Author: Golfo Alexopoulos

I apologize for my late entry, but as many of you know, I have been in Russia.  There’s a lot to say about Death and Redemption because it’s so rich and insightful.  Steve is right that book reviews are not exactly published in a timely manner.  The review of his book that I wrote last year just appeared in proofs.  I won’t restate what I wrote in my very positive review of Death and Redemption.  Instead, I will focus on three questions or doubts that have lingered since my first reading.

I should stress right off that I am persuaded by much of Steve’s analysis.  For example, he argues rightly that the Gulag was not separate from but entirely integrated into Soviet society, that its social impact was immense, that Moscow’s directives were often contradictory, that the Gulag “experienced remarkably little mass resistance throughout its history” and not really until the death of Stalin, that the whole re-education apparatus mattered to those who created and maintained the system, and that the NKVD-MVD operated an integrated system of camps, colonies, settlements, sharaski, etc.  All of these insights are extremely valuable, and I suspect that they will be developed even more in future gulag books.

There are three things I might disagree with, however.  First — on the political versus the economic.  I no longer think that “economic v. political” is an appropriate formulation for gulag analysis. We should do instead what Timothy Snyder suggests and consider the two inseparable in a Stalinist context.  After all, Steve quotes Stalin in his book as saying that the economic is the political.  Let’s take him at his word.  In an article, I too once claimed that the political superseded the economic, but I am now convinced that this is incorrect. We should really think of the two as integrated rather than competing goals.