Two Books on the Gulag

Two books delve into the ordeal of the prison camps known as the gulag in the Soviet Union. Barenberg offers an overview of the Soviet penal system, masterminded by Stalin, between 1930 and 1960, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially abolished it. Millions of prisoners were held in a sprawling network of “correctional labor camps,” while entire ethnic and social groups were uprooted from their homelands and exiled to places with harsh conditions. Beyond isolating and punishing its inmates, the gulag abetted Stalin’s ambitious modernization goals. Prisoners harvested timber, mined mineral resources, and were used to build new cities, railroads, dams, canals, and hydroelectric stations. Roughly one in five inmates died from hard labor, cruel treatment, and the severe deprivations of the camps. The “enemies of the people” convicted of made-up political crimes accounted for a quarter to a third of the overall gulag population. Barenberg points out the difference between the gulag and Nazi extermination camps: unlike Nazi prisoners, most labor camp inmates (although not the deportees) had finite sentences and could expect to be released—if they were lucky enough to survive.

Kirk’s unique contribution to the history of Stalin’s labor camps is based on his research in the archives of the Komi Republic in the Russian Far North. These archives contain the testimonies of returnees from the gulag, a collecting project initiated in the late 1980s by local branches of Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the height of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and banned by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021. The initiative generated a flood of prisoner’s memoirs that sparked privately funded attempts to find mass graves associated with the camps; 83 such gravesites were discovered in three decades. In their memoirs, the returnees emphasized the importance of the brotherhood of zeks (prisoners), a solidarity that helped them survive the camps and adjust to life after their release. For many former prisoners, their former fellow inmates were the only family they had. Some former zeks were also proud of their contributions to Soviet achievements (six out of seven cities in the Komi Republic were built by prisoners). A striking chapter is devoted to one former prisoner, an artist who sent over 150 letters about his imprisonment and his life after release to a local museum, along with poignant drawings of his camp experience, some of which are reproduced in the book.