s alleged crime was absolutely critical for it could be an important factor determining a number of things that might make it easier or harder to survive: length of sentence, eligibility for early release programs, eligibility for release under amnesties, location of detention, eligibility to participate in non-general (and therefore usually lighter) forms of labor, etc. This is not to say that all of these things were always followed in practice, but one can have little doubt that a conviction as a so-called “counterrevolutionary criminal” made it much more difficult to survive the Gulag than a conviction as a petty thief.

Wilson is right to emphasize that not all practices in the Gulag were necessarily tied to one’s alleged crime. Thus, for example, he notes:

Certain camps (for example Norilsk and Vorkuta) were even on a different, enhanced ration system due to their economic importance. Moreover, these specific regulations do not reveal differences related to sentencing or background. Those fulfilling their norms at 100% were supposed to get the basic ration, regardless of sentence.

No doubt about it, but notice also that it is “those fulfilling their norms at 100%” who are supposed to get the basic ration. The fulfillment of labor quotas is yet another way that prisoners were categorized, and one I argue that is key to understanding the issue of reeducation and the line between death and redemption.

So, on to the questions around reeducation itself. While Jeff points out that I show how labor “was the primary method and indicator of re-education,” I think it bears repeating here, for the term “reeducation” can be perhaps a bit misleading. While I fully acknowledge the active cultural and educational programs in the Gulag (the camp newspapers, the political education sessions, the camp theatricals and musical performances), when I speak of reeducation, this is not what I primarily have in mind. One of my Stanford professors Terence Emmons argued at my dissertation prospectus presentation many years ago (in which I heavily focused on precisely the cultural and educational activities in the camps) that I was mistaken to focus on reeducation, quipping that Gulag reeducation was “certainly not the type of reeducation [I was being subjected to] at Stanford.” And he was right, but that didn’t mean that reeducation was not happening in the Gulag. A fellow graduate student came up to me after and said I merely needed to explain that others had focused on the Gulag’s brutality and I was writing the rest of the story. This also didn’t strike me as quite right, for how could we truly understand the Gulag if we didn’t understand its brutality as well. I began to understand that reeducation Gulag-style was of a specific sort. As I started thinking about the prisoners’ daily schedules, I could not help but notice that the vast majority of waking hours were spent working. As I started looking at the content of cultural and educational activities, I could not help but notice that labor was typically explicitly or implicitly one of the main focuses. Labor was in fact itself understood as reeducation, and as I argue further in the book, it was also the main method of evaluating success or failure in the reeducation project. Like one’s alleged crime, fulfillment of labor quotas was never the only category according to which prisoners were evaluated, but it was always an incredibly important one.

Of course, Wilson notes that in the case of amnesties and periodic releases of invalids, pregnant women, and nursing mothers, behavior in the camps was irrelevant to the release. However, if you look more closely at these mass forms of release, certain categories of prisoner were usually excluded–those with long sentences, those sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes, recidivists, those who had fulfilled less than half of their sentence, etc. (These exclusions differed from one incident of mass release to another, so they did not all always apply.) While behavior in the camps may not have been important here, evaluation of prisoners still was, and local Karlag bureaucrats would work through individual prisoner files at each such mass release to determine if a prisoner was eligible. Wilson’s point here about the importance of external events to amnesties (announced at, for example, the end of the war, Stalin’s death, etc.) is actually important to highlight, because the way in which prisoners were evaluated and the line defining the boundary between death and redemption (though keep in mind that envisioning this as linear is overly simple) was constantly being redrawn in response to political events.

Now, perhaps the biggest objection one can lodge to my argument is raised by Jeff and Wilson. As Jeff wrote:

Yet when it comes to practice, things were not so neat, and it seems to me that Barnes takes the death-or-redemption dichotomy too far by tightly linking survival with re-education.

Or as Wilson put it:

it’s difficult to imagine that some of these categorizations worked in practice the same way that they worked on paper.

With this I cannot disagree, though I might quibble a bit with some of the particular examples chosen to illustrate the point. Thus, for example, Jeff points out that

the primary form of release under Stalin, as Barnes acknowledges, was simply the expiration of sentence….In other words, without any sort of final assessment as to their correction while incarcerated (other than a pulse?), the Stalinist regime was letting convicted criminals back onto the street.  Neither death nor redemption, one might argue.

Wilson makes the same objection that release upon expiry of sentence did not require exemplary behavior in the camps. This misses a couple of things, I think. First, fixing a certain length of sentence was itself part of the evaluation process. More serious crimes, especially political crimes, and repeat offenses garnered longer sentences. In addition, prisoners could be and frequently were (though I have no figures on how frequently) charged criminally for their failure to exhibit proper labor performance and behavior in the camps. Thus, we should keep in mind not only shortening but also lengthening of sentences. Furthermore, release was never taken as an indication of total reeducation. Numerous restrictions remained on former Gulag prisoners and they could easily become victims of new legal campaigns when police officials found rounding up former prisoners a convenient way to meet arrest quotas.

Here, I would latch on to Cindy’s comment, put better than I ever could, that in using the term redemption in the title, I do not intend to imply actual, successful reeducation, but rather “bringing someone back from the edge,” in this case return from the brink of death, which the Gulag as a “last chance” represented.

Nonetheless, Jeff has pointed us toward some additional nuance we must think about to understand the system and his point that studies of recidivism rates revealed problems with supposed reeducation to Soviet authorities in the post-Stalin years is critical. When people have asked me what most surprised me when I got to the archives, I have often noted that given my schema for understanding the system, I would have expected to find studies of recidivism rates (for example, comparing one camp’s recidivism rate to another as a measure of performance) but never did.

Again, while I may quibble with specific things my readers have noted, I do not dismiss the point of the difference between theory and practice and its importance. Perhaps I have stated the general argument too boldly, but in the heart of the book, I do try to show many instances in which local practice differed from the system as envisioned in directives from Moscow, and those directives themselves did not always offer an internally coherent system. I tried to show how Karlag officials struggled with seemingly incompatible demands from Moscow to fulfill their economic plan while never allowing alleged “counterrevolutionary criminals” to live outside of camp zones or work in their specialties. They never tired of reminding Moscow that this did not take account of their particularities as an agricultural camp, where economic tasks demanded that prisoners move about large areas herding animals and tending crops. The only way we can meet these two demands, they pleaded, was for central Gulag authorities to stop sending so many counterrevolutionary criminals to Karaganda. Even had certain Gulag directives not been so incompatible with others, demands would not have been perfectly fulfilled in local conditions in Gulag any more than in any other Stalin-era bureaucracy. However, this does not make central directives unimportant, and it would not totally alter our understanding of the system’s operation that I lay out in the book. The same can be said of the numerous (one might say endemic) way in which personal relationships, seeking individual gain, and other aspects of day-to-day life in the camps undercut the operation of the system I have laid out.

Hopefully, the nuance that perhaps gets lost at times in my book will be the ground on which the next generation of Gulag scholars like those gathered for this conversation and the many others now working on the topic will take our understanding of this massive system to the next level. I always understood my book first and foremost to be a conversation-changer. I felt compelled to comment on a wide array of topics often far too briefly in order to show how we needed to rethink what the Gulag was and what it meant. Now, many others (including myself) will go on to fix what I got wrong and fill in the picture where it is too sketchy but will hopefully do so from a new starting point.

For now, I will stop as I have gone on much too long, even though I still have not responded to many things I had initially set out to discuss.

In any case, I have read all the great comments, and what I wanted to talk about is Steve’s focus on Bolshevik ideals and his interest in “reforging.” Until this point I had felt that the Bolshevik ideals had melted away as the expediency of work and plans and then the war took over. I had no idea that the Gulag administrators had held on to these earlier ideals, and even took seriously the type of writing we saw in Belomor. To find out that Steve finds evidence of this sort of talk in the Karlag files is very important. It gives us a glimpse at the work of the political officers who were everywhere in the Gulag. Before this, I never had a feel for their real role aside other than preparing propaganda posters and exhibits.

Reading Miriam’s thoughtful comments made me realize that I too totally buy Steve’s argument that the reason for the existence and even endurance of the Gulag had to have been more political than economic. But like Jeff mentions in his excellent posting, I find this a very difficult point to prove. I mean, it’s fascinating to see that within the walls of the Gulag there were attempts at “reforging” going on, but my question is: to what end? And why do we not see mention of it in the memoir literature? Admittedly, we have all thought about the flaws and drawbacks in relying on memoirs, and I have not read that entire literature, but I cannot recall any descriptions of the actual work that the political officers did with the prisoners, or the results of this work. I would be interested to see that.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’ve studied the Chinese Gulag (the Laogai), which has its roots in the Soviet system. All I have been able to find out is that the Chinese imported the Gulag “model” in the early 1950s during the famous period of friendship and cooperation. (My favorite slogan from that time is “Let’s Be Modern and Soviet!”) The two systems are shockingly alike in their structure and function. However, there are definitely differences between the Gulag and the Laogai, the most important of which is that the Chinese Laogai is still functioning and actually producing goods that make money for the Chinese economy. The other difference is that still being a functioning Communist government, they successfully keep a lid on any files or data about the Laogai. It is basically a forbidden topic.

But, the most important difference is that there exist Laogai survivor memoirs (and there are not anywhere near as many of  them), in which the survivors write a lot about the “reforging” that took place in the Chinese Gulag. The most well-known writer, the Solzhenitsyn of the Laogai, if you will, is Harry (Hongda) Wu. He was arrested as a “rightist” in kind of a mass craziness sort of like the Great Purges called The Hundred Flowers. In any case, in the middle of a mass meeting to criticize him at his workplace, a uniformed Public Security officer appeared to announce: “I sentence the counterrevolutionary rightist Wu Hongda to reeducation through labor.” (45) He was forced to confess that he was indeed a rightist, and once he was incarcerated in the Laogai, he was told that his entire family had denounced him. The political officer then said to him: “You must study Mao Zedong thought very hard, reform yourself diligently, and become a new socialist person.” (57)

Later, after being worked over constantly “to reform his thoughts,” he thinks about the old Chinese custom of footbinding. “We have switched to headbinding…they bind a person’s thoughts instead. That way ideas all take on the same size and shape, and thinking becomes impossible. That’s why they arrested me. That’s why they want to change me, that’s why they force me to reform.” (88)

Has this sort of blatant recording of actual “reforging” or “thought reform” appeared in the Soviet memoir literature? I’m totally ready to believe that I have missed it. But it would be so great to find some accounts of it. As Steve mentions somewhere in his book, the camps were all different, and they changed over time, too, so it seems to me that if this “reforging” work was being pushed at all by the Central Administration, it would show up in some memoir. Anybody?

Note: Citations from Wu, Harry, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of my Years in China’s Gulag (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994).

For me, what sets Steve’s book apart from Applebaum and Solzhenitsyn is a lack of preachiness or unquestioned moral authority that those works claim.  Rather, Steve uses all his sources to present an argument as to why the Gulag in general, and Karlag in particular operated as they did.  His focus on “re-education” or reforging is vital to my mind to understanding how the Gulag operated especially in the thirties and forties.  I agree with him that it was possible to be reforged/re-educated and that this was a means through which some inmates could be released.  As Jeff, Wilson, and Miriam all point out, the Gulag on paper and the Gulag in reality were often quite different things.  But what had gone unsaid prior to Steve’s book, at least in a historian’s book about the Gulag, is that this re-education could and did occur and that many people–inmates and re-educators alike–believed in it.  How well it worked is a different issue and I would argue that one person’s re-education is another’s capitulation to or manipulation of the system.

The whole process of re-education created both a “culture” of reforging and cultural products.  These products, the quality of which might be questionable, nonetheless lend further credence to the point Steve makes about the redemptive qualities of the camp system and the particular way in which the Gulag sought not to slaughter outright those deemed potentially irredeemable, but rather to return them to Soviet society as a whole.  Indeed, as simplistic as it might sound, the ability to read and write and to have some sort of trade beyond thieving or prostitution could have been adequate “re-education” for those who had neither prior to their time in the camps.

As others have already noted, Steve’s book is very readable, and brilliantly researched. Steve uses archive material and published texts from the time to reconstruct the state’s perspective on the unprecedented penal network it was creating, but he also draws on a wide range of memoir material to explore the experience of the most important people in this bloody chapter in Europe’s history: the Gulag’s inmates.  One of the real strengths of Death and Redemption is that it does not present the Gulag as an unchanging and immutable institution. There are certainly some constants throughout – the disregard for human life being one, the regime’s insistence on political re-education another (more on this in a minute). But there are also important changes across the period and this book draws out the war and post-war developments very effectively.  The special camps created in 1948 sectioned off the prisoners considered least likely to reform, not only creating a new kind of penal institution which was to prove particularly volatile in the years 1953-4, but also changing the composition of the remaining camps. There the removal of the political contingent seemed to contribute to an escalation of tensions between different criminal groups which – no longer able to lord it over the 58-ers – increasingly turned against one another. 

In addition to creating a nuanced picture of the Gulag and its transformation over time, Death and Redemption also makes an important argument. As Steve explains in the introduction, different explanations for the existence of the camps have been put forward. Some argue that its origins were economic, its raison d’etre the league of laborers who slaved in the hostile but resource-rich territories which made up the margins of the USSR; others that the Gulag’s roots were essentially political – a monstrous penal system was brought into being as a mean to destroy the regime’s enemies and instil fear throughout society. Steve eschews the economic for the political, but he understands the political reasons for the Gulag’s existence rather differently from historians of an earlier generation. In keeping with other recent scholarship, he takes the Bolsheviks’ ideology and propaganda seriously and argues that we should not simply dismiss the resources and manpower poured into the “re-education” of prisoners as some kind of pernicious window-dressing. Instead, he argues that one of the prime functions of the Gulag was to sort and categorise its inhabitants: the redeemable were to be identified and reforged, through labour and the efforts of the Gulag personnel; the remaining could be worked to death, sent to a penal battalion, or simply shot.  

To support his argument about the political purpose of the Gulag Steve draws on a number of sources, making particular use in early sections of the seminal text Belomor which trumpeted Soviet success in re-forging the criminal. It could be argued that the authors of Belomor cared as much about an international audience as readers within the USSR, but Steve also draws on archival sources which show how important such ideas remained within the sealed world of the camps: memos and directives from Gulag’s leaders in Moscow to its regional camp commanders; newspaper articles produced solely for prisoners; even letters from ex-zeks thanking their former educators for putting them on the right track. Research into the economics of the Gulag has suggested that the camps were not financially viable as the relatively cheap labor of the ordinary Soviet citizen was in fact more cost-effective. Moreover, as is noted in Death and Redemption, the political leaders of the Soviet Union were aware of the economic burden presented by the camps (at least by the beginning of the Second World War). And yet this realization did not spell the end of the Gulag, because the political drive to preserve it lasted as long as Stalin did, with change only possible after his death in 1953.

After reading Death and Redemption I’m thoroughly persuaded that the goal of sorting, re-educating, and where possible releasing the offender were real ambitions, and did impact on the management and running of the Gulag, but I also wonder how far these big political ambitions filtered down to the grass-roots level. To what extent did the goal of politically transforming prisoners govern the thinking and actions of those charged with the day-to-day running of the camps? In terms of thinking about how research on the Gulag might develop further in the future the question of how those who guarded and administered the camps understood their own actions seems to me to be an important one.

As an earlier blog conversation revealed, historians still find it hard to learn much about the guards and other officials working within the zona; in contrast to the huge body of writing produced by the victims of Stalinist terror, Fyodor Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss is one of the first memoirs left by those who policed the camps.¹ Death and Redemption suggests that the men who ended up in these roles were often demobbed soldiers or young NKVD commanders who – whatever their own political beliefs – needed material incentives to persuade them to set off for a new life in the Gulag. How did they feel about their charges once they got there, I wonder? What role did class identity or military experience play in the way guards and officials treated prisoners?

Death and Redemption clearly shows the huge gulf between the Soviet Gulag and Nazi concentration camps, but some of the issues concerning camp workers’ responsibility, and the role of material or political incentives in motivating them, are perhaps similar. I recently read an article examining the violent practices of SS guards in the Majdanek camp during the Second World War. Elissa Mailänder Koslov asks why guards transferred to Majdanek were more violent in their treatment of prisoners than they had been earlier in the careers and suggests that certain factors enabled the guards to see the inmates as a dehumanizied “other.” She considers, for example, the extreme cold in Lublin, the prevalence of disease, the foreignness of the prisoners, the chaotic and brutal conditions which meant the prisoners were easily viewed as animals rather than other human beings.² This article made me wonder about the importance of the different stages of a Soviet prisoners’ sojourn before she even arrived in the camp. Starvation, torture, and other forms of degradation prisoners experienced first in prison, then in transit meant many prisoners simply did not recognize themselves.  In her camp memoir, Olga Adamov-Sliozberg describes finding a full-length mirror during one of the long transits “I stood in the crowd and stared, unable to figure out which of the women was me [...] [F]or a long time afterward, I kept thinking of that gray-haired woman who had stared at me from the mirror with her sad, weary face, trying to get used to the idea that this was me.”³ If they were no longer recognizable to themselves, how did the prisoners appear to their guards and educators? Did the abuse and neglect which prisoners experienced pre-camp help to make further violence towards them seem legitimate to camp personnel who no longer saw them as fully human?

Death and Redemption takes us a long way in terms of understanding Moscow’s conception of the Gulag and – along with existing studies, and the great canon of camp memoirs  – probing the experiences and memories of the system’s victims. For me, the figure of the guard, the educator, and the camp administorator remain elusive. But perhaps this will always be the case. Studies of Nazi prison guards (such as Koslov’s) are possible for  because of the great body of perpetrator testimony which was generated by the trials held in West Germany from the 1960s. The situation in the USSR was very different. In the post-Stalin period, the Soviet leadership intermittently encouraged discussion of the country’s violent past, but it never sought to attribute personal blame on a significant scale, fearing, perhaps, a return to purging, or maybe just anxious about the threat it might pose to the regime’s legitimacy. Whatever the reason, it has legacies for post-Soviet attitudes towards Stalin and Stalinism but also has implications for the historical record.

I would be interested to know what Steve and others working on the Gulag think about this. Survivors’ memoirs tend to suggest that there was a huge variation in the way different camp employees treated prisoners. As the scholarship on the Gulag develops, can we go further in understanding how and why this was the case? Or is the evidence simply not there? 

It is a great honor to have this stellar cast gathered for this conversation. I find the praise overwhelming and flattering (“dean of Gulag studies“? wow!) and the critiques painful but also exhilarating and thought-provoking. Most of all, I am excited to see that the argument I tried to make in the book (warts and all) actually came through to the readers.

In an effort to facilitate this as “conversation”, I’ll respond intermittently to the readers’ comments rather than waiting for all to chime in. Here, I want to address the issue of images raised both by Deborah Kaple and Cynthia Ruder. Obviously, I can change nothing about the book now and I acknowledge that the book would have been improved with more images, but I can point now to some visual (and textual) evidence that might be useful to readers and to all of our students. I like Cynthia’s idea of creating auxiliary web material for the book, and it’s something I’ll think about doing. However, I would point out the availability of some freely available auxiliary material that may not be known to all. (For an extended discussion of materials available for teaching the Gulag, look at the posts by Wilson Bell and me at Teach History, Karl Qualls’ blog on teaching Russian history.)

I would point readers and students to the Gulag website created with my colleagues at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media here at George Mason University. In addition to a virtual exhibit, complete with visually-based original mini-documentaries, the site, especially in its archive, contains a wealth of visual evidence.The text search and the “browse by tag” function allows one to find materials by location, subject matter, person, etc.

In particular and in relation to Death and Redemption, I would like to point colleagues, readers, and students with Russian language skills to a selection of documents from the local Karlag archive in Karaganda.

As for a map of Karlag, it is easier said than done. Karlag, like most Gulag camps, did not occupy a single defined (let alone enclosed) space. It was diffuse with many different sub-camps located around the steppe of central Kazakhstan (not to mention the many “de-convoyed” prisoners who were herding animals around the steppe without residing in a particular camp zone and sometime even without the presence of an armed guard.) I try to describe the extent of the camp in the text by pointing out its outermost sub-camps, and I provided a map that located the most important geographic locales in Kazakhstan discussed in the book. To draw lines around the camp would be misleading as to how the camp was actually organized. (Here is a rather poor-quality version with credit to the cartographer Stephanie Hurter Williams.)

The primary contribution of Death and Redemption is the author’s willingness to ask (and, of course, answer) a seemingly simple question: Why did the Soviet authorities spend enormous amounts of energy and resources “to replicate the Soviet social and cultural system within the Gulag?”  In other words, why not just kill the prisoners either through execution or through penal labor and use the resources on any number of other important priorities, rapid industrialization being chief among them.  Why go to such lengths to try to reform them into good Soviet citizens?  Certainly, millions of Soviet subjects were shot or worked to death in the camps of the Gulag, or left to die in the so-called special settlements.  But several times more survived confinement and returned to Soviet society having supposedly undergone the process of “reforging” or “re-education.”  To some this re-education process was a farce, lip service to Bolshevik identity that prisoners simply ignored or manipulated to their own advantage.  Barnes, while not dismissing such reactions to the re-education process, nonetheless accepts it as real, as tangible evidence that the Gulag represented not just the fears of Soviet socialism but its hopes and dreams as well.  Indeed, he views it as a crucial link for understanding in their full complexity the tensions inherent in the Soviet worldview, and, more narrowly, in their vision of criminal justice in a socialist society.

This understanding of the Gulag as a microcosm of Soviet society, with events, institutions, and relationships in the Gulag mirroring those outside the barbed wire, owes much to Solzhenitsyn, as Barnes readily acknowledges.  Yet Barnes views this not as an exclusively negative, repressive phenomenon as Solzhenitsyn does, but as a positive, constructive one.  It was perhaps not a moral system, but it operated within its own system of ethics that made sense to its practitioners.  From political indoctrination sessions to socialist slogans in the barracks, from literacy classes to musical performances, Gulag life was organized around this new socialist ethos.  And the most important part of this ethos and of Gulag life was labor.  It was the primary method and indicator of re-education, of the inmate’s readiness to return to a productive life outside the barbed wire.  Those who failed this critical test could have no place in Soviet society—they were slated for death.

For Barnes the tension between life and death, between redemption and guilt is summarized in this visual propaganda piece, which is described but unfortunately not included in the book:

Here a mock grave complete with coffin has been constructed for members of a prisoner labor brigade.  The crime, as depicted by several signs, each bearing a prisoner’s surname along with a percent—22%, 30%, 42%—was underperformance of the work quota.  Laziness.  The message is unmistakable: those who do not perform their labor duty are not submitting to re-education.  They will exit the Gulag not by release but by death.  Or as Barnes puts it: “In the harsh conditions of the Gulag, the social body’s filth would either be purified (and returned to the body politic) or cast out (through death).” (14)  What is important here is that both options—death and redemption—are appealing outcomes in the Soviet worldview.  Setting deadly violence alongside correction was not a contradiction, but an ideal.  It was not a perversion of socialism, it was not some sort of Stalinist deviation, it was how socialism was to be built.  This argument is the central tenet of the book and a significant departure from most other works on the Gulag, from Solzhenitsyn’s and Anne Applebaum’s memoir-based studies, to the more archivally-grounded works of Oleg Khlevniuk and Galina Ivanova.  It is also an important theoretical foundation on which younger scholars, including myself, can build.

Yet when it comes to practice, things were not so neat, and it seems to me that Barnes takes the death-or-redemption dichotomy too far by tightly linking survival with re-education.  There were more exit options to prisoners in the Gulag than re-education and release or resistance and death.  It was certainly possible to accept and submit to re-education, to perform acceptable or even herculean feats of labor, and yet still perish in the camps from malnutrition, a worksite accident, disease, or at the hands of violent guards or fellow prisoners. Perhaps such cases can be explained as the innocent chips that flew as the proverbial wood was chopped.  But it was likewise possible to resist or be completely indifferent to re-education and yet still be released.  Indeed, the primary form of release under Stalin, as Barnes acknowledges, was simply the expiration of sentence.  Penal reformers globally had long discussed the idea of indeterminate sentencing, of holding convicted criminals until they were deemed worthy of release into society.  Yet the Soviets shied away from this practice, preferring a fixed sentence that in certain times and places under Stalin could be reduced by good-time (workday) credits, parole, or pardon, but in other times and places could not.  In other words, without any sort of final assessment as to their correction while incarcerated (other than a pulse?), the Stalinist regime was letting convicted criminals back onto the street.  Neither death nor redemption, one might argue.  And in the post-Stalin era, when criminologists and penal officials began to track recidivism rates, they quickly realized that this is precisely what was occurring.

Indeed, given Barnes’s dichotomy and what we know about productivity and the wide range of attitudes of prisoners in the camps, perhaps we should ask why more deaths did not occur in the Gulag.  Why were the special camps created, where inmates were subjected after the expiration of their sentence to exile?  Why not just kill them if they were so irredeemable?  What restrained Soviet officials in the regular corrective-labor camps from being more brutal toward underperforming prisoners, particularly in the last five years of Stalin’s life, when the (official) mortality rate in the Gulag slipped to roughly 1 percent?  Were 99 percent of Gulag prisoners demonstrating their redemption, or at least their redeemability?  Were the 1 percent who died the ones who resisted re-education?   And, on a related note, how well does this narrative of death or redemption map onto all the other features of life in the camps as described by memoirs and official documentation alike: endless corruption, tufta (cooking the books), gang warfare, everyday violence perpetrated by guards and prisoners alike, and so forth?  My sense is that while Barnes is correct to point out that Soviet ideology and the particularities of the Soviet state created in some minds a death-or-redemption ideal for the Gulag (at least in the 1930s—the 1940s and 1950s seem to me more complex), Gulag life can only partially be explained by this dichotomy.  This is not to say that Barnes’s portrayal of the realities of camp life is simplistic in order to prove his point.  On the contrary, the problem is that what Barnes describes in the camps often does not reflect his central argument of the Gulag as a last chance for redemption with the other option being death.

Just a few additional words of praise to conclude.  Barnes’s description of how camp life was organized and categorized both detailed and nuanced, reflecting the complex realities that faced both prisoners and administrators in the Gulag system.  Barnes is correct to point out that both economics and corrections mattered in the Gulag.  While many memoirists and scholars have focused on the economic side of the camps, Barnes masterfully details a whole host of correctional and penal practices, including labor, that both complemented and collided with economic aims. His discussion of how inmates were categorized by administrators and prisoners alike sheds valuable insight into how Gulag society functioned.  His detailed description of the special camps and their divergence from the regular corrective-labor camp system is a particularly important contribution of the book.  His exploration into the camp revolts of the immediate post-Stalin era is masterful.  In short, I cannot say enough about Death and Redemption—it will remain an important contribution to our understanding of the Gulag and of the Soviet phenomenon in general for decades to come.  We will soon see if those enrolled in my senior research seminar devoted to prisons and concentrations camps agree—it is one of four works that made the mandatory reading list.   Congratulations, Steve, on an excellent book.

I also had a question for Steve–Why did you decide to use the English translation of the История строительства…rather than the Russian original?  I ask because the English translation is a poor substitute for the original.  While scant information exists (at least that I know of) as to how the English translation came to be, it turns out that the English variant omits significant parts of the Russian original, incorrectly translates some of the sub-headings, if they are included at all, and diminishes the careful construction of the original that the true editorial team–Boris Lapin, Viktor Shklovsky and other writers–had in mind when they produced the work as a literary montage. Just curious!  ( As a basis for reference I talk about this in my book, pp. 192-202.)

What I don’t like about Steve’s book is…the lack of photos. Where are they? I so much wanted to see Dolinka that I found this on the internet. I hope it’s the right one. The title is “Karlag Museum, Dolinka, Kazakhstan.” The prose in the book is very descriptive, but I needed a visual.

Based on meticulous and exhaustive archival research, as well as a thoughtful examination of memoir literature by prisoners, the book examines the Gulag as a penal institution. While acknowledging the brutal and inhumane nature of the Gulag, Barnes also explores those aspects of the institution that made it very different from a Nazi death camp.

The conversation dovetails nicely with our first blog conversation about Deborah Kaple’s translation of a Gulag prison guard memoir (Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir). That conversation prompted a lively exchange on the nature of the Gulag — its function in Soviet society, its distinctiveness versus other internment systems. Barnes’ book forces us to consider the borders that separated the Gulag from the rest of Soviet society. How did the Gulag figure into the larger Soviet political and economic project? Was its function economic, ideological, or rehabilitative — or some combination of all three? What was the relationship between the regular criminal and the political criminal within the Gulag?

Death and Redemption was the winner of the 2011 Baker-Burton Award, European History Section, Southern Historical Association.  Barnes was also interviewed about the book by Sean Guillory on New Books in Russia and Eurasia and on C-SPAN.

This blog conversation brings together the following people, including Barnes and a group of Gulag specialists, to discuss what scholars can learn about Soviet society through his book:

Steven A. Barnes is associate professor of Russian history and director of the Center for Eurasian Studies at George Mason University. Additionally, with the National Parks Service and the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, Barnes was historical consultant for a traveling museum exhibit on the history of the Gulag. Working with the Center for History and New Media, Barnes built a web exhibit on the history of the Gulag. Information on both these projects, which provide a wonderful resource for teaching, can be found at Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. Barnes is presently working on a new book tentatively title The Wives’ Gulag: The Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. The book traces women’s lives in a camp for elite women during the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. Barnes is also writing about representations of the Gulag in the visual arts.

Deborah Kaple teaches in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Her specialty is communism in the 1950s and 1960s. She is Special Editor for Modern Chinese Studies‘ forthcoming 2 issues called “The Forgotten Decade: Special Issue on China and the USSR: A Retrospective Look at the 1950s.” She is also author of Dream of a Red Factory: High Stalinism in China (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Gulag Boss: A Memoir (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Cynthia Ruder is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures, & Cultures at the University of Kentucky.  Her first book–Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal–examined the construction of the Belomor Canal vis-a-vis the cultural products associated with it.  Her current project is a book-length study on the Moscow Canal and the creation of “Soviet” space through landscape, architecture, literature, and fine art.

Golfo Alexopoulos is Associate Professor of Russian History at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Cornell, 2003). She is currently completing a monograph on the history of the Gulag with a focus on the systemic and routine violence of the labor camp system in the Stalin era. She is the author of numerous Gulag-related articles, including “A Torture Memo: Reading Violence in the Gulag” in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), a book she co-edited; “Exiting the Gulag after War: Women, Invalids, and the Family,” published in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2009); and “Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag,” which appeared in Slavic Review (2005).

Jeff Hardy is Assistant Professor of Russian History at Brigham Young University. He is completing a book on the evolution of the Soviet penal system in the Khrushchev years. He shows how Soviet officials transformed the Gulag based on the rejection of mass incarceration and violence as governing principles through a new emphasis on “socialist legality” and “socialist humaneness,” only to see some of those reforms overturned by a broad coalition of interests that rejected amelioration of conditions for prisoners. Hardy soon will publish two articles based on this work: “The Camp is not a Resort”: The (re)Imposition of Order in the Soviet Gulag, 1957-1961″ will be in Kritika (vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 2012)); and “Gulag Tourism: Khrushchev’s ‘Show’ Prisons in the Cold War Context, 1954-1959″ will be in Russian Review (vol. 71, no. 1 (January 2012)).

Miriam Dobson is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Before moving to Sheffield seven years ago, she studied Russian and French at  Cambridge and then History at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, where she gained an MA in History and later her PhD. Her first monograph, Khrushchev´s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin explores popular responses to the reforms of the Khrushchev era, in particular the massive exodus of prisoners from the Gulag. It examines the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin’s terror. Khrushchev’s Cold Summer won the 2010 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her current project is entitled `The Unorthodox: Baptists and Evangelical Christians in Soviet Russia, 1944-1991´ and is funded by a small research grant from the British Academy.

Dan Healey is Professor of History at the University of Reading, UK. He has published extensively on the history of sexuality and gender in modern Russia. His first book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (DeKalb, Il.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009) was translated and published as Gomoseksual’noe vlechenie v revoliutsionnoi Rossii: Regulirovanie seksual’nogo-gendernogo dissidentstva, (Moscow: Ladomir Press, 2008). His Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2011) explores the medical dimensions of the early Soviet “sexual revolution.” He has co-edited collections of essays on Russian masculinity in history and culture, and on Soviet medicine. Currently he is writing a study of the history of medicine and medical care in the Gulag.

Antonina and the three babushki are desperate to protect Suzanna from the institutionalization they fear will be her fate if the authorities realize her “muteness.” Instead of sending her to nursery, the babushki spend their days reading to her (in Russian and French) and talking about their own unhappy lives under Soviet power. They secretly christen her Sofia and teach her about their Christian faith, despite the crack-down on religious practice in these years. In an interview, the author Chizhova explained the importance of women transmitting historical memory: “In war and civil war, it is primarily the men who take part in military action and die in huge numbers. And so it turned out for us that in the twentieth century, it was only the women who could be the carriers of historical memory [носительницами исторической памяти].”

The historiography of the post-war era has tended to focus on youth, not least because the Soviet regime was both so enamored and so fearful of its youngest generation. But, as Chizhova’s book suggests, the elderly – particularly women – played a key role in child-raising. The state provision of child-care remained limited and sometimes unsatisfactory:  Melanie Ilič has shown that although the number of places in crèches, kindergartens and nurseries increased under Khrushchev, mothers were not always happy with the standard of care in state-run organizations “where the sheer number of children in attendance meant that illness and infection, and sometimes injuries, were frequent, and the food provided was not considered to be wholesome.”¹ Parents commonly used informal child-care arrangements, relying on support from family or neighbors, as is the case in The Time of Women.

My current research examines religion in post-war Soviet society, so I was particularly interested by the different beliefs Chizhova attributes to her heroines. The girl’s mother, Antonina, was raised in the countryside and still has faith in various folk practices, but when faced with her own mortality, it is a secular, communist vision of the future which seems to haunt her, albeit in a confused fashion. For the old women, it is their meeting with God which concerns them; Glikeria, for example, makes a dress for her own funeral, exclaiming “I can’t go before Him in old rags, can I?”² An exchange between Glikeria and the dying Antonina presents these two different worldviews:

Glikeria tries to comfort her. “The Lord himself will sort everything out. In the other world things are quiet and peaceful. In the green pastures… You see everyone who you have said farewell to. What sins can you have… Let those tremble, whose path lies to hell.”

“I dream of living under communism, Glikeria Yegorovna. Just to have a glimpse of it… The people who will live to see it are happy.” “Oh!” – she waves her hand. – When will that happen? They promised it before the war…”  - “Before the war they were just guessing… But they know now for certain: in 20 years. They says that everything will be different. Machines will do the laundry…” – “What do you mean!” – She’s stunned. “Will that be outside? Like street-washing machines? … The laundry will get all mixed up. They’ll never be able to sort it out afterwards.”³

Glikeria becomes alarmed (How will the washing machine fit in?), particularly when Antonina suggests that money is going to disappear in the communist future (a possibility which almost leads the three babushki to a bout of panic-buying). But the conversation ends more calmly. Antonina thinks that this future communist paradise will be full of kind and cheerful people, like the ones shown on television.

“That’s right,” she nods. – “I think that’s what paradise is like. Just the way it is on television. I didn’t use to believe that. But now I think that this is what is like. I dream of going there…” “Well,” – Glikeria rubs her eyes. “You will… Believe me…. Who else, if not you. It will be just like it is on television. They probably don’t just show these things – they know about them…” 

Television plays a crucial role in the novel. Although an expense – and a frightening novelty for the babushki - Antonina scrimps and saves to buy one, believing it will be an indispensable source of learning for Suzanna. One evening’s viewing in particular prompts the grandmothers to think about their own losses, and about the afterlife. Presented with a newsreel of the May-day parade in 1941 the women are both bemused, and hopeful: might they see their own dead children or grandchildren?

“It’s as if they were alive,” – Grandma Glikeria rejoices, – “neither wars can hurt them, nor diseases. They stayed the way death found them – young and healthy. They’re waiting for their turn: to get on TV.”

“You’re talking a lot of rubbish!” – Grandma Yevdokia glares at her. – “Everybody’s the same, you mean, and has the same rights? They died and they’re all in the same place:  both the sinners and the righteous… And they’re waiting their turn in the same queue?”

“Now that they’re dead,” – Grandma Glikeria says sadly, – why shouldn’t they sort themselves out in the interim…

“No way!” – She got up, with her hand holding her back.  - “They didn’t sort things out in this world, and no one’s the wiser? It’s not like that. The Lord sees everything. Death’s not war: it won’t write off your sins. If you didn’t get things right here, then you answer for it there.”⁴

One of the reasons these passages struck me so forcefully was because they closely echo  some interviews that I’m reading for an article I’m trying to finish. The interviews date from a very similar period (they were conducted in Ivanovo region in 1964-5) and they allow us a glimpse into how this generation of women – those born before the revolution and who experienced the all the upheavals of 1914-1945  - articulated their vision of the heaven, hell, and afterlife.

In the materials held in the archival fond for the Institute of Scientific Atheism, we find, for example, the views of Ekaterina Andreevna, an Orthodox pensioner.⁵ Raised in a religious, rural, family by the sixties she was attending church only on holidays, but she kept three icons at home, observed fasts, knew three prayers by heart, and constantly turned to God for support in the course of her daily life. The report described her beliefs regarding the afterlife as follows: “Believes in the immortality of the human spirit. Thinks that when she dies, her spirit will, after forty days of tribulation, be sent by God to either hell or heaven, as he thinks fit [...] As she imagines it, a person who has committed sins on earth, even significant ones, if he is clever, God might send his spirit to heaven as such people are necessary “for the building of paradise” [“dlia stroitel’stva raia”].” Here, as in the exchange between Antonina and Glikeria, we find some kind of elision between ideas of a Christian afterlife and a paradise which, like communism, is still under construction. Another interiewee, sixty-five, illiterate, and living in a cellar, was reported to believe that “that most people have little chance of getting into heaven; basically only those who perished during the Patriotic War will go to heaven, and those who committed suicide stand no chance.”⁶ Like Glikeria, she formulates a rather idiosyncratic view of how souls were judged – one in which wartime service was everything. 

In the longer piece I am writing on this topic, I explore how the women’s vision of the afterlife was shaped by their own experiences and by the language and innovations of Soviet life, as is also the case with the babushki in The Time of Women. There are, however, differences between the interviewees and Chizhova’s Glikeria, Ariadne and Evdokia. Certainly as far as they present themselves to their interviewers, the women of Ivanovo region are not as explicitly anti-Soviet as the grandmothers in The Time of Women.  And, at least in some cases, their domestic arrangements are not so cozy. The 65-year-old referenced above was, apparently, of “the opinion that those who suffer on earth will find comfort in the afterlife, and the reverse. For herself, she would like to find deliverance from the woman who shares her room [sosedka po komnate] – Liusia.”⁷ In Chizhova’s depiction, in contrast, the outside world is cruel or indifferent at best, but at home her heroines are warm, honest, and deeply care about one another. And it is probably this – as well as the poignant evocation of 1960s Soviet life – which makes it such a good read.