Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag

38 Pages·0.41 MB·English

by  Brown K.

Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag
Brown, Kate.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume
8, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 67-103 (Review)
Published by Slavica Publishers
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2007.0001
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri/summary/v008/8.1brown.html
Access Provided by York University at 10/15/11 5:06PM GMT
Review Forum: History of the Stalinist Gulag
Out of Solitary Confinement
The History of the Gulag
Kate Brown
Iu. N. Afanas´ev et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920kh–
pervaia polovina 1950kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov, 7 vols. [History of the
Stalinist Gulag: The End of the 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s. A
Collection of Documents]. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–5. ISBN 5824306044
(set). Individual titles and editors for each volume in notes.
Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great
Terror. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo. 464 pp. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005. ISBN 0300092849. $45.00.
Tomas Kizny, Gulag: Life and Death inside Soviet Concentration Camps.
496 pp., illus., maps. Richmond Hill, Ont.: Firefly Books, 2004. ISBN
1552979644. $69.95.
The arrests were admittedly indiscriminate and designed to inspire terror
and disorientation. Some were taken off the street. Others were surprised in
their beds in late-night roundups. One man was detained simply because he
had a long beard, which suggested he might be a radical Muslim cleric. Once
in the detention center, the detainees were led into a special room where they
were told to face the wall and assume stress positions. Guards took turns
watching to make sure no one slept or lay down, for days on end if need be,
I am grateful for the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American
Council for the Society of Learning, and to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
(UMBC), for research support. I greatly benefited from discussions of versions of this article
with Jennifer Klein and Francine Hirsch at the Council of European Studies annual con-
ference in Chicago in 2006. I wish to thank especially Marjoleine Kars, Jochen Hellbeck,
Michael David-Fox, Lynne Viola, and David Shearer for their constructive criticisms and
helpful comments.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, 1 (Winter 2007): 67–103.
68 KATE BROwN
until the detainees were willing to testify. The most resistant detainees were
beaten while handcuffed or tied. At times, officers beat them to the point of
“fanatical cruelty.” One guard, particularly enjoying himself, humiliated the
detainees by forcing them to dance, “cheering” up those who danced poorly
with jabs from a sharply pointed stick. Another investigator smeared the
detainees’ heads with glue, and in winter forced them to “bathe” in a cold
shower. when beatings induced death, prison-appointed medical doctors
wrote up fictive medical reports. Since the detainees had not been officially
charged, family members seeking information about their loved ones lined
up outside the prison where the muffled cries of the beaten detainees slipped
from the walls. Since most of the guards and interrogators did not know the
native languages of the detained Muslims, confessions were often creatively
constructed; in other words, investigators made them up. Subsequent inves-
tigations found that over one-third of the sentenced were innocent of any
crime at all. Of course, this activity was not sanctioned by law. Investigators
later looking into the abuses at the prison cited the articles of the Constitution
that guaranteed “personal inviolability” and habeas corpus.1
Lest the reader mistake this account for a description of abuses in
American prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, I hasten to correct that
impression. This account of prison abuse derives from a Soviet investigation
of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and Gulag officials in
Turkmenistan in 1939. I came across the records reading for this review essay
in the seven-volume document collection Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga and Oleg
Khlevniuk’s History of the Gulag. Since, as Senator Dick Durbin knows well
(and paid for with his tears) there can be no comparison in current American
culture of the monstrous and singular cruelties of the Gulag with American
practices against civilians identified as “enemy combatants,” I rush to make
this qualification.2 The Gulag stands alone as signifier of senseless state re-
pression, lawlessness, and cruelty.
Durbin cribbed the phrase “a Gulag of our time” from Amnesty
International’s 2005 report. He also quoted from Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) accounts of prisoners held in chambers of extreme heat or
cold, chained naked to the floor without food and water, defecating on them-
selves, beaten, and forced to dance, lick their shoes and body parts, crawl
and bark like dogs.3 well after the abuses were made public, Vice President
1 S. V. Mironenko and Nicolas werth, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: Massovye repressii
v SSSR (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004): 340–59.
2 On 14 June 2005, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois denounced Guantánamo as the
“Gulag of our times” on the Senate floor. His speech was followed by a rush of demands that
Durbin apologize for his “attacks on America’s military.” Durbin withdrew his comments in
a tearful address a few weeks later.
3 Durbin quoted the following from the FBI report: “On a couple of occasions, I entered
interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with
OUT OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT 69
Dick Cheney denied any mistreatment of detainees at Guantánamo. He
said the detainees “have been well treated, treated humanely and decently.”
“Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment,” he added. “But if you
trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody
who had been inside and released to their home country and now are ped-
dling lies about how they were treated.”4
with his bald-faced denial of torture, Cheney could not have better il-
lustrated how a breath of the Gulag might just emanate from Guantánamo.
His performance mimicked that of Maksim Gor´kii, who several months
after smiling broadly for a photo in front of the notorious Solovetskii Labor
Camp, lied with sanctimony in refuting reports of Soviet camp abuses. The
reports had triggered a boycott of Soviet timber products in the west, and
Soviet leaders led a media counter-offensive. In an article published in Pravda
on 5 March 1931, Gor´kii called convict labor “a petty, foul slander” aimed
at economically isolating and weakening the USSR. “The Soviet regime,”
he fibbed, “does not employ convict labor even in prisons, where illiterate
criminals have to study and where peasants enjoy the right to leave for their
villages and families during the agricultural season” (Khlevniuk, 28–29). It
seems that when a state goes to the trouble of sanctioned, systemwide tor-
ture of civilians for purposes of political control, government officials do not
willingly own up to these practices. In fact, those who point out the fact of
abuse are discredited as slanderers, “peddling lies” and ultimately abetting
the enemy.
The bewildering fact is, despite the official denials, we know of Soviet and
American abuses of prisoners precisely because investigators from the NKVD,
United State Political Directorate (OGPU), FBI, and U.S. Army described
the crimes in appalling detail. FBI and NKVD agents inspected prisons with
cameras and notebooks in hand, recording testimonies from prisoners-turned-
witnesses, noting the bruises and lacerations and vacant stares of men and
women who had been doctors, civil servants, lawyers, and farmers. They be-
held the blood stains on the walls. They stepped into and then quickly out of
the dark, dank isolation chambers smelling of excrement and human misery.
no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves and had been
left there for 18–24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned
down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was
shaking with cold.... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making
the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost
unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally
pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the tempera-
ture unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had
been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on
the tile floor” (Dan Balz, “Durbin Defends Guantanamo Comments,” Washington Post, 17
June 2005).
4 “Cheney Offended by Amnesty International Report,” Associated Press, 31 May 2005.
70 KATE BROwN
They glimpsed the battered corpses. They then wrote all this horror down for
posterity. why, when government spokesmen were so adamant in their deni-
als, did inspectors write about the abuses in the first place, and then in such
magnificent detail? who among the leaders who ordered torture would then
sanction an investigation into the practices and results of torture?
In the American case, the answer comes readily to hand. The United
States has a free press, an open judicial apparatus, and watchdog organi-
zations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross to look out for the
rights of those unfairly treated. Abuses in the American case were and are an
anomaly, and the American system of transparent governance perseveres as
a democracy because of precisely these kinds of mechanisms that can locate
and expose abuses to the public so as to correct them. If this answer does
not suffice, other, somewhat contradictory answers justify the persistence of
extreme measures in extraordinary times: America is at war, and terrorists
need to be dealt with using a firm hand. According to President Bush, ter-
rorists are “cowards,” “barbarians,” and “evil-doers” who hide in the shadows
and aspire to world domination.5 The secretive and desperate nature of this
enemy thus justifies the suspension of laws, abroad and even at home, where
Human Rights watch estimates that 50,000 people are being held indefi-
nitely without charges.6
But what of the Soviet case? One cannot speak of the Soviet system
as either transparent or democratic. There was, admittedly, the Moscow
Society of the Red Cross, which was renamed in 1922 the Society for Aid to
Political Prisoners. This society, chaired by E. P. Peshkova, Gor´kii’s wife,
visited prisoners and advocated for them until Nikolai Ezhov closed the or-
ganization in 1937. In 1931, when political prisoners went on a hunger strike
in the Verkhne-Ural´sk political prison, they sent a list of demands to the
Collegium of the Gulag of the OGPU. Their demands included judicial pro-
ceedings against abusive guards; access to more light, air, space, clothing,
and bedding; the right to collective representation; an expanded library; sub-
scriptions to foreign newspapers; monkey bars in the courtyard; better medi-
cal care; and dental prostheses. Some of these demands, including a court
martial for several abusive guards, were met.7 Unlike hunger strikers recently
5 See the transcript of President George w. Bush’s 2005 Veteran’s Day Speech, New York
Times, 11 November 2005.
6 Before 11 September, there were 20,000 people in U.S. prisons held without charges. See
Human Rights watch, Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Jail in the U.S. (New York:
Human Rights watch, 1998); and Reed Brody, The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Human
Rights watch, June 2004), as cited in Michelle Brown, “ ‘Setting the Conditions’ for Abu
Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad,” American Quarterly 57, 3 (2005): 985.
7 For a list of documents generated by these organizations, see S. V. Mironenko, V. A. Kozlov,
and A. V. Dobrovskaia, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 7: Sovetskaia repressivno-karatel´naia
politika i penetentsiarnaia sistema v materialakh Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii
OUT OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT 71
in Guantánamo, these hunger strikers were not force-fed.8 The early 1930s,
however, were still the good years, if one can call them that, of the Soviet
penal system (Khlevniuk, 53). By the late 1930s, Soviet leaders arbitrarily
arrested thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then millions of their
own citizens in peacetime conditions. They tortured these prisoners soundly.
Surely there is no justification for torture without war? Clearly Soviet leaders
did not order investigations into abuses in order to clean up the system and
make it humane?
Yet, from the inception until the end of the Gulag, Soviet officials inves-
tigated official abuse in camps and issued reports drenched in moral oppro-
brium.9 The investigative commissions most often ended their reports with a
list of actions aimed at ending the abuses in the prisons and camps.10 After the
reports, conditions might improve for six months or a year, or they might not.
Prison wardens might be punished and become prison wards themselves, or
they might stay on their jobs. Regardless of the outcome, the practice of illegal
detention and abuse carried on decade after decade. In the American case,
despite the headlines of 2004–5 and the public trial of the handful of army
(Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), 337–41. For the list of demands and the OGPU commission’s
response, see Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 48–53.
8 In January 2006, military officials at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay broke a
wave of hunger strikes by force-feeding detainees while they were strapped into “restraint
chairs” for hours at a time (Tim Golden, “U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel
Says,” New York Times, 20 May 2006: A1).
9 Among many examples, see “Raport osoboupolnomochennogo pri Kollegii OGPU V. D.
Del´dmana zamestiteliu predsedatelia OGPU G. G. Iagode o rezul´tatakh proverki anonim-
nogo zaiavleniia o narusheniiakh zakonnosti v Arkhangel´skom otdelenii Upravleniia sever-
nykh lagerei osobogo naznacheniia,” no later than 16 December 1929; “Raport byvshego
nachal´nika 3-go otdeleniia spetsial´nogo otdela OGPU I. G. Filippova zamestiteliu predse-
datelia OGPU G. G. Iagode o polozhenii v Solovetskikh lageriakh,” no earlier than 6 May
1930, as reproduced in N. I. Vladimirtsev and N. V. Petrov, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga,
2: Karatel´naia sistema: Struktura i kadri (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 71–76, 84–86; “Iz
otcheta Komissii OGPU po obsledovaniiu rezhima i byta zakliuchennykh Solovetskikh
lagerei,” no earlier than 20 April 1930; “Iz informatsionnogo obzora No. 1 nachal´nika
ULAG L. I. Kogana,” 6 November 1930; “Iz stenogrammy vystupleniia zamestitelia nar-
koma iustitsii A. Ia. Vishinskogo,” 13 January 1933; “Prikaz NKVD SSR no. 0072 ‘o bor´be
s faktami izdevatel´skogo otnosheniia k zakliuchennym v ispravitel´no-trudovykh lageriakh,
tiur´makh i koloniiakh NKVD,’ ” 17 February 1936, as reproduced in A. B. Bezborodov and
V. M. Khrustalev, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4: Naselenie Gulaga, chislennost´ i usloviia
soderzhaniia (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 139–46, 147–49, 150–53, 156–57; “Materialy i pe-
repiska ob otmene po protestu prokurora SSSR A. Ia. Vyshinskogo tsirkuliara nachal´nika
Otdela trudovykh kolonii NKVD SSSR Perepelkina ot 23 iiulia 1935 za 886503, protivo-
rechashchego deistvuiushchemu zakonodatel´stvu,” as cited in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 7:
44. A substantial part of the evidence of life in camps and special settlements in Khlevniuk’s
book derives from this type of whistle-blowing report (History of the Gulag, 101, 111, 123,
78–79, 79–80).
10 “Iz otcheta Komissii OGPU po obsledovaniiu rezhima i byta zakliuchennykh lagerei,” no
later than April 1930, as reproduced in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4: 139–46.
72 KATE BROwN
privates court-martialed for abuse at Abu Ghraib, army and CIA authorities
still detain people without charges, apply physical pressure, and employ stress
positions. Despite the condemnation of international human rights organiza-
tions, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon continue to insist they
have a legal right to forgo the Convention against Torture.11 CIA rendition
squads apparently continue to kidnap civilians in European countries, drug
them, swathe them in diapers, and transport them thousands of miles to third
countries where practices resembling torture are normalized. The methods
for detention and interrogation used by investigators in Iraq and Cuba derive,
reportedly, from CIA manuals issued in 1963 that envisioned not a Muslim
extremist as detainee, but a Soviet agent.12 In other words, to “Gittmoize” is
a new verb applied to old practices. Abu Ghraib is business as usual, or, as
Michelle Brown phrases it, “terror as usual.”13
So why, if high-placed officials sanctioned illegal detention and torture,
vehemently denying the abuse publicly, would they then order detailed in-
vestigations into abuses that continue despite official condemnation? The
student of Soviet history would note that the report I describe above dates
from 1939, when Stalin and Beria called a halt to the Great Purges and in
turn arrested and charged thousands of NKVD officials for following orders
issued in 1937 to arrest by quota in a series of broad and discriminatory cat-
egories. The general wisdom is that after ordering a mass purge, Stalin then
sought to erase the evidence of his crimes by executing the assassins. The
problem with this theory is that the investigations into official abuses used
to sentence the 7,000–8,000 NKVD agents guilty of abuse covered nothing
up but rather exposed the crimes of the Gulag in a paper trail as long as the
Belomor Canal.14
In answering this question—why tell all, when it is so incriminating?—I
found answers in an essay by Jacqueline Rose, who in turn was ruminating
on Sigmund Freud. She argues that at times it becomes difficult for citizens
to distinguish between the “totalitarian” or “rogue” states and one’s own,
which employs the same practices as the enemy in order to annihilate it. She
writes:
11 Golden, “U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel Says.”
12 See Mark Danner, “The Logic of Torture,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2004:
70–74. Danner claims the abusive interrogation of prisoners abroad derives from the 1963
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) manual KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, es-
pecially the chapter “The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources.”
A later version of the manual describes the need to create a “debility–dependence–dread
state.”
13 Michelle Brown, “ ‘Setting the Conditions’ for Abu Ghraib,” 973–97.
14 The Abu Ghraib scandal, too, has generated voluminous records—over 15,000 pages of
documents (ibid., 975).
OUT OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT 73
Today the citizen is again faced with the dawning recognition—the “horror,”
to use Freud’s term—that “the state has forbidden to the individual the prac-
tice of wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires
to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.” ... A belligerent state not only breaks
the law in relation to the enemy; it also violates the principles that should hold
between itself and its citizens. “A belligerent state,” Freud writes, “permits itself
every such misdeed, every act of violence as would disgrace the individual.” No
surprise, then, that faced with the disclosure of such misdeeds as those at Abu
Ghraib, the state will rush to return them to the citizen precisely as “individual
disgrace.”15
Rose adds that a state’s denial and repression of its crimes is not only
central to the urge to scapegoat, but that repression might point to a larger
concern, that of projecting the crimes of the self outward. we can see this
process clearly in the Stalinist regime. In 1930, A. I. Rykov, chairman of
the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK USSR), directed Gulag officials
to conceal the fact of prison camp labor in Soviet ports, and Karl Radek
ordered a media campaign in Pravda to expose labor conditions in capitalist
countries and slavery in colonies of England and France (Khlevniuk, 29).
Not surprisingly, the subsequent Soviet press descriptions of colonial slavery
mirrored accounts of brutal exploitation in Soviet camps. For Pravda report-
ers, impressions of brutality and enslaved labor were close at hand.
Likewise, moral outrage has fueled the bulk of western scholarship on the
Gulag. Senator Durbin was driven to tears because the consensus in American
newspapers was that the Gulag cannot be compared to American prisons but
can only shed light on practices of totalitarian states of the extreme Right or
Left.16 Soviet leaders, some editorialists added, imprisoned and tortured their
own citizens in the Gulag (as well as a fair number of foreigners), whereas
American prisons abroad and Immigration and Nationalization Service de-
tention centers at home deprive only non-U.S. citizens of rights. This argu-
ment is persuasive, if one bypasses the principles of universal human rights
15 Jacqueline Rose, “In Our Present-Day white Christian Culture,” London Review of Books,
8 July 2004.
16 The Washington Post editorial page argued, “Its [the Gulag’s] modern equivalent is not
Guantánamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of
prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on
Stalinist lines; or China’s laogai , the true size of which isn’t even known; or, until recently,
the prisons of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq” (“ ‘American Gulag,’ ” Washington Post, 26 May 2005:
A26). For more opinions in the same vein, see James C. Robbins, “Got Gulag?” National
Review Online, 9 June 2005; and numerous newspaper reports, including Jonathan Gurwitz,
“Guantánamo’s Gulag Label Is a Gross Exaggeration,” San Antonio Express-News, 15 June
2005: 7B; Barton Hinkle, “Guantnamo [sic] Apologists, Critics Have Both Gone Off the
Deep End,” Richmond Times Dispatch, 27 May 2005: A13. The editors of Istoriia stalinskogo
Gulaga compare the totalitarian nature of the Gulag to that of Iran, as well as to Latin
American and Asian military dictatorships (Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: 46).
74 KATE BROwN
sanctified in the Geneva Conventions and the Helsinki Accords and upheld
so vigorously by American officials during the Cold war.
Despite all the denials of the Gulag metaphor, as I read through the
newly published seven-volume collection of documents Istoriia stalinskogo
Gulaga and then studied the daily headlines and the International Red Cross
and Amnesty International reports, I grew disoriented and confused, as if
someone had thrown a hood over my head and prodded me down long pas-
sages of grim detail. A queasy repetition played out across the pages of texts
written in 1935 and 2005. In Soviet documents, guards suffering from “acute
edginess” set dogs on prisoners, drank “voluminously,” beat with sticks and
rifle butts, ordered prisoners into solitary confinement stripped naked and
on shortened rations. The headlines swarming from newspapers describe
U.S. soldiers surprising civilians in late-night searches, detaining them in the
thousands without charges, and handing them over to prison guards who set
dogs on prisoners, beat and humiliated them, and forced them to strip naked
and stay awake for long periods deprived of food, light, water, and medical
services, all to “soften them up” for interrogation.
The whole nightmare of Iraqi society occupied and subject to a policing
system leaves us with a new set of questions as we approach the history of the
Gulag. why did we not come to Senator Durbin’s aid? who should know
better than we historians of the Soviet Union whether the headlines of the
past few years resonate with chapters from the Gulag? whether we agree or
not with Amnesty International’s metaphor, is it not important for profes-
sional historians to weigh in? what sort of repression lingers behind the
United States’ continued fixation on “totalitarian empires”? why was it so
easy for President Bush to openly recast the Cold war enemy into the current
enemy in the war on Terror?17 why was this grossly simplified migration of
images so easy to pull off?
I fear that we sat silently on the sidelines because not far from the surface
of American histories of the Soviet Union is a self-congratulatory subtext on
the righteousness of the American way. whether we intend to or not, our
histories of the Soviet past are often read as implicit comparisons with the
U.S. government which is perceived, in direct contrast to the Soviet Union,
as bound by laws and by the principles of transparent governance, universal
equality, and civil rights; overseen by a watchdog free press; and fortified
with a free market economy, practitioners of which, in the pursuit of profits,
17 In his Veteran’s Day speech of 2005, Bush said the contemporary enemy was similar to the
Cold war enemy of his father’s generation. This enemy, too, is ideologically fanatic, seeking
to dominate the world, working in concert with other ideologues across the globe, and bent
on annihilating American freedom and prosperity. See the transcript in New York Times, 11
November 2005.
OUT OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT 75
rarely have time to exploit or discriminate.18 This is, however, an image of
American history that few historians of the United States would recognize.
If one relinquishes the singularity of the Gulag, one can also surrender
the Gulag as the emblem of a particularly Soviet repression. Perhaps it is
time, in these days when moral opprobrium is ever harder to drum up, to
take a giant step backward, so as to acquire perspective on the Gulag and
place it more squarely in the panorama of the history of unfree and restricted
labor, as well as in the context of the development of the industrial welfare
state. Soviet polemicists sought to relativize the Gulag by fingering colonial-
ism and slavery, but as I pointed out above, they did so to externalize the en-
slaving and colonial qualities of Soviet society. I do not wish to recycle those
arguments in this essay but rather to shed light comparatively on the Gulag
in order to integrate it more fully into the larger history of the Soviet Union,
a line of questioning that then might help elucidate greater global develop-
ments of the 20th century. with a broader scope in our sights, we can return
to the Gulag as metaphor in American society to reflect on its relevance. My
hope is that by considering seriously the image of the Gulag, we might be
able to curb what Freud would identify as repression of the “rogue” qualities
of our own state.
The Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga documentary collection is a good place
to start this re-evaluation of the Gulag. The volumes are based on the hold-
ings of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The collec-
tion is divided according to topics: Mass Repressions in the USSR (volume
1); The Penal System: Structure and Personnel (volume 2); Economics of the
Gulag (volume 3); The Gulag Population: Structure, Numbers, and Living
Conditions (volume 4); Special Deportees in the USSR (volume 5); Prison
Uprisings, Riots, and Strikes (volume 6); and, finally, The History of the Soviet
Repressive-Penal Policy and Penal System in the Holdings of the State Archive
of the Russian Federation: Annotated Guide to the Files (volume 7). Each
volume contains a useful introduction that elucidates the kind of materials
in the collection, the reason for the selection, and the editors’ interpretation
of the documents. The editorial board of the collection and of the separate
volumes tried to select documents, among the millions that concerned the
Gulag, which told the most comprehensive story. They also tried to use
documents that had not been published before. I had worked in several
18 Martin Malia noted, “western observers in talking about Communist Russia were almost
always talking, if only indirectly, about western problems and politics as well.” Malia went
on to illustrate his observation in his subsequent discussion of socialism as an aberration of
democracy and negation of capitalist markets. The standard of comparison in his narrative is
implicitly the U.S. system. Socialism is an “abnormal order” because it concentrates “politi-
cal and economic power in one set of hands.” The “normal order,” against which socialism
fails, is a “market democracy” (Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,
1917–1991 [New York: Free Press, 2004], ix–x, 507).