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. …
Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin
Introduction Part I. The First Phase: 1. The design of an experiment 2. Criminal justice under NEP Part II. The Years of Collectivization: 3. Campaign justice 4. The decline of legality Part III. The Conservative Shift: 5. The return to tradition: Vyshinsky and legal order 6. Stalin's criminal policy: from tradition to excess 7. Criminal justice and the great terror 8. The reconstruction of criminal justice 9. Preparing for war: the criminalization of labour infractions Part IV. The Stalinist Synthesis: 10. Moulding legal officials for careers 11. The dynamics of Stalinist justice: bureaucratic and political pressures on legal officials 12. The distortion and limits of criminal policy Conclusion.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of