The History Of The Gulag: From Collectivization...
The growth of the penal system was part of Stalin's successive campaigns to break the Soviet population to his will. The penal system's history has been known in broad outlines, but lacked precise data until the archives of the Communist Party and the central GULAG administration became available. Oleg Khlevniuk, from the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), uses these now public internal documents to trace the GULAG expansion from 1929 to 1941 in The History of the GULAG: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. He describes the circumstances that led the Stalinist regime to prefer camps over other forms of forced labor, including evidence that shows Stalin's responsibility for the terror and repression. He uses regulations and reports to show that while the penal system intended to isolate and exploit (not exterminate), its brutality and disregard for human life cost the lives of many. From his deep knowledge of the archives, he adds precision to the discussion about the overall scale of Stalinist repression during these years, and the likely number of dead. His book adds to the ongoing debate among genocide scholars: Was Stalin's GULAG a genocidal act or not?
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization...
"What a long, extraordinary process digging into the deepest secrets of the Gulag has been. Now, here is its history, fully, factually, and humanly effected for the present day by Oleg Khlevniuk."- Robert Conquest, from the forward The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy.
Khlevniuk argues persuasively that the Stalinist penal camps created in the 1930s were essentially different from previous camps. He shows that political motivations and paranoia about potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than the economic incentive of slave labor did. And he offers powerful evidence that the Great Terror was planned centrally and targeted against particular categories of the population. Khlevniuk makes a signal contribution to Soviet history with this exceptionally informed and balanced view of the Gulag.
"What a long, extraordinary process digging into the deepest secrets of the Gulag has been. Now, here is its history, fully, factually, and humanly effected for the present day by Oleg Khlevniuk."- Robert Conquest, from the forward The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy.
"What a long, extraordinary process digging into the deepest secrets of the Gulag has been. Now, here is its history, fully, factually, and humanly effected for the present day by Oleg Khlevniuk."-Robert Conquest, from the foreword
Annals of Communism, Yale's acclaimed series, adds another major documentary history to its list. More than 100 documents from the Russian archives are translated, and interspersed with Russian historian Khlevniuk's extensive analysis. The result is a fascinatingly detailed depiction of that horrific symbol of the 20th century, the Soviet prison camp system. Khlevniuk argues that the gulag as it developed from 1929 was a new creation, a specifically Stalinist invention. He weaves together personal accounts by victims with the far more numerous documents written by Soviet bureaucrats. The documents provide surprises and revelations. In the early years, prisoners petitioned and went on strike for improvements in their conditions, sometimes successfully. Officials wrote innumerable memoranda documenting the abysmal food supplies and sanitary conditions and the excessive brutalities of camp guards. At the same time, production derived from forced labor became a major element of the Soviet economy. Attempts to ameliorate the camp situation were thwarted by the ineptitude of the Soviet bureaucracy and the severe crises of the 1930s. Khlevniuk demonstrates how every tightening of the overall political situation, such as the onset of forced collectivization and then the Great Terror, led to a worsening of conditions within the camps. Ultimately, the camps were "almost [the] direct reflection" of the Soviet system and the outcome of decisions made by Stalin and a small group around him. This is an excellent companion to Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer-winning Gulag: A History. 39 illus. (Nov.)
Because the party's legitimacy rested on the basic correctness of its ideology, failures in practical policy were never attributed to ideology itself. To maintain the party's ideological authority, religion had to be condemned outright, and history periodically revised to match the current party line. Books and magazines viewed as no longer politically correct were removed from libraries. Scientists, artists, poets, and others, including many who did not think of themselves as dissidents but whose work appeared critical of Soviet life, were systematically persecuted and even prosecuted. Often they were declared either enemies of the state and imprisoned, or insane and committed to punitive mental hospitals.
On April 26, the city's anonymity vanished forever when, during a test at 1:21 A.M., the No. 4 reactor exploded and released thirty to forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world first learned of history's worst nuclear accident from Sweden, where abnormal radiation levels were registered at one of its nuclear facilities.
The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy. Khlevniuk argues persuasively that the Stalinist penal camps created in the 1930s were essentially different from previous camps. He shows that political motivations and paranoia about potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than the economic incentive of slave labor did. And he offers powerful evidence that the Great Terror was planned centrally and targeted against particular categories of the population. Khlevniuk makes a signal contribution to Soviet history with this exceptionally informed and balanced view of the Gulag.
Some of this may be hyperbolic. Nonetheless, it is once again clear that Solzhenitsyn believes that the individual, armed with Truth and Right alone, can move tyrants, subvert power, and alter the course of history. In his own life this conviction has no doubt helped summon the courage to cop from the most formidable challenges. But it is of dubious value for understand history, especially the history of modern totalitarian societies exemplified by Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Solzhenitsyn's hypothesis of effective individual resistance seems fanciful, difficult to entertain in the face of the systems of terror devised by Stalin and Hitler. He himself provides a contradictory, wholly persuasive account: "They threw out a general dragnet and arrested in accordance with assigned quota figures, yes, but every person who objected publicly they grabbed that very minute! And it turned into a selection on the basis of soul. . ."(Solzhenitsyn's italics).
Did the Gulag have a biopolitics? The linked concepts of"biopower" and "biopolitics" were sketched by MichelFoucault and have been taken up by historians of medicine and the bodyexamining diverse historical contexts. (1) It may sound counterintuitive tosuggest that the Soviet forced-labor camp system operated policies (a"biopolitics") to manage the quality and character of life at thelevel of the individual and at the collective level of the populations housedin the camp. The scale of mortality in the camps was extraordinary,apparently belying any official concern about prisoner health. Despite a lackof agreement over the precise numbers of prisoners lost to malnutrition,exhaustion through labor, disease, and violence, the death toll in the campswas very high, especially during the World War II and famine years. (2)Nevertheless, medical facilities existed in the Gulag to monitor andostensibly to improve the physical condition of prisoners, and the work ofthese institutions was framed by regulations and norms that merit systematicscrutiny. Declassification and scholarly publication of Gulag administrativearchives have given us a previously inaccessible view of what campadministrators said and did, and a majority of scholars now accept thesedocuments as a flawed but credible record of Gulag practices (including thoseof concealment and dissimulation). (3) Careful reading from a criticalperspective can help us assess what these bosses and the doctors who workedfor them thought they were doing with prisoner labor. Understanding thehistory of medicine in the camps begins with a close examination of officialrationales and actions. (4) 041b061a72