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. …
“The Camp Is Not a Resort”: The Campaign against Privileges in the Soviet Gulag, 1957–61
"Rulers change, the Archipelago remains." (1) Such was the final judgment of the preeminent Gulag chronicler, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after his brief description of the Soviet penal system under Nikita Khrushchev. At first glance such a broad condemnation seems counterintuitive, in light of the well-known reforms of the mid-1950s that freed the vast majority of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, noticeably ameliorated conditions in the camps, and put in place mechanisms to ensure that neither the staggering numbers of prisoners nor the terrible abuses of the Stalinist Gulag would return. Yet Solzhenitsyn's primary contention is that after these "pitiless blows of liberalism staggered and rocked the camp system" during the mid-1950s, "the whole cast of practical workers" that staffed the Gulag, fearful of their jobs, fought zealously to restore the Gulag to its former, repressive state. (2) The initial reforms of 1953-56 were followed by potent ground-up counterreforms, most notably the 1961 statute governing corrective-labor colonies and prisons; and as a result, living conditions for prisoners in the 1960s rivaled those of the late Stalinist period. Solzhenitsyn is not alone in making such claims. A number of scholars and memoirists have echoed the view that, in the words of Anne Applebaum, "the neo-Stalinists had triumphed," and that, according to Anatoly Marchenko, the Soviet penal institutions of the 1960s were "just as horrific as in Stalin's time." (3) A few historians, however, have recently questioned, at least in part, Solzhenitsyn's characterization of the conservative counterreforms in the penal system of the early 1960s. Marc Elie, in a brief account of "the conservative shift" in the penal sphere, for instance, ignores Solzhenitsyn's mid-level Gulag officials, portraying the counterreforms rather as a product of the struggle between high-level "reformists" and "conservatives." Moreover, he sees the reaction occurring because of a brief crime wave in 1959--60, which conservatives blamed on the recent "laxity in repression" in the Gulag. (4) Thus the motive was not the restoration of jobs and privileges but rather anger at the criminal actions of ungrateful and unreformed released prisoners. Miriam Dobson, by contrast, finds the press and especially the general public to be influential actors in shaping national debates. More specifically, she posits that the reeducation theme of the mid-1950s "failed to resonate" with the broader Soviet population, and as a result, Khrushchev and his peers in the late 1950s turned instead to optimism for the future as a ruling technique, a trope that was inseparably coupled with intolerance for those unwilling to move forward toward communism. (5) There are important reasons for investigating the transformation of the Gulag under Khrushchev: not only does it reveal much about the nature of Soviet society and officialdom in the 1950s and early 1960s as they grappled with the legacies of Stalinism, but the penal system that Khrushchev left behind when ousted in 1964 continued without substantive alteration until the fall of the Soviet Union and then persisted beyond 1991 in the successor states. (6) Certainly the subject deserves far more attention than it has received, a lacuna this essay remedies only partially. Indeed, the present work makes no claim to providing a comprehensive narrative of penal reform under Khrushchev but instead focuses on the motivations for creating harsher living conditions in the early 1960s, the specific policies that ensued, and the result of these reforms. As Sohhenitsyn rightly notes, Stalin's death was followed by a period of theoretical and substantive "liberalization" in regard to inmates' living conditions that persisted into the late 1950s. Likewise, there certainly was a campaign that began in the late 1950s and culminated in 1961 to make living conditions in the Gulag harsher. Moreover, there were many continuities between the Gulag of 1950 and that of the early 1960s that would seem to support Sohhenitsyn's contention: the basic organization of camps and colonies remained relatively unchanged (barracks, barbed wire, guards); production by means of inmate labor remained a serious if not overriding concern for camp administrators; corruption continued unabated; stool pigeons and trusties were always being recruited; ethnic distinctions among prisoner groups remained, and so forth. …
Hill country sheep production. I. The influence of age, flock, and year on some components of reproduction rate in Romney and Border Leicester × Romney ewes.
Data from 7,091 straightbred Romney and Border Leicester × Romney ewes grazed at the Whatawhata Hill Country Research Station over the period 1959 to 1967 have been used to obtain estimates of flock and age-of-ewe effects on reproduction rate and its components and of year-to-year variation. The ewes were from six groups: a Romney control (RCR) flock, a Romney flock in which ewes were mated either to Romney (RER) or to Border Leicester rams (REB), and flocks of first-cross (F1), second-cross (F2), and third-cross (F3) Border Leicester × Romney ewes mated to first-cross Border Leicester × Romney rams. The ewes' ages at lambing varied from 2 to 5 years and no selection was practised. The ratio of number of lambs weaned per ewe present at lambing increased from the RCR (0.84) to the F1 (1.07), then declined with interbreeding to the F2 (0.92) and further to the F3 (0.87) ewes. Similar changes were evident for the percentage of ewes lambing, of multiple births, and of lambs surviving to weaning. Over...