Author: Cynthia Ruder

Thanks to Jeff, Wilson, and Steve for their great comments and feedback.  In thinking about the book and their comments, I realized how easy it is to get locked into a mindset whereby you believe that the Gulag in one era might conceivably be identical to the Gulag in another era.  Or, conversely, that procedures and practices of one era were isolated in that point in time rather than carrying on and evolving over the course of the Gulag.  While this revelation might seem naive or simplistic, it underscores in a small way how complex the Gulag history is and how little we still know even with Steve’s book, our research, and those studies that preceded us.  I’m always amazed when the Gulag seems to be not a “hot” topic when, as Steve cogently argues, it was an integral part of Soviet life and that there is so much more to discover.

I bring this up because I was interested to hear from Jeff and Wilson that the reeducation efforts in the camps did not diminish even as the Gulag itself was slowly evaporating as the fifties wore on.  This should not be a surprise given that, again as Steve argues, the theory underpinning the Gulag was based not just on economic issues, but on a very real idea that prisoners could be remade/reforged into Soviet citizens.  This idea cannot be over-emphasized.  While the ultimate goal might have been so-called model Soviet citizens (whoever they might be), the overall goal still was to produce Soviet citizens.  What the promoters of reforging did not take into account, however, was that Soviet could mean a lot of things–from someone who genuinely believed in the Soviet enterprise to someone who mastered the art of “tufta”, a practice we know invaded many parts of Soviet life outside the Gulag as well.

Indeed, the whole idea of what it means to be Soviet vis-a-vis Gulag prisoners is a fascinating question.  (I realize topics of subjectivity and identity are hot topics now.)Where not those Gulag inmates who produced armaments during WWII Soviet citizens,  in the sense that their labor contributed to the USSR’s victory and likely, in spite of the horrendous conditions could have been posited on real patriotism (even if many were hoping a German victory might free them)?  And what Steve points out on p.131 about wartime re-education echoes and continues the same rhetoric of which the Belomor and Moscow Canal projects were redolent.

The enterprise of reforging likewise is based on the premise that Steve brings up (p. 97) of malleability.  The notion of reeducation is posited on the belief that human beings can change and can be remolded–not as raw material, but as poorly cast original material that requires REmaking into the purported image of a Soviet citizen.  The term перековка, a word imbued industrial and metallurgical meaning, speaks both to the idea of malleability, but also to the difficult process inherent in reforging metal.  The industrial metaphor dovetails with Soviet rhetoric of the late twenties and the thirties, while the metallurgical element surely was not lost on the promoters of reforging, prominent among them Semyon Firin, a person who deserves a much more detailed study in his own right.

Arguably the process of reforging reached beyond the remaking of prisoners and into the remaking of the landscape, cultural production, and rhetoric as well.  One need look no further than the Moscow Canal to see how this re-engineering of landscape–space and place–was taken on wholesale:  from the construction of the Northern port in the shape of a ship with a red-star-crowned mast that could be extended to reach farther into the heavens, to the monumental sculptures of Lenin and Stalin at the entrance to the canal at Lock #1, to all the architecture and sculpture in between.  This suggests a physicality to reforging that goes beyond human nature to nature itself and to cultural production.

All the entries by my colleagues in history have been informative, fascinating, and extremely useful for someone like me who operates outside the fold, as it were, of official Gulag scholarship.  I agree with the eloquent reviews written thusfar of Steve’s book, so my comments will not reflect so much a review, as certain points, themes, and ideas that resonate for me as someone who is, for better or for worse, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the Gulag with a special emphasis on questions of culture and space/place.

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.

I love this book and wanted to second Deborah’s comment about how readable and useful it is.  I’ll comment more on that later.  But for my first post I also wanted to second how much I wished there were illustrations–pictures, of course, but a map of Karlag would have been most useful as well to get a sense not only of the size of the camp, but the location of the various outposts and a relative scale of the distances covered, especially since this was such a geographically large camp.  Forgive me if I have not checked this, but it might be helpful, especially as we use this book in our courses, to have web material posted to which we could send students for further clarification of locations and terrain.

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.)