Out of solitary confinement: The history of the Gulag

Kritika

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 67-103

  Brown, Kate ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547154082     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2007.0001     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. S. V. Mironenko and Nicolas Werth, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: Massovye repressii v SSSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004): 340-59
2. Durbin quoted the following from the FBI report: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor" (Dan Balz, "Durbin Defends Guantanamo Comments," Washington Post, 17 June 2005)
3. "Cheney Offended by Amnesty International Report," Associated Press, 31 May 2005
4. See the transcript of President George W. Bush's 2005 Veteran's Day Speech, New York Times, 11 November 2005
5. Before 11 September, there were 20,000 people in U.S. prisons held without charges. See Human Rights Watch, Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Jail in the U.S. (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998)
6. and Reed Brody, The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Human Rights Watch, June 2004), as cited in Michelle Brown, "'Setting the Conditions' for Abu Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad," American Quarterly 57, 3 (2005): 985.
7. For a list of documents generated by these organizations, see S. V. Mironenko, V. A. Kozlov, and A. V. Dobrovskaia, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Guhga, 7: Sovetskaia repressivno-karatel'naia politika i penetentsiarnaia sistema v materialakh Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 337-41
8. For the list of demands and the OGPU commission's response, see Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 48-53.
9. In January 2006, military officials at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay broke a wave of hunger strikes by force-feeding detainees while they were strapped into "restraint chairs" for hours at a time (Tim Golden, "U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel Says," New York Times, 20 May 2006: A1)
10. Among many examples, see "Raport osoboupolnomochennogo pri Kollegii OGPU V. D. Del'dmana zamestiteliu predsedatelia OGPU G. G. Iagode o rezul'tatakh proverki anonimnogo zaiavleniia o narusheniiakh zakonnosti v Arkhangel'skom otdelenii Upravleniia severnykh lagerei osobogo naznacheniia," no later than 16 December 1929; "Raport byvshego nachal'nika 3-go otdeleniia spetsial'nogo otdela OGPU I. G. Filippova zamestiteliu predsedatelia OGPU G. G. Iagode o polozhenii v Solovetskikh lageriakh," no earlier than 6 May 1930, as reproduced in N. I. Vladimirtsev and N. V. Petrov, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2: Karatel'naia sistema: Struktura i kadri (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 71-76, 84-86; "Iz otcheta Komissii OGPU po obsledovaniiu rezhima i byta zakliuchennykh Solovetskikh lagerei," no earlier than 20 April 1930; "Iz informatsionnogo obzora No. 1 nachal'nika ULAG L. I. Kogana," 6 November 1930; "Iz stenogrammy vystupleniia zamestitelia narkoma iustitsii A. Ia. Vishinskogo," 13 January 1933; "Prikaz NKVD SSR no. 0072 'o bor'be s faktami izdevatel'skogo otnosheniia k zakliuchennym v ispravitel'no-trudovykh lageriakh, tiur'makh i koloniiakh NKVD,' "17 February 1936, as reproduced in A. B. Bezborodov and V. M. Khrustalev, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4: Naselenie Gulaga, chislennost' i usloviia soderzhaniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 139-46, 147-49, 150-53, 156-57; "Materialy i perepiska ob otmene po protestu prokurora SSSRA. Ia. Vyshinskogo tsirkuliara nachal'nika Otdela trudovykh kolonii NKVD SSSR Perepelkina ot 23 iiulia 1935 za 886503, protivorechashchego deistvuiushchemu zakonodatel'stvu," as cited in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 7: 44. A substantial part of the evidence of life in camps and special settlements in Khlevniuk's book derives from this type of whistle-blowing report (History of the Gulag, 101, 111, 123, 78-79, 79-80)
11. "Iz otcheta Komissii OGPU po obsledovaniiu rezhima i byta zakliuchennykh lagerei," no later than April 1930, as reproduced in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4: 139-46
12. Golden, "U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel Says."
13. See Mark Danner, "The Logic of Torture," New York Review of Books, 10 June 2004: 70-74. Danner claims the abusive interrogation of prisoners abroad derives from the 1963 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) manual KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, especially the chapter "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources." A later version of the manual describes the need to create a "debility-dependence - dread state."
14. Michelle Brown, "'Setting the Conditions' for Abu Ghraib," 973-97.
15. Jacqueline Rose, "In Our Present-Day White Christian Culture," London Review of Books, 8 July 2004.
16. The Washington Post editorial page argued, "Its [the Gulag's] modern equivalent is not Guantánamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai, the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq" ("'American Gulag,'" Washington Post, 26 May 2005: A26)
17. For more opinions in the same vein, see James C. Robbins, "Got Gulag?" National Review Online, 9 June 2005
18. and numerous newspaper reports, including Jonathan Gurwitz, "Guantánamo's Gulag Label Is a Gross Exaggeration," San Antonio Express-News, 15 June 2005: 7B; Barton Hinkle, "Guantnamo [sic] Apologists, Critics Have Both Gone Off the Deep End," Richmond Times Dispatch, 27 May 2005: A13. The editors of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga compare the totalitarian nature of the Gulag to that of Iran, as well as to Latin American and Asian military dictatorships (Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: 46)
19. Martin Malia noted, "Western observers in talking about Communist Russia were almost always talking, if only indirectly, about Western problems and politics as well. " Malia went on to illustrate his observation in his subsequent discussion of socialism as an aberration of democracy and negation of capitalist markets. The standard of comparison in his narrative is implicitly the U.S. system. Socialism is an "abnormal order" because it concentrates "political and economic power in one set of hands." The "normal order," against which socialism fails, is a "market democracy" (Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 [New York: Free Press, 2004], ix-x, 507)
20. Elena Danielson, Terence Emmons, Paul Gregory, O. V. Khlevniuk, V. A. Kozlov, and S. V. Mironenko, "The History of Stalin's Gulag in Seven Volumes: Main Problems and Concepts," Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: 46
21. Kozlov postulates a similar theory, that the Gulag was founded to defend society but ended up a threat to it. See his introduction to V. A. Kozlov and O. V. Lavinskaia, eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 6: Vosstaniia, bunti i zabastovki zakliuchennykh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 34
22. For an example, see Steven A. Barnes, "'In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens': An Uprising in the Post-Stalin Gulag," Slavic Review 64, 4 (2005): 823-50
23. For an example of how this kind of political culture played out in post-Soviet Russian politics, see Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
24. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
25. E. A. Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927-1941 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 65
26. In 1947, the majority of collective farmers in Komi ASSR earned from 61 kopeks to one ruble for a labor day. In 1947, one ruble could buy 333 grams of rye bread. When the collective farm in some years failed to pay workers for their labor days, collective farmers starved. Some grew so desperate as to commit suicide. See D. V. Milokhin and A. F. Smetanin, Komi: Kolkhoznaia derevnia v poslevoennye gody, 1946-1958 (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 168-70, 271, 275
27. For a description of the passport system, especially as it applied indefinitely to rural areas, former kulaks, and ex-cons, see David Shearer, "Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932-1952," J ournal of Modern History 76 (December 2004): 835-81
28. P. Popov, "Pasportnaia sistema v SSSR (1932-1976)," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 8 (1995): 3-14
29. Gijs Kessler, "The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932-1940," Cahiers du monde russe 42, 2-4 (2001): 478-504
30. and Nathalie Moine, "Passeportisation, statistique des migrations et contrôle de l'identité sociale," Cahiers du monde russe 38, 4 (1997): 587-600
31. Khlevniuk, History of the Gtdag, 9. With this decision came concrete construction projects. On 29 December 1929, the Politburo decided to use prisoners on Sakhalin. On 5 May 1930, the Politburo ordered geological exploration to build a canal from Lake Onega to the White Sea (Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2: 30)
32. The description of this file is: "Material and correspondence about the confirmation of lists of localities of the USSR that can serve as places of exile for people exiled by administrative order of organs of the OGPU, and about the confirmation of lists of places in which people are forbidden to live who have been exiled by administrative order of the organs of the OGPU" (Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 7: 31)
33. Industrial centers with 40 percent of the population received 80 percent of the goods (Osokina, Our Daily Bread, 60-65)
34. See R. U. Devis [R. W. Davies] and O. V. Khlevniuk, "Otmena kartochnoi systemy v SSSR, 1934-1935 gody," Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (1999): 87-108
35. Osokina argues that collective-farm workers were forced to sell their agricultural goods to the state at the lowest prices and buy from the state at the highest prices (Our Daily Bread, 68)
36. FHA Underwriting Manual (Washington, DC: Federal Housing Authority, 1938), sect. 911, 929, 937)
37. See Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
38. and Deborah E. Ward, The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)
39. See Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 104-5.
40. For histories of urban areas subsidizing suburbs, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier
41. The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 181. 39 Colin Wayne Leach cites studies showing that 60 percent of Americans polled thought that African Americans were treated fairly before Brown v. Board of Education ("Democracy's Dilemma: Explaining Racial Inequality in Egalitarian Societies," Sociological Forum 17, 4 [2002]: 687)
42. The literature on this topic is impressive. See, for example, Bruce D. Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
43. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
44. W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994)
45. Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
46. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W W. Norton, 2005)
47. Richard Pierce, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920-1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)
48. and Charles E. Connerly, The Most Segregated City in America: City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005)
49. In 1928-32, 12 million people moved from the countryside to Soviet cities. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 80
50. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 134.
51. David Shearer describes how in 1934 Iagoda became "nearly hysterical" at the suggestion of deregulating the movement of labor: "The OGPU categorically opposes the registration of individuals arriving spontaneously, on an individual basis in regime cities to look for work . . . only an insignificant number of real kolkhozniki come to cities on their own." Most who come, Iagoda argued, are from "class-alien and criminal elements." Hiring people spontaneously on the spot, he noted, could lead only to "saturation [zasorenie] of cities and enterprises by the socially alien element" (Shearer, "Enemies Near and Alien," 862)
52. Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:79. For a similar NKVD alternative to this vision, see Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4: 61
53. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Ungar, 1963), 57.
54. Turner himself called for the application of his thesis to other national histories, including Russia. Many have responded to his request. See, for example, Paul [Pavel] Miliukov, Russia and Its Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906)
55. W. Treadgold, "Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner's Study of the American Frontier," Agricultural History 26, 4 (1952): 147-52
56. J. B. Shaw, "The Frontier Experience in Romanov Russia," in Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613-1917, ed. Judith Pallot and Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 13-23
57. J. L. Wieczynski, The Russian Frontier: The Impact of Borderlands upon the Course of Early Russian History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976)
58. and Mark Bassin, "Turner, Solov'ev, and the 'Frontier Hypothesis': The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces," Journal of Modern History 65, 3 (1993): 473-511.
59. On the Frontier Antithesis, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World," American Historical Review 100, 3 (1995): 700-1.
60. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historian: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), 147.
61. Even during Turner's lifetime, the Great Plains states had started losing population and were returning to the population density (less than six people per square mile) that Turner had defined as "frontier." See Lisa Hardmeyer and Kate Brown, Where Have All the Children Gone? (video documentary, 2001)
62. Hofstadter, The Progressive Historian, 148. Other historians have added to the Frontier Antithesis with a scholarly force: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987)
63. and Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
64. See Kate Brown, "Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place," American Historical Review 106, 1 (2001): 17-48.
65. Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1: 65; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 18.
66. Elena Osokina, Zafasadom "stalinskogo izobiliia": Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii nase-leniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927-1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999), 110-13.
67. Kessler describes the crisis as the direct result of "a deliberate strategy of unequal development of the urban and rural sector of the economy," in "The Passport System," 479
68. "Dokladnaia zapiska komissii VTsIK o rezul'tatakh proverki provedeniia pasportizatsii po Moskve i Moskovskoi oblasti," April 1933, as reproduced in ibid., 152-55
69. For monographs on the Nazino tragedy, see Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag, trans.
70. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)
71. and B. P. Trenin, ed., Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi, 1933 g.: Nazinskaia tragediia (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2002). My thanks to Lynne Viola for drawing my attention to these sources
72. O. V. Khlevniuk, ed., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3: Ekonomika Gulaga (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 95
73. See Vladimir Kozlov, introduction, Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 6: 67.
74. Jeffrey J. Rossman points out how this connection was often made in Russia's textile belt (HR) with important repercussions. Peasant-workers were often (illegally) denied rations and were often the first to be laid off. People who complained about the faster pace of work and lower rates of pay were described as workers "with ties to the countryside" (Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005], 58-59, 87-88)
75. David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)
76. David Shearer points out that even ex-cons could get a regime passport if they proved themselves to be exemplary workers, but that this rarely happened ("Elements Near and Alien," 868)
77. See Paul M. Hagenloh, "Socially Harmful Elements and the Terror," in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 286-308
78. Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1939," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, 3 (1996): 344-73.
79. This becomes clear when looking at the local records. Most of the people on the arrest lists in 1935 and 1936 in the border zone of Ukraine had already been arrested and released at least once in their careers and were at large and working in state offices, despite the fact that they were ex-cons. See Derzhavnyi arkhiv Zhitomirskoi oblasti (DAZO) f. P-42, op. 1, d. 125, 11. 14-12 (17 February 1935)
80. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 328-35.
81. For a discussion of this difference in the Soviet and Nazi regimes regarding the domestic enemy, see Amir Weiner, "Nothing but Certainty," Slavic Review 61, 1 (2002): 44-53.
82. Despite the fascination in late Soviet culture with the Gulag, many ex-cons did not receive a hero's welcome back home. On the campaign to deny registration to native Leningraders returning from the camps in the 1960s, see Steven Harris, "Moving to the Separate Apartment: Building, Distributing, Furnishing, and Living in Urban Housing in Soviet Russia, 1950s-1960s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003), 215
83. See the debates over Soviet subjectivity begun in Kritika and continued in Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Matshall Poe, eds. , After the Fall: Essays in Russian and Soviet Historiography (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2004)
84. For a discussion of this paradox of idealism and alienation, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
85. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Osokina describes how Muscovites cheered on the official propaganda about saboteurs and speculators and demanded action against them (Our Daily Bread, 194)
86. A stark description of the clash between conflicting subjectivities occurs in Michaela Pohl's account of riots between special settlers and patriotic, incoming Virgin Land settlers in Kazakhstan in the mid-1950s. See "Planet sta iazykov: Etnicheskie otnosheniia i sovetskaia identichnost' na tseline," Vestnik Evrazii/Acta Evrasica 24, 1 (2004): 5-33
87. See, among others, Valerii Vasil'ev and L. [Lynne] Viola, eds., Kollektivizatsiia i krest'ianskoe soprotivlenie na Ukraine: Noiabr' 1929-mart 1930gg. (Vinnitsia: Lohos, 1997)
88. Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk, NY: M.E. Shaipe, 2002)
89. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
90. and S. S. Vilenskii, Soprotivlenie v GULAGe: Vospominaniia, pis'ma, dokumenty (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1992)
91. The United States has the highest prison incarceration rate (737 per 100,000) and aggregate prison population (2.2 million) in the world ("U.S. Has Most Prisoners in the World Due to Tough Laws," Reuters, 10 December 2006)