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The Gulag After Stalin
In The Gulag after Stalin, Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin’s death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for t...
Rethinking the Gulag
The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers "identities"—the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have ...
After the Gulag
"From 1929 to 1958, hundreds of thousands of prisoners and exiles from across the Soviet Union were sent to the harsh yet resource-rich Komi Republic. When the Soviet Union collapsed, former prisoners sent their autobiographies to Komi's local branches of the anti-Stalinist Memorial Society and history museums.Utilizing these previously unavailable personal records, alongside newspapers, photographs, interviews, and other non-state archival sources, After the Gulag sheds new light not only on how former prisoners experienced life after release but also how they laid the foundations for the future commemoration of Komi's dark past. Bound by a "camp brotherhood," they used informal social netw...
The Gulag Doctors
A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin’s Gulag—showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics—about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and “saved” a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin’s forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.
Political Survivors
In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their...
Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris
The Altai Republic in southern Siberia is renowned for excavations of frozen mummies from high-altitude burial sites. Less well-known is the fact that it hosts fallout zones for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Local inhabitants blame ‘evil spirits’ released by archaeological work and toxic fuel from rocket debris for their misfortunes. This book explores the divergent fates of such claims when confronted with state-fostered ‘rationalisms’ of science and governance.
The Gulag
A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century. It combined a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime. More than 25 million people passed through the Gulag from its creation in 1930 to its dismantling in the 1950s. By presenting both the everyday experiences of ordinary prisoners and the overall political and economic background of the system, The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction offers a succinct and comprehensive study of the Gulag and its legacy in the former USSR.
Showcasing the Great Experiment
Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, it reinterprets one of the great cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters of the twentieth century.
The Thaw
The period from Stalin’s death in 1953 to the end of the 1960s marked a crucial epoch in Soviet history. Though not overtly revolutionary, this era produced significant shifts in policies, ideas, language, artistic practices, daily behaviours, and material life. It was also during this time that social, cultural, and intellectual processes in the USSR began to parallel those in the West (and particularly in Europe) as never before. This volume examines in fascinating detail the various facets of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s, a period termed the ‘Thaw.’ Featuring innovative research by historical, literary, and film scholars from across the world, this book helps to answer fundamental questions about the nature and ultimate fortune of the Soviet order – both in its internal dynamics and in its long-term and global perspectives.
The Secret Police and the Soviet System
Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.
