What Was the Gulag? New Books on the History and Memory of Soviet Repressions

Barenberg, Alan. The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 168 pp. $12.99 (paper). ISBN 978-0-1975-2822-6. Hardy, Jeffrey S. The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory. Russian Shorts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 144 pp. $61.00. ISBN 978-1-3501-2819-4. Healey, Dan. The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin’s Labour Camps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. 368 pp. $38.00. ISBN 978-0-3001-8713-7. Grunewald, Susan C. I. From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union. Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. 258 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-7602-1. Mass repression, forced labor, and mass incarceration in corrective-labor camps, colonies, and special settlements for exiles were central features of the Soviet system under Stalin. Their legacies continue to be felt throughout post-Soviet space and seen in the region’s politics of memory. The opening of the archives in the late 1980s, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, provided a brief opportunity that historians seized to investigate in depth Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet penal system known popularly as the Gulag. This significant historical moment also led to the establishment of collections of Soviet and other archives outside of Russia relevant to the study of the Gulag, as well as the publication of archival documents in edited volumes.1 However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s crackdown on Russia’s civil society have made it difficult if not impossible to continue this work based on archives inside Russia.2 Despite this reversal, scholars continue to work on these important topics and publish new works, including ones based on archives outside Russia. After decades of growing scholarship, historians and scholars in other disciplines continue to explore essential questions such as what was the Gulag?3 What were its roles and functions in Soviet society? Who were the victims and perpetrators of state violence in the Soviet Union? What did prisoners experience in the camps? How did it shape prisoner identities? What roles did experts such as camp medical staff play in the camps? What were the connections between the Gulag and Soviet prisoner-of war-camps? How did survivors reintegrate back into Soviet society after release? What are the legacies of Stalin’s mass repressions and how are they commemorated in Putin’s Russia? These questions and more are addressed in four new, beautifully written histories of the Gulag by historians Alan Barenberg, Jeffrey S. Hardy, Dan Healey, and Susan Grunewald. The Gulag was a prison system charged with the colonization and exploitation of the Soviet Union’s remote, resource-rich regions, the punishment of real and imagined criminals, and the rehabilitation of wayward citizens. Over the course of its existence these aims were frequently at odds. Between 1929 and 1960, roughly 18–20 million people were imprisoned in hundreds of camps, colonies, prisons, and special settlements for exiles that spanned the Soviet Union. The Gulag was incredibly violent and deadly. Prisoners faced violence from guards and each other as they labored in conditions destructive to human life. At least 3.7 million perished in the camps. However, as Barenberg and Hardy point out, the true number of dead continues to elude historians because of the nature of Soviet record keeping, which incentivized camp administrators to underreport the number of those who died in the camps for fear of repercussions from Moscow. To help keep these numbers low, camp chiefs released prisoners who were deemed too far gone to save in the prison hospitals.4 Yet despite the inhumanity and brutality of the Gulag, millions more survived. Those who returned from the Gulag to society served as a reminder of the living legacy of Stalinist repression. In addition to describing the origins, function, and life in the camps, Barenberg and Hardy explore previous efforts to commemorate the Gulag’s victims and define its place in the histories of post-Soviet countries. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev initiated a short-lived attempt to de-Stalinize Soviet society, which led to the publication of works on the “camp theme” such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.5 After Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, open discussions about Stalinist repression effectively ended as the regime reformed its politics of memory to emphasize heroes of the Soviet Union (including some Gulag survivors).6 Starting in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev returned to the topic of Stalin’s crimes in an effort to de-Stalinize and democratize Soviet society, Gulag survivors, exiles, and their children came forward to tell their stories.7 During this new round of truth-telling, Gulag survivors furnished newly formed civic organizations, such as the Memorial Society, with their personal archives, autobiographies, letters, memoirs, and art, which enabled historians and others to rewrite the history of the Soviet Union.8 Today, in 2024, the history of Stalinist repression and the Gulag is embattled in Putin’s Russia, where it competes with the cult of victory of World War II.9 While there is a state-sponsored Gulag history museum and monument in Moscow, in addition to a state-sponsored “Day of Victims of Political Repression” on October 30 to commemorate Stalin’s victims, Putin’s regime celebrates Stalin’s achievements and claims the Soviet victory in World War II as part of Russia’s imperial legacy. Organizations once responsible for shedding light on Soviet crimes, such as the Memorial Society and the Sakharov Center, are now banned. The time for an overview of the Gulag and its legacies, such as Barenberg’s and Hardy’s, has never been more urgent. These short books are intended for those new to the subject. They are excellent primers for anyone interested in an overview of the history of the penal system and mass repression in the Soviet Union. However, they are much more than short courses on the Gulag. By drawing upon the rich field of Gulag studies, including the latest work, and situating Stalin’s forced-labor camps within the history of the twentieth century, Barenberg and Hardy provide succinct, detail-oriented historiographical reviews of this important and massive topic. Both of their books address the origins and evolution of the camps, their location and function, the composition of the prisoner population, the prisoner experience, and the memory and legacies of mass repression. They are illustrated with photographs depicting camp infrastructure and prisoner labor, in addition to maps that show the Gulag’s broad geographic dispersion throughout the Soviet Union. Both works make excellent use of prisoner testimonies to render the human experience of this vast and terrible penal system. They include helpful indexes and bibliographies that provide students and researchers alike with the opportunity to explore topics of interest at a more granular level. One of the many strengths of these two introductions to the Gulag is that both historians compare the Soviet camps with Nazi camps, highlighting their similarities and differences. This may be a tired comparison for specialists, but it is an essential one to raise for those new to the topic. When comparing Nazi and Stalinist camps, Barenberg and Hardy also address questions of genocide, which frequently arise in classrooms and among audiences of popular films and media. In doing so they make broader connections to the emerging literature on global histories of prisons, camps, forced migration, and genocide.10 Despite the intended brevity of these works, they meaningfully engage these complex topics, which is essential to understanding Soviet history. As Barenberg and Hardy make clear, there are no simple or easy answers to the questions that the history of Stalinist repression poses. While Barenberg and Hardy provide broad overviews of the topic, two other recently published books draw from new evidence to delve into specific experiences of life in the Gulag. Dan Healey’s The Gulag Doctors explores the Gulag medical system through the lives of the free and unfree staff who served it. Healey taps an array of regional and central archives, memoirs, and personal documents to tell the stories of the prisoner-doctors, nurses, and orderlies who treated sick and emaciated prisoners. He shows the complexity of this system, complicating Solzhenitsyn’s description of the Gulag’s medical section as “born of the devil and filled with the devil’s blood” and the camps themselves as “destructive labor camps.” a core argument I offer for the toleration of medical expertise inside a place of such destructive punishment is that medical knowledge supported the “police colonisation” objectives of the NKVD. Nevertheless, the “medical knowledge” that was given some authority by Gulag bosses was intended to be Soviet, collectivist, and production-focused: it diverged substantially from the Hippocratic values that some doctors still understood and tried to honour in their Gulag healing. It also differs a great deal from the “medical knowledge” and values most readers would consider “humane” today: historical study enables us to understand but it does not compel us to absolve. (p. 33) One of the many strengths of Healey’s book is his use of memoirs and autobiographies of prisoner-doctors and civilians who worked for the Gulag medical service. Healey goes to great lengths to contextualize these collected memories and excavate details not captured in the sterile reports filed by camp staff, which can be found in state archives. Healey’s side-by-side analysis of prisoner and civilian memoirs throughout the book highlights the sliding scale of unfreedom that existed in the Gulag and in the surrounding communities that grew around the camps.13 Prisoner-doctors and free medical workers alike were compelled to practice medicine in ways that served the regime. Yet they also did what they could to help abused and dying people in truly destructive conditions. I was particularly fascinated by the ways these unique forced laborers contributed to and complicated the memory of the Gulag with their testimonies about work for the camp clinics. The stories of local medical heroes and institutions were foundational to the histories of places like Ukhta, Pechora, Magadan, and Norilsk.14 The same can be said of other prisoners who built the infrastructure and cities of regions colonized by forced labor.15 Susan Grunewald’s From Incarceration to Repatriation, meanwhile, shifts the focus slightly by providing new insights on a related but relatively unknown chapter of the history of the camps for German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union and how they are remembered. As she writes, Soviet officials drew from their experiences in mass incarceration, specifically the use and exploitation of forced labor for economic development. The Second World War destroyed the Soviet Union’s economy. Soviet officials continued to detain more than 1.5 million German POWs in the postwar years, with the last group repatriated in 1956. Although historians have established Soviet motivations behind keeping German POWs for such a long time after the war, Grunewald is one of the first to apply geographic information system (GIS) mapping to show that the “economic realities of the wartime and postwar Soviet Union, not retribution, motivated policies and practices toward German POWs” (pp. 3–4). Eventually, as the Soviet Union recovered, POW camps drew from the Gulag model and became sites of reeducation that would assist in the establishment of a socialist Germany in the early days of the Cold War. In addition to GIS mapping, Grunewald draws on a wealth of state archives, newspapers, and memoirs in this first-of-its-kind history of German POWs in the Soviet Union. Like the Gulag, the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees attempted to create a network of self-supporting camps to further develop the Soviet Union’s remote natural resources. The POW camps also employed the same practice of releasing prisoners who were too sick to work, suggesting “an approach that was less retributive than economic in motivation” (p. 6). Like Barenberg, Hardy, and Healey, Grunewald turns to the history of memory in her final chapter. One of the striking differences in Grunewald’s study of the memory of German POWs is that their commemoration was complicated by the fact that they were enemy combatants in the Soviet Union’s/post-Soviet Russia’s most sacred historical event. As Grunewald writes, these men existed as victims during the brief moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union when the graves of German POWs and those of Red Army soldiers became sites of shared remembering. All four of the works reviewed here make significant contributions to the diverse field of Gulag studies. Thoroughly exploring the topics of mass repression and its afterlife are essential to our understanding of authoritarianism as it resurges throughout post-Soviet countries. However, new avenues for research on the Gulag remain. For instance, relatively little attention has been devoted to the environmental history of the Gulag.16 This is particularly striking when one considers that prisoners’ forced labor was used to colonize, and extract precious natural resources from, the Soviet Union’s remote regions, and that this process created industrial landscapes that exist in various states of decay today. The human and environmental cost of the Gulag is truly staggering. Although scholars have begun to study identity, gender, and women’s history in the Gulag, these topics remain underrepresented in the scholarly literature on the camps.17 While Healey’s work contributes to these topics, especially in his examination of civilian and prisoner nurses in the camps, there is considerable room for growth. The Gulag was a system that spanned the Soviet Union and a phenomenon that millions experienced. We do not, and perhaps will never, know everything about the Gulag and its legacies, given the new dangers and restrictions placed on the study of this topic of vital importance. But this should not stop scholars from working on it. Tyler C. Kirk is Associate Professor and the Arthur T. Fathauer Chair in History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is the author of After the Gulag: A History of Memory in Russia’s Far North (Indiana University Press, 2023). He is currently working on two projects on the environmental history of the Gulag and the Soviet circumpolar North.