The Gulag and the Non-Gulag as One Interrelated Whole
One would be hard-pressed to identify a question of the Soviet past that has been studied with the same intensity over the past few decades as the history of Stalin's Gulag. (1) Thousands of works have been written on the basis of manifold interviews, published memoirs, and archival documents from both state and private collections. The long list of thoroughly examined topics includes aspects of the Stalinist repressive political apparatus, the structure of the Gulag, the functioning of its administrative bureaucracy from the lowest rungs to the central leadership, and the principles undergirding forced labor and camp life. Many data concerning the magnitude of the camp system, its population, and indicators of production have been published and circulated. Scholars are investigating key moments in the history of the Gulag, such as prisoner uprisings. Increasingly, the object of study has become various aspects of Gulag society itself. (2) The historiography of the Gulag is, broadly speaking, approaching the point at which we merely begin to reproduce or touch up a well-illustrated picture; one now senses a pressing need to reconsider the literature with the aim of identifying lacunae and new directions for research. Indeed, the advent of new approaches for studying the Gulag is to some extent predicated on the development of new source bases. (3) At the same time, the "archival revolution" has inevitably contributed to ever-growing specialization, and therefore much will still depend on our ability to sharpen our perspective on the most fundamental questions and problems of Gulag scholarship. The present article is intended to highlight several complex questions regarding the Gulag's history. In particular, I draw attention to the task of defining the Gulag's boundaries, identifying the channels of its interaction with the broader Soviet society, and specifying the consequences of these interactions in both short- and long-term perspective. Such questions are not entirely novel; one need only recall Alexander Solzhenitsyn's journey through implicitly bounded circles of the Gulag hell or his conception of the Soviet world as bifurcated between greater and lesser zones. (4) At the same time, as they bring to bear previously unknown facts and new methods, historians are in a position to refine and even to challenge established perspectives, or at the very least to articulate new directions for research. Defining Boundaries Recent archival work has contributed to a vivid and compelling picture of Soviet society under Stalin as composed of several interrelated layers. The first is the Gulag itself--a flourishing system of camps, colonies, prisons, special settlements, and other more fleeting and specialized units of isolation and forced labor. The preponderance of available data indicates that between 1930 and 1952, nearly 25 million people passed through the Gulag system, 18-20 million of whom were sentenced to imprisonment in camps, colonies, and prisons. (5) Meanwhile, no fewer than six million people, mostly kulaks and members of repressed nationalities, were sent into internal exile, living under conditions approaching those of the camps themselves in special settlements. (6) In addition, World War II saw several million Soviet citizens interned, quarantined, or subjected to forced labor. The Gulag "population" was notable for its diversity and for an internal hierarchy that mirrored the hierarchy of Soviet society beyond the Gulag. There were inversions as well: political prisoners, many of whom occupied high positions outside the Gulag, frequently found themselves at a much lower level on the Gulag's social ladder, often yielding to common criminals. (7) The world of special settlements was similarly diverse. The groups most typically liable to deportation included peasants, Baltic and Ukrainian partisans, persecuted peoples of the North Caucusus, and city dwellers expelled during the passportization process. …
Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization
Drawing on newly-opened Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint and petition with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, Stalin's Peasants analyses peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village. Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between transformationally-minded Communists and traditionally-minded peasants over the terms of collectivization: a struggle of opposing practices, not a struggle in which either side clearly articulated its position. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village, exploring questions of authority and leadership, feuds, denunciations, rumors, and changes in religious observance. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the "Potemkin village" created by Soviet propagandists. In the Potemkin village, happy peasants clustered around a kolkhoz (collective farm) tractor, praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the real Russian village of the 1930s, as we learn from Soviet political police reports, sullen and hungry peasants described collectivization as a "second serfdom," cursed all Communists, and blamed Stalin personally for their plight. Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in studies of the Stalinist period-a richly-documented social history told from the traumatic experiences of the long-suffering underclass of peasants. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia.
Prisons in context
Introduction (Roy D. King and Mike Maguire) 1. Can Prisons be Legitimate: Penal Politics, Privatisation, and the Timeliness of an Old Idea (Richard Sparks) 2. Public Imprisonment by Private Means: The Re-emergence of Private Prisons and Jails in the United Kingdom, and Australia (Douglas C. McDonald) 3. The New Penology and Politics in Crisis: The Italian Case (Massimo Pavarini) 4. Russian Prisons after Perestroika: End of the Gulag? (Roy D. King) 5. The Growth of Imprisonment in California (Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins) 6. Racial Disproportion in US Prisons (Michael Tonry) 7. Cross-national Imprisonment Rates: Limitations of Method and Possible Conclusions (Ken Pease) 8. Study Women's Imprisonment? Or Anyone Else's? An Indefinite Article (Pat Carlen) 9. Inspecting Prisons: The View from Strasbourg (Rod Morgan and Malcolm Evans).