The Gulag serves as a ready icon for the totalitarian Soviet regime. In 1951, Hanna Arendt called it one of the ur-institutions of totalitarianism.^[1] Simeon Vilensky in Till My Tale is Told describes how the Gulag creates the Soviet citizen in inert, passive form.^[2] Anne Applebaum in Gulag: A History, foregrounds her work in the moral equation of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. The Gulag, in Applebaum’s work, stands as a metaphor for Soviet society as a whole, a society living in unfreedom in the “bol’shaia zona”. G. M. Ivanova in Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva categorizes the Gulag as the critical Soviet institution which held society in a moral and spiritual vice throughout the seventy years of communist rule. As Ivanova writes: “The Gulag allowed the upper echelons of power to implant on society uncontrolled any kind of exceptional measures, holding the people in blind obedience and slavish submission, to destroy at the very roots/buds the sprouts of rare dissent or free thinking.”^[3] The odd thing about this assertion is that many of the roots of dissent and dissident culture in the Soviet Union in the postwar period emerge from these very same dark corners of the camps. Songs, literature, poetry and the convicts themselves held a special place of moral authority within the Soviet counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.^[4] Could the Gulag have been both an instrument for obedience and submission as well as a site of resistance and counter-culture?
Unfortunately, for all of the assertions of the formative nature of the Gulag on Soviet society, there has been work that traces the impact of the structure and evolution of the Gulag as a reflection or influence on Soviet social and economic structures. How much was the Gulag economy part of the greater whole? Did the workings of the Gulag shape the larger economy and society? How much did the “malaia” and “bol’shaia” zones interact with one another administratively, socially and culturally?
Okhotin and Roginskii’s edited volume Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923-1960 is not to rehash the Gulag as a metaphor. The editors seek instead to ground the Gulag system in fact, statistics and detail. The devil is, after all, in the detail. Roginskii founded the dissident journal, Pamyat’, in the early seventies and has led the Memorial movement in Russia to compile a database of the mass repressions. Together the pair have written a number of articles about the repression of national groups during the Great Purges.^[5] Few understand the great criminal acts of the Gulag in more detail than Okhotin and Roginskii. Yet, in the introduction to the work, they write that they have set out to describe and catalogue the corrective labor camps of the Gulag system dispassionately – a task in which they succeed admirably. What they have put together is an administrative and economic history of the labor camp system which serves as a valuable aid to the researcher.
The guide is divided into four sections. The first section provides a biography for MVD/NKVD labor camps (ITL), supplying full names and acronyms, their dates of existence, location, character of work, numbers of inmates, administrative transfers of the camps from one department to another, the names of the officers in charge and archival sources. Section two provides similar information but in quick-reference form for camps which were run by both industrial enterprises and camp administrations. Section three describes, also in a quick-reference format, camps which were under central control. Section four provides information on prisons run by territorial departments of the NKVD-MVD. The guide includes a number of useful maps locating the camps and an index.
The guide opens with several articles, which lay out the complex and ever-changing administrative and economic scheme of the corrective labor camp system. The sketches contain some intriguing details. For example, the question of labor and the value and use of prison labor is a major focus of the book. In the twenties, the labor camps were decentralized; largely in the hands of republic and local governments. Prisons and camps were supposed to pay for themselves, but largely failed to so in part because of NEP-era labor surpluses. Labor – especially poorly trained, equipped and organized, prison labor – hardly commanded a premium in the NEP economy. As the industrialization drive sped into action, however, labor became more valuable, and, not-necessarily-consequentially, the labor camp system became more centralized. As profits might be made from a mass of unskilled labor, the central government offices of the NKVD gradually centralized the system of labor camps under the administrative rubric of the Gulag.
It was difficult to integrate this corner of slavery into the larger planned socialist economy. As a consequence, the NKVD began a course of vertical integration and specialization, cornering the market on some industries such as highway construction and logging. In this way, the NKVD transformed from a supplier of labor to free state enterprises into an independent producer of goods and raw materials. By the end of the thirties, the NKVD was a major player in the Soviet economy. At the peak of centralization, the Gulag system was run as a kingdom unto itself, with little necessary, daily interaction with other enterprises. In effect, the walls of the Gulag became higher, the boundaries between the “free” and “unfree” space in Soviet society became more clearly demarcated administratively and, according to some witnesses, in daily life as well. Applebaum quotes one Olga Vasileevna who worked as a camp inspector. She remembered that “in the 1930s, prisoners were enlisted in all sorts of work, as clerks, barbers, guards.” In the 1940s this kind of system ended, “It all began to take on a mass character… things became harsher… as the camps grew bigger, the regime grew crueler.”^[6]
Although there was less interaction with the rest of Soviet society, this did not mean that there was no interaction and influence between the “malaia” and “bol’shaia” zones. Published prison memoirs have tended to promote an image of the Gulag as a place of detention for the educated and elite moral and intellectual dissidents held for long periods. With the opening of the archives, however, we are coming to understand that the vast majority of prisoners were given criminal not political sentences and were held for short periods of two to five years. The Spravochnik documents how some prisoners even served out their time in their places of employment. Their imprisonment largely amounted to a garnishing of wages. We know that in most years tens of thousands of convicts were released back into Soviet society. In the peak year, 1953, half of all prisoners, 1.2 million were given amnesty.^[7] This movement amounted to a revolving door between the Gulag and Soviet society. Unfortunately, the Spravochnik does not provide information on the numbers entering and leaving labor camps each year. This ready set of statistics would illuminate the continual movement back and forth of intermediaries between the Gulag and elements of Soviet society. With it we might better trace the impact of the Gulag on labor, social, criminal and dissident culture in the Soviet Union. This topic has been touched on, but needs more research if we are in fact to determine the impact and nature of the Gulag on Soviet society.^[8] The Spravochnik offers a fine guide to commence that research.