How Important Was The Gulag In The Life Of The Soviet Un Ion In The 1930s?

The Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the ferocious extremity of that surprising country of Gulag which though in terms of geography scattered out an as archipelago- almost invisible, almost imperceptible country

The words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the notorious Kolyma region of the Gulag system allows us to view history from the eyes of one who lived it and this instance& through the life of prisoner and scholar who experienced the terror and violence of the Stalinist regime. The system of camps, known under the acronym GULAG (Chief Administration of Camps) was first created in 1929 by the Politburo. It is estimated that through the Stalinist era, some 18 million people passed through the prisons and camps of the Gulag, and between 1934 and 1953, 1,053,829 persons died in the camps. & How do we understand such repression and mass killings as historians? We must take seriously the ideology, the level of brutality, and the complex interactions between the terror, the Gulag, the economy, Stalin, politics, and understand that the same principles that informed the Gulag are embedded into the Stalinist economy and Soviet life as whole. Therefore, it is important to welcome the fact that conceptualising the role played by the Gulag in Soviet society and policy is fraught with many contradictions& of tales of terror, oppression, and mass death, coexisting with ideas of re-education, redemption, and release. In light of the new historiographical waves that followed the opening and access to (some of the) Soviet archives in 1991, such contradictions and interactions have intensified and allowed for a huge expansion in our empirical knowledge base. Solzhenitsyn landmark work The Gulag Archipelago, and the belief of the Gulag as an isolated island, separated from Soviet society as a whole, with little hope of return to the mainland, is no longer an appropriate formulation for constructing our understanding of the camps. There was hope of return, however, present in revolving door evidence found in archival-based study of J. Arch Getty and Viktor N. Zemskov and the 20 40 percent of inmates released every year. As Steven Barnes argues, the Gulag played a fundamental role in the construction of the Soviet citizens and the idea that prisoners could be reformed. It will be argued, therefore, that the Gulag was a closely connected, and an integral part of Soviet society at large. I will illustrate this by examining recent historiographical trends and the influential works of Alan Barenberg, Wilson Bell, and Lynne viola& all of which serve to complicate Solzhenitsyn vision of the Gulag as a closed universe.

&To complicate Solzhenitsyn metaphorical Archipelago , one has to look no further than the image of the 1988 Vorkuta Gulag Memorial. It is clear that complexities and terrors of Soviet history do not lay in the documents hidden behind the walls of Kremlin and the archives but in the physical spaces: in cities, villages and, in this instance, in the remains and memorials of prison camps. The opening of the Vorkuta Gulag Memorial and its very existence marks a significant shift from the policies of the previous three decades and how discussions of the Gulag had vanished from public discourse, becoming a separate entity such as the one Solzhenitsyn claims it to be. Nevertheless, the struggles over the memorialization of the Gulag and the confronting of Vorkuta s past, placing it the camps back into Soviet history in the 19980s, emphasizes the need for the Gulag to not sit in isolation from the the legacies of Soviet Union. The Gulag, therefore, is not locked in one era of Soviet history and is certainly not locked away from the rest of society. Alan Barbenberg s work on this particular camp and complex city of Vorkuta, provides an in depth and ground level perspective of the significant processes and transformations that took place during the Soviet era. He rightly argues that Gulag camps were indeed part of the communities that surrounded them, connected by myriad economic, spacial and informal relationships, and links to society as a whole, for Vorkuta was not just a camp, it was also a city, a Soviet company town . This specific camp is of great historical importance as it also allows for connections to made across this period and in society as a whole, beyond that of the Stalin. This is shown by Vorkuta s symbol of violence and welfare and industry and the efforts of free prisoners who built the city s impressive children s hospital in 1950, for example.