Category: Death and Redemption

I know I am late entering this conversation and that puts me in danger of repeating many excellent points that have already been made. First – to echo my colleagues’ praise – I find Steve’s book an exciting addition to the secondary literature on the Gulag. It has a strong, compelling thesis, is grounded in a fascinating and unique regional study, and is beautifully written and organised with the undergraduate student and general reader in mind. It arrived a bit late to be incorporated fully into my final-year Gulag studies seminar this past academic year, but I did point students toward it and have good feedback to build in to future years’ coursework. So the book is an enormously valuable contribution.

My observations concern the emphasis on death.  Jeff Hardy hinted at the problem of assigning an ideological meaning for death in the Gulag philosophy of redemption (if one could label it that way), when he suggested that “a death-or-redemption ideal” operating in the minds of some Gulag officials does not capture the complexity of historical reality. Of course, the virtue of Steve’s book is that it does not confine itself to a simple dichotomy of death or redemption. But I do want to question how ‘death’ as an intended fate figures in the book as a matter of deliberate policy.

In no way am I denying that death was a constant threat in most camps most of the time. Nor do I deny that authorities were criminally responsible for these conditions.  We see high and fluctuating death rates that are explicable by official neglect and corruption (leading to reduced rations and inadequate living conditions); by a lack of planning for surges in prisoner numbers; by violence and abuse by guards; by extreme conditions, especially in the early, pioneering camps where no infrastructure existed; by parlous conditions during the transport of prisoners; and by extreme wartime privation, the single most important factor that seems to trump all the others when we look at recorded deaths.

My question is: how far can we consider what I have listed as the result of a planned, deliberate policy to kill off those who could not be redeemed through labour? Perhaps it may apply to the katorga camps, where extremely harsh conditions were mandated and little mercy was offered to the sick, for example. But I have not yet seen documents that explicitly state that in the Gulag, death would be the intended alternative to redemption.

We know that the Bolsheviks were not afraid to record their violent intentions on paper. We do not have anything like an NKVD Order No. 00447 that codifies a Gulag policy on the liquidation by labour exhaustion of unredeemables – at least, none has come to light in the fonds which have been declassified in the past 20 years. Naturally, such a document might one day surface. For the moment, however, I would argue that it seems prudent to approach the question of intention cautiously.

From the perspective of my own research, I find the existence of the Sanitary Department of the Gulag leads me to question the intention to kill unredeemables. How do we account for the twice-annual medical inspection of all prisoners’ physical condition (to classify them as capable of heavy/medium/light labour, or as invalids)?  How do we explain the seriously inadequate but system-wide attempts to reanimate sick and weakened prisoners in the Gulag’s infirmaries and hospitals? How do we explain the fact that from the late 1930s, the Gulag recruited doctors, nurses, dentists, and feldshers (paramedics) nationally from new graduate cohorts and made considerable investment in them?  One explanation is to interpret the prisoner’s access to medical care as an aspect of the web of incentives so persuasively detailed in Steve’s work; this thesis is proposed in a recent, excellent MA dissertation about medical care in Ukhta camps (Charlotte Sophie Kühlbrandt, “Rereading the Gulag through Medicine: Ukhta 1929-1955.” MA Thesis, Cambridge University, 2011).

Another explanation is to suggest that despite the high death rate, the authorities generally held that prisoners should survive. There were short and long-term rationales for this, I propose. Prisoners in camps were more valuable alive as units of labour. As released ex-convicts, confined to exile in nearby districts, they were valuable as productive ‘quasi-free’ inhabitants. Prisoners who survived to be released populated the new cities of the urbanizing Gulag. They provided the Gulag with the human resources required to fulfil the important, if secondary, colonial mission of the forced labour system. They were often eager to establish themselves, to found or reconstitute families, and they were a compliant workforce of second-class citizens. The authorities had plenty of reasons to wish that as many prisoners as possible from virtually all categories might finish their sentence and join this ‘colonist’ population.

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.  

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.)

Just to start the conversation, I’d like to mention how rich and multi-faceted Steve’s book is, and how useful the various short and long discussions on many aspects of the Gulag are. For instance, the section titled “Hierarchy of Detention: The Institutions of the Gulag” is a thorough and clearly-written several page discussion about all the relevant Gulag institutions. Going along with his idea that prisoners were sorted out according to their presumed redeemability, he lists, from most severe to least: execution, prisons, katorga camp divisions and special camps, corrective labor camps, special settlements and corrective labor colonies. Within each of these categories, he clearly sets out a compact descriptive history. I am so grateful to have this spelled out so brilliantly (for myself) and I can’t wait to have my students in the Soviet Gulag class use this resource.

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.