Death and Redemption

The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society

Steven A. Barnes

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400838615
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive.
Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, Barnes shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. He takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. Barnes traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. Death and Redemption reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would reenter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.

Chapter 1

THE ORIGINS, FUNCTIONS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE GULAG

While Early Students of Soviet history certainly identified terror as perhaps the definitive characteristic of the Soviet polity, their abiding conviction that a sentence in the Gulag represented death inhibited serious study of life within the Gulag. Even for those few scholars who sought methodically to understand life in the Gulag, the camp was little more than a site of exploitation and inevitable death. While terror, and the Gulag as an integral part of that terror, found itself at the center of early conceptualizations of the Soviet experience, the prisoner was thoroughly marginalized from understandings of the revolutionary transformation of society.¹

Scholars of the Gulag have understood its emergence and role in the Soviet Union primarily in three distinct yet overlapping ways, emphasizing in turn the economic, the political, and the moral. While no scholar offers a monocausal explanation of the Gulag, they have typically placed particular stress on one of these factors. The economic understanding posits the Gulag as essentially a slave labor system emerging as a result of Stalin’s crash industrialization policies.² Even proponents of this approach understand its limitations. The camp system was far from economically efficient, even in the world of inefficient Soviet industry.³ Arrests occurred chaotically and inefficiently, catching camp administrators unaware and unprepared. Arrests were not limited to healthy young men who could withstand work in the Gulag’s harsh climates but also included women, children, the elderly, and invalids. Anne Applebaum, for instance, notes that the economic “illogic” of the mass arrests have led “many to conclude that arrests were carried out primarily to eliminate Stalin’s perceived enemies, and only secondarily to fill Stalin’s camps.” Like many others before her, Applebaum argues that the explanations are not “entirely mutually exclusive either. Stalin might well have intended his arrests both to eliminate enemies and to create slave laborers.”⁴ Nonetheless, she generally adopts the economic motive for understanding the Gulag. This book, a careful study of life inside the Gulag’s institutions, will show the limitations of the economic understanding of the Soviet penal system. Many aspects of Gulag administration on the day-to-day level belie any economic rationality, and point to the camps as penal institutions concerned with differentiating and evaluating their prisoners, with important secondary concerns about the economy.

The political understanding of the Gulag sees the system, in Robert Conquest’s classic formulation, as not primarily a means of economic exploitation but rather “politically efficient. They effectively isolated masses of potential troublemakers, and were a great disincentive to any sort of anti-Stalinist activity, or even talk.”⁵ Conquest’s portrayal of life in the camps amounts to a slow, steady march toward death. Prisoners were worked as hard as possible and given a precisely measured amount of food to guarantee that they would not survive. On this regimen they inevitably reached “the last stage in the camps,” when “debilitated to the degree that no serious work could any longer be got out of them, prisoners were put on sub-starvation rations and allowed to hang around the camp doing odd jobs until they died.”⁶ The labor camps, in this political understanding, were really “death” camps. Few made it out alive. As Conquest writes, “Releases were very rare, and survival until the post-Stalin amnesties rarer still. The length of sentence . . . made little difference. . . . Upon the expiration of a sentence, it was usual for prisoners to be called before a Special Section officer and given a few more years.”⁷ No doubt the camps were intended to remove those deemed unfit or dangerous from Soviet society, but with the benefit of archival access that was denied to scholars of Conquest’s generation, we know that substantial percentages of the Gulag population were released to return to Soviet society. What are we to make of these people? This book will carefully evaluate that question.

Finally, we come to the moral interpretation, which lies at the heart of the work that forms the foundation of Gulag studies: Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume “experiment in literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s work remains the most comprehensive available study of everyday life in the Gulag. The achievements of The Gulag Archipelago are perhaps more amazing today than when it was first published. Solzhenitsyn completed extensive research through oral history, circulated underground (samizdat) manuscripts, and prepared his lengthy texts despite the significant personal danger of doing so. Notwithstanding these limitations on Solzhenitsyn’s ability to work freely, his work remains unparalleled in the attempt to integrate an understanding of Gulag daily life into the broader context of Soviet and world history. No other work comes near the depth of his psychological probing of the Gulag experience.⁸ Even Applebaum’s more approachable catalog of Gulag suffering, though modeled on The Gulag Archipelago, pales in comparison to Solzhenitsyn’s multifaceted work.

Throughout the present study, I call on Solzhenitsyn’s insights extensively but cautiously. His work is problematic in some ways, particularly because it does not fall strictly in the genre of the historical monograph; rather, it is a combination of genres—documentary history, memoir, oral history, literature, and political-moral polemic. His sources and personal experience are especially valuable for their presentation of the prisoner’s view of life inside the corrective labor camps. Alternative sources confirm most of his conclusions about the living conditions in the camps.⁹ Nonetheless, his sources were less accurate in their speculations about the number and socioethnic makeup of the camp population.

The Gulag Archipelago, however, must be approached not just as a primary source but also as a work of history that stakes out a strong position on the moral significance of the Gulag. In Solzhenitsyn’s analysis, the spread of the Gulag represents the triumph of immorality cloaked in the justification of ideology.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. . . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.¹⁰

Ideology in The Gulag Archipelago is devoid of all constructive content. It lacks all relationship to ideas and worldviews, and is reduced to an empty “justification” for evildoing. For Solzhenitsyn, human nature contains an evil, dark side. Ideology effaces any checks on that evil, and the Gulag is the direct consequence.

In terms of reconciling the economic, political, and moral interpretations, the opening of the former Soviet archives has yielded mixed results to date. Much of the first decade of archival access was spent chasing the headline-gathering issue of the total number of victims, with little consideration for the role played by this system of victimization in the first place. Otherwise, scholars have often focused on extremely narrow questions, avoiding broad conceptual issues. The tide is fortunately beginning to turn.¹¹ Of particular significance is Oleg Khlevniuk’s The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror.¹² Simultaneously a monograph and a publication of documents, the book benefits from Khlevniuk’s careful and studied hand at working through the documents. Unfortunately the book limits itself to the 1930s, and because of its documentary nature does not seek to integrate memoirs into the story of the Gulag. Still, it makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the camp system and its relationship to the highest levels of Soviet power. Lynne Viola’s recent The Unknown Gulag: The lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements is the definitive study of the Gulag exile system in the 1930s.¹³ In particular, she reveals the critical role of collectivization and de-kulakization in the initial mass growth of the Gulag. A wide variety of local studies have appeared in recent years. While each is a significant study in its own right, none seek a full conceptualization of the entire Gulag system.¹⁴ Finally, a group of young scholars working under the leadership of the economist Paul Gregory has been poring over the Gulag archives in an effort to understand the economic operation of the camp system. This group’s insights, published in The Economics of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, have shed light on the inefficiencies and economic idiocy of the camp system.¹⁵ But the exclusive focus on economics is frequently too limited a framework to understand all the workings of the Gulag, as will be apparent throughout the present work.

To this day, the most important archival-based revelation remains a preliminary study by J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov. Their study showed, among other things, that the Gulag had a revolving door with approximately 20 percent of inmates released every year.¹⁶ The Gulag was not a death chamber, as at least some Gulag inmates were deemed fit for release. The ramifications of this discovery needed to be pursued. If some inmates were going to be released back into Soviet society, how was it decided who would be released and who would not, and what, if anything, were Soviet penal authorities doing to make their inmates ready for release?

The present study seeks to understand the role played by the Gulag in the construction of a socialist society and the new Soviet person. In this respect, I examine the ever-evolving relationship among Bolshevik ideology, historical circumstances, and the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag. Ideology in this case reflects Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the phenomenon. It refers to an idea (or a worldview) and the logic of its application to understanding and transforming the course of history.¹⁷ Ideology in this sense is neither pejorative nor artificial. It is not a false consciousness foisted on an exploited class by their exploiters to hide the very fact of their exploitation. It is not, as Solzhenitsyn would have it, an empty vessel that “gives evildoing its long-sought justification.” And it is not an ex post facto justification for institutions created and maintained for more utilitarian reasons.¹⁸ Ideology as used here is a vision of what a society should become and the nature of the methods to realize that vision. Ideology is not a road map, and it is not some genetic code that can be deciphered as the key to understand a regime’s every action. Ideology does not operate in a vacuum. It is more than some ethereal theory worked out by intellectuals and divorced from real life. Ideology operates in real historical circumstances. It shapes and is shaped by the responses to those circumstances. Ideology makes certain responses to historical circumstances more likely and other responses less likely.

While ideology played a significant role in the development of the Soviet Gulag, this book does not seek to reduce its explanatory framework to the “primacy of ideology” but rather attempts to take up Michael David-Fox’s call for “multi-dimensional conceptual frameworks” in the field of Soviet history.¹⁹ The Gulag, after all, cannot be understood and explained merely by reference to the tenets of Marxism or Bolshevism. The Gulag emerged as the concrete historical response to a number of contingent factors, including the tsarist experience with forced labor, the late nineteenth-century invention of the concentration camp, the crime and chaos of a period of revolution and civil war, and the attempt to industrialize rapidly a backward peasant economy to prepare it for an anticipated war with capitalist powers. Furthermore, Bolshevik ideology was not constant and unchanging. It changed over time. It was interpreted and expressed in different ways by different historical actors. Yet Bolshevik ideology performed a meaningful part in the Gulag’s development. Bolshevik visions—of creating a perfect society, struggle as the motive force of history, enemies blocking the path to and contaminating utopia, labor as the defining feature of humanity, and criminality as created by social conditions—all combined with historical circumstances to make the creation and mass expansion of the Gulag possible. Here in the Gulag, in this secretive and lethal corner of the Soviet enterprise, ideology mattered, and if it mattered here, it mattered everywhere.

In this book I refer frequently to Belomor, the celebratory volume on the early 1930s’ construction of the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal by Soviet concentration camp prisoners.²⁰ Belomor was without question a work of propaganda, and it has been rightly condemned for whitewashing the brutality and death that accompanied the canal’s construction. The volume offers a series of anecdotes about the alleged “reforging” and reclamation of Belomor prisoners through Soviet forced labor.²¹ Nonetheless, the least interesting thing we can learn about the Belomor is that it is a work of propaganda. This is too obvious. Much can still be gleaned from exploring the type of whitewashing that it represents. Soviet authorities could have withheld forced labor from public view entirely. Certainly by the later 1930s, Soviet authorities simply refused to speak publicly about the Gulag. In the early 1930s, however, they not only spoke about it but also celebrated it. The book was immediately translated into English and offers up Soviet forced labor as the very forefront of world penal practice.

The volume is something of an ideal-type presentation of early Stalinist penal ideology. In many ways, it set the terms of ideological discussion about penal labor in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that Soviet authorities would shut down public discussion of forced labor, the present book reveals how works like Belomor continued to appear throughout the Gulag’s history inside the camps whether in camp newspapers, like Karlag’s Putevka, or in special publications stamped “for use inside camps only.” While the Gulag was increasingly hidden from public view, such that open publication of works like Belomor at home and abroad, or national subscriptions to camp newspapers like that of the Solovetsky labor camp in the 1920s, ended by the mid-1930s, these types of materials were not the product of a single moment, a temporary belief in the malleability of the criminal. The continued appearance of these materials within the camps reveals a much more complex relationship with the subject of individual redeemability. Throughout this book, then, I compare the presentation in Belomor and the...