The Gulag in Grim Detail

...As I sensed in conversations while traveling in the USSR shortly after Nikita S. Khrushchev began his anti-Stalin campaign in 1956, only the greater trauma of World War II, with its catastrophic casualty lists, overshadowed the experience of Stalin's repression...

...from torture and maltreatment), in transit (usually from starvation or freezing to death), or in the camps themselves...

...Solzhenitsyn's reward at home was expulsion from his own country...

...The book is partly narrative that sticks close to the primary materials, and partly selections from the actual documents, which speak for themselves in the most chilling tones...

...How much time and gory revelation from the archives will be needed before everyone fully faces up to the unwelcome memory of Stalin's atrocities...

...In Moscow in 1989 I stumbled upon an early meeting of Memorial that was taking place in the premises of the Museum of the October Revolution on Gorky Street to discuss designs for a monument to the victims—a project that has still not been realized...

...Thereafter, until 1936, the system remained more or less stable...

...In the main, he concludes, "mass repressions," especially collectivization and the terror of 1937-38, "had specific political goals: the extermination and isolation of real or imagined opponents of the regime...

...Khlevniuk calculates that the camps had approximately 1.5 million inmates in 1940 (whichjibes with Otto Pohl), and that nearly 4 million went through the camps between 1934 and 1940...

...Russian citizens," he writes, "continue to perceive the state as a hostile force, the embodiment of arbitrariness and violence...

...This does not include convicts in urban prisons or the "special settlers" (upward of a million throughout the 1930s...

...Hence, summary alternatives ranging from "mass shootings" down to "corrective labor" (penalties at the workplace) to suspended sentences...

...Russian scholars and memoirists jumped at the opportunity afforded them by Soviet Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost to put in print their long-suppressed knowledge...

...Khlevniuk's approach underscores the importance of thinking about the Soviet past historically—that is, as a phenomenon that grew and changed over time, within a particular national context, not something preformed and unchanging as though dropped down from an alien planet...

...Perhaps the most troubling as well as original remarks in The History of the Gulag concern the lingering social and moral consequences of Stalinist repression...

...Thus over half of all families in the Soviet Union were touched directly...

...He dates the launching of the forced labor system quite precisely to a June 27,1929 Politburo decision to create a complex of camps run by the secret police that could receive uprooted kulaks (recalcitrant peasants who resisted collectivization) and promote colonization of the Far North to exploit its natural resources...

...In Khlevniuk's words, the camps turned from economic enterprises into "extermination centers...

...That seems to have contributed to relative amelioration in the early years of the Second FiveYear Plan...

...Solzhenitsyn's blockbuster tore away lingering pro-Soviet denial about the camps among the Left everywhere and notably in France, just when Moscow was trying to win international respectability through the policy of détente...

...Nor was the system immune to bureaucratic infighting higher up, among the GPU and the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (until the two were merged as the infamous NKVD in 1934) and the Commissariat of Justice and the State Prosecutor (the Procuracy...

...Society absorbed the criminal mindset, the reliance on violence and the prison culture...

...Moreover, their numbers were being multiplied by deportees from the Polish and Baltic territories the Soviet Union annexed in 1939-40, as well as by ordinary workers who fell afoul of newly stringent labor discipline...

...Robert V. Daniels, a frequent NL contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont...

...Over the past decade he has composed or coedited a raft of books and documentary collections drawing on the newly available archival materials...

...His numerous books include Russia's Transformation and The Soviet Trajectory...

...Simple logistics limited the Gulag...

...But paradoxically they show that this Russia is not so new after all, and that surprising percentages of the citizenry still hanker after images of the Soviet era, to the point of including Josef Stalin among the most positive figures in the country's history...

...In his Foreword, the eminent Anglo-American authority Robert Conquest, the source of some of the higher ones, now endorses the book's conclusions and hails it as the best kind of history...

...J. Otto Pohl (The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953, 1997...

...The prisoner population, Khlevniuk shows, was held down by convict deaths during investigations (i.e...

...Some, including juveniles, were assigned to "labor colonies," with an only slightly less rigorous regime...

...Even in Russia the sorry past is already losing its true shape...

...Khlevniuk links the development of the Gulag to the unfolding political phases of the Soviet Union, and in particular to the evolution of the Stalinist regime in the 1930s...

...Not all the victims of the dragnet were incarcerated in the camps...

...Systematic analysis of the Gulag was initiated with the publication of Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (1947) by two prominent figures in The New Leader's history, the Menshevik emigres David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky...

...Political terror was curbed under NKVD Commissar Lavrenti P. Beria from 1939 on, but that did not mean relief for camp inmates...

...Soviet totalitarianism, for all its similarity to the Nazi version, was never as efficient...

...A new breakthrough in studying the Gulag came with the loosening and collapse of the Soviet system in the late 1980s and early '90s...

...The new Memorial Society undertook to research the lives and deaths of the survivors and victims of the whole system of political repression...

...The terrible, partly man-made famine of 1932-33 paradoxically slowed expansion of the camps by wiping out so many potential inmates...

...Post-Communist disillusionment with democratic reform, and the economic straits of a majority of the population, have cast a glow of reflected nostalgia over the harsh record of the Soviet regime...

...The Gulag economy was never effective, and it survived only through the massive, uncontrolled exploitation of forced labor...

...Writers & Writing The Gulag in Grim Detail By Robert V Daniels IN the lives of nations, as with individuals, unhappy memories often rapidly slip into the past, though this does not prevent them in either case from exerting baleful influences on the present emotions of their subjects...

...After 1991, under the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin, most—but not all—secret Soviet archives were opened to researchers, offering a superabundance of source material needing to be judiciously sifted and weighed...

...It began to appear long before the opening of secret archives confirmed and amplified what had already been known or surmised from former inmates' accounts...

...Some of these revelations predate World War II and are by foreign Communists caught up in Stalin's purges, like the Yugoslav Anton Ciliga's The Russian Enigma (1940...

...Owing to hypercentralization and the breakdown of normal social controls, "Fear of harsh punishment for minor violations was an important foundation and principle of Stalinist socialism...

...Meanwhile, a new genre of prisoner fiction emerged, notably Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963), which followed in the footsteps of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941) and Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1950...

...One surprise is that the self-defeating horrors of the camp system were sometimes recognized as such by people in authority...

...What Khlevniuk serves up is raw history, and it is not an easy read...

...There is not much of the historian as intermediary who might shape the material to make it easier to grasp, and the voluminous Index is not categorized in very useful ways...

...Without playing down its horror and injustice, Khlevniuk marshals the regime's own best knowledge of how many arrests and deportations there were...

...And they continued to grow in huge amounts until Stalin's death...

...Their prototype was the Baltic-White Sea Canal undertaken in 1930, a death trap for prisoners that strategically was almost useless...

...The great sensation in Gulag literature was Solzhenitsyn's mammoth nonfiction depiction of the Soviet labor camp system in his three-volume The Gulag Archipelago (1974-78), first published in Russian in Paris with the more resonant title Arkhipelag Gulag, and then in a host of other languages...

...And these figures represent merely the upper tier of the iceberg...

...Better that light be directed again on those episodes, painful as it might prove, to learn from experience and try to release the burden of old traumas...

...The camps were inundated with prisoners they could not rationally exploit, while the Gulag administration was itself disrupted by denunciations and arrests...

...Khlevniuk carefully weighs the elements of economic advantage in the Gulag, such as construction and mining, yet he finds that "failure of the Gulag to achieve the intended industrialization goals was inherent and predictable...

...Still earlier accounts go back as far as the 1920s— for example, S.A...

...The camp population,' Khlevniuk writes, "could expand very rapidly, but its growth was hindered by the lack of infrastructure, the shortage of guards, and other deficits...

...Based at the main Russian governmental archive in Moscow, Khlevniuk is a prolific young historian who specializes in the Stalin era...

...Undaunted, Oleg Khlevniuk now gives us The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale, 464pp., $39.95...

...But all traces of rationality were swept away by the Great Terror and rising political paranoia among Stalin and his entourage as war loomed...

...That was before the great jump in the scale of the camp system and deaths therein during the War and immediately afterward...

...Often this approach simply encouraged zealous abuses by underlings who were never given the resources to accomplish what they were supposed to do...

...One of the effects of official secrecy about the Gulag was to make it seem more rational, and more extensive, than it actually was...

...The injustice of the penal system and the escape of perpetrators from retribution have left a thick residue of cynicism, perversely leavened by "sympathy for criminals and transgressors...

...the stark particulars are highlights, but it is left pretty much to the reader to fill in the wider contours...

...and Viktor Zemskov (many articles of the 1990s on specifics of the Gulag, most still only in Russian...

...Though the whole venture combined such cruelty and stupidity that it prompted protests within the Soviet bureaucracy itself, the 1929 plan became the model for the entire Gulag undertaking as it ballooned with waves of new categories of convicts—ethnic minorities, political purge victims, POWs, even returning Soviet POWs—until Stalin's death in 1953...

...This applies to the Gulag as much as to other facets of Soviet history—or any country's history, for that matter...

...Khlevniuk does not explicitly get into the old controversies about the nature of totalitarianism...

...Legions of historians, both Russian and foreign, jumped at the opportunity and plunged in to pursue projects on every period and element of the Soviet regime, including the Gulag...

...After 1935 children as young as 12 were subject to the death penalty...

...Other convicts, in numbers rivaling the camp population, were called "special settlers," by the Soviet authorities when they resumed and amplified the old tsarist practice of exile to compulsory residence in remote locations, with or without any means of self-support...

...the best known were Journey into the Whirlwind by Evgenia Ginzburg (1967) and Hope against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1970...

...One practice that continues to distinguish the new Russia from its predecessor is the proliferation of public opinion polls...

...In his Introduction he calls the Gulag "the most important segment of the Soviet economy," but later on he concludes that its role was more political than economic...

...the suppression of dissent...

...ANother significant point is a corrective to the longstanding controversy over the magnitude of the whole camp system...

...Worthy of mention on this topic, among many other authors, are Michael Jakobson of the University of Toledo (Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917-1934, published in 1993...

...and the social unification of major regions of the country...

...Overall, counting suspended sentences and on-the-job penalties, as well as genuine convicted criminals, as many as 20 million people passed through the portals of Stalin's justice during the decade...

...Edwin Bacon of the University of Birmingham in England (The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labor System in the Light of the Archives, 1994...

...Khlevniuk's materials underline the Stalinist habit of confusing orders and outcomes, and the persistent attempt to achieve impossible objectives by turning up the volume on military-style commands and penalties...

...Some of these—notably Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936 (1995) and The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936(2003)—have already been issued in the Yale Annals of Communism series...

...He estimates total mortality in the camp and exile system between 1930 and 1941 at around half a million, while over 700,000 people were shot out of hand, mostly in 1937-38, and never reached the Gulag...

...Galina Ivanova of the Institute of Russian History in Moscow (Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, written in 1997 and translated in 2000...

...In the course of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (it actually just ran from 1929 to 1932), the camp system was focused on grandiose and wasteful construction projects...

...He does lend support to the argument that the Gulag was inherent in the Soviet regime, though about its economic utility, argued by many critics of the USSR, he seems unsure...

...In general, it is hard to see the forest for the trees...

...This legacy helps explain why the transition to democracy has been so problematic in the former Soviet Union, where apathy and corruption reign alongside former minions of the old regime...

...Malsagov's Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North (1926), on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea that served as the prototype for Stalin's nationwide labor camp network...

...Although not altogether complete, they lean toward the lower estimates...

...A major recent account, boasting a Pulitzer Prize, is by Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post (Gulag: A History, 2003...

...Through returning inmates and former guards, "The Gulag spread beyond the barbed wire...

...As an especially horrendous aspect of Soviet rule, the story of the forced labor camps known as the Gulag has evoked a huge literature of description and condemnation...

...That problem aside, in his iteration of the details Khlevniuk makes some important points...

...The purges of 1936-38 generated a sudden new surge in the camp population and a corresponding worsening of conditions...

...Graphic prison memoirs surfaced in the 1960s...