Stalin's Gulag: Death, Redemption and Memory

Author(s): Miriam Dobson

Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (October 2012), pp. 735-743
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.90.4.0735
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 Review Article
Stalin’s Gulag: Death, Redemption and
Memory
MIRIAM DOBSON

Barnes, Steven A. Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of
Soviet Society. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford,
2011. x + 352 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00: £24.95
(paperback).
Applebaum, Anne (ed.). Gulag Voices: An Anthology. Annals of
Communism. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2011.
xv + 195 pp. Notes. $25.00: £17.99.
Petkevich, Tamara. Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Klots
and Ross Ufberg. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2010.
xiv + 481 pp. Illustrations. Glossary. Index. $35.00.
Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilievich. Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir. Translated
and edited by Deborah Kaple. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New
York, 2011. xxxviii + 229 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices.
Selected bibliography. Index. £16.99.

The history of the Gulag continues to be a topic of considerable interest,

both within and outside academia, with regular conferences, blogs and
publications on the Stalinist penal behemoth. For the most part, historians
working on the Gulag are keen to draw on both the extensive archival
materials generated by the Soviet state and the rich canon of survivor
literature which exists. Gulag scholars are using both to explore a range of
themes: the diversity of experience within different camps; the changing
nature of the Gulag over time; the relationship between camps and the
local communities in which they were embedded, and — perhaps the
thorniest of them all — the reasons for the Gulag’s existence.

Miriam Dobson is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield.

Slavonic and East European Review, 90, 4, 2012

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736 MIRIAM DOBSON
Steven Barnes’s Death and Redemption is an ambitious and challenging
book which tackles the big questions head on. Barnes begins by setting up
the existing debates about the reasons for the Gulag’s origins: the economic
need for slave labour; the political urge to exterminate any potential sources
of opposition; the moral degeneracy of the Bolsheviks. Not all works fit
neatly into one of these three categories but it provides a useful framework
for understanding the state of the existing scholarship. What Barnes’s
work then does is to suggest an alternative, and provocative, interpretation.
Whilst he stresses the importance of the political over the economic, he
does not view the state’s violence as being directed only towards destruction
and control. Instead, he urges historians to take ideas of ‘re-education’
and ‘re-forging’ seriously. In the early and mid 1930s the Soviet authorities
publicly celebrated the existence of forced-labour projects, such as the
White Sea Canal, as evidence of the regime’s novel approach to criminality,
but, Barnes maintains, this belief in labour as a means to transform convicts
into citizens was not mere window-dressing; nor did it entirely disappear,
even with the Great Terror. Death and Redemption thus argues that even
though the Gulag receded from the pages of the Soviet press, the promise
of re-forging remained central to many camp practices, right throughout
the Stalinist era. But death — the first of Barnes’s dyad — is ever present.
Viewing the Gulag as a more violent and extreme example of other projects
of Western modernity, he suggests that one of its main functions was to
sort and categorize. One of the purposes of the interrogation carried out
after arrest was to establish whether the prisoner was ‘redeemable’; if so,
release and reintegration into the Soviet body politic was offered as an
attainable goal once the prisoner had been sufficiently ‘reforged’ through
labour (the length of time this required reflecting the perceived magnitude
of the transgression). In contrast, those deemed implacable enemies at the
interrogation stage were sentenced to the ‘highest form of punishment’
— execution; in addition, death was ‘accepted’ (p. 12) as a likely outcome
for Gulag inmates who, during their incarceration in the camps, proved
unable to complete the corrective labour upon which their political rebirth
depended. Soviet penal institutions carried out the categorization in a
chaotic and inconsistent manner, but for Barnes this dual purpose —
sorting in order to redeem or discard — runs through the history of the
Stalinist Gulag.
In addition to this major argument, Death and Redemption provides a
detailed study of the Gulag system with a particular focus on one camp,
Karlag, in Kazakhstan. Chapter one sets out very clearly the different forms

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 STALIN’S GULAG: DEATH, REDEMPTION & MEMORY 737
of imprisonment in the USSR, before chapter two moves on to explain the
development of this particular camp in the Kazakh steppe. Karlag reminds
us of the diversity of the camp experience: whilst many prisoners’ memoirs
describe the harsh conditions working in gold mines or building railway
lines, Karlag inmates largely worked in agriculture, and faced extreme
heat rather than the Siberian cold. Barnes argues that this expansion into
Central Asia was in part about intensively cultivating new lands, but it was
also, and primarily, about political colonization and the regime’s intention
to ‘bring the fruits of socialist civilization to every corner of the Soviet
Union’ (p. 40). Covering huge territory, the agricultural nature of Karlag
meant that for some prisoners the borders between camp and civilian
life were relatively porous; hard labour was an absolute constant, but it
could take various forms, sometimes even giving the prisoner a degree of
autonomy, as demonstrated by camp memoirist, Militsa Stefanskaia, whose
work as a veterinary medic’s assistant involved independently travelling
through the steppe to care for sick sheep. This chapter also shows that
whilst labour was the cornerstone of the ‘reforging’ process, the camp
authorities devoted resources to the camp newspapers, political education
classes and cultural activities such as theatre.
The third chapter of Death and Redemption examines in more detail the
categorization process. The picture which emerges — at the level of both
theory and practice — is one of ambiguity. In general, proletarians charged
with non-political offences were considered the most redeemable, but the
perceived likelihood of different categories of prisoner being successfully
‘rehabilitated’ was complex and evolved over time. Class enemies such
as kulaks were a particularly troublesome category: early on in the book
Barnes suggests that they were considered ‘incorrigible’ (p. 24) — and they
were often treated as such — but in theory they could too be re-educated
and amnesties were also applied to them in 1935 and 1938. At this very time,
however, other shifts were occurring. The redeemability of those sentenced
under article 58, always ‘questionable at best’, became more uncertain in
the second half of the 1930s; whilst in the mid ’30s published texts such as
the famous Belomor and Karlag’s own official history did include stories
of 58-ers successfully transformed into industrious Soviet citizens; the
Great Terror and the Second World War reduced their chances of being
labelled redeemable. Execution — both at the time of arrest and later on in
a prison’s Gulag odyssey — became more common. At the same time, the
concept of the ‘class enemy’ — someone whose alien status derived from
their place in socio-economic structures — gave way to ‘enemies of the

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738 MIRIAM DOBSON
people’ and enemy nations (starting with the Soviet Koreans in 1937). Other
works have already noted this shift towards more essentialist conceptions
of the ‘enemy’, but Barnes’s research is important in showing that it was
only after the war was over that this shift was fully reflected in Gulag
practice. Although building on a wartime experiment, it was not until 1948
that the segregation of political prisoners was fully implemented. Many
were now subject to extremely long sentences followed by eternal exile; the
promise of redemption had effectively been removed from some, though
not all, political prisoners.
In chapters four to six, Barnes studies the wartime and post-war Gulag
and emphasizes how much the system evolved in the 1940s. War saw the
prisoner population shrink as a result of releases in 1941 and high death
rates, but this was not the end of terror; despite the economic burden it
represented, the Gulag system was not dismantled. From 1939 onwards,
successive waves of new arrests filled the camps once more: prisoners from
territories annexed in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; captured
POWs from enemy nations; members of ethnic groups deported en masse
and, later, returning Soviet POWs and war veterans. Coupled with the new
legislation on theft introduced in 1947, these measures meant that the late
Stalinist Gulag population was larger and more diverse than ever before.
With the creation of special camps in 1948, political prisoners were held
separately, in especially brutal conditions. Their removal transformed the
composition of the ‘ordinary’ camp where conflict between rival cohorts
of criminals escalated, but it was in the special camps that unrest erupted
following Stalin’s death, as Barnes’s study of the forty-day stand-off in
Kengir in 1954 colourfully demonstrates. In a camp division dominated by
‘Westerners’ (nationalists from Ukraine), it was a Red Army veteran who
took the lead, and Barnes argues that even here — in a special camp where
reforging had been sidelined — the rebels’ demands took on a decidedly
‘Soviet’ hue. For some this might have been tactical, for others a more
genuine reflection of their political beliefs. The Kengir case reaffirms the
book’s message: politics was at the centre of Gulag life.
Barnes’s account of the Gulag’s origins is compelling; it does not elide
the violence of the camps but instead shows how Soviet ideology made this
violence possible. On the ground, matters were perhaps rather messier than
either ‘death’ or ‘redemption’; Barnes’s monograph certainly acknowledges
this, though the central place given to political ideas issued from Moscow
sometimes implies a coherence that was lacking in practice. Many died
because of neglect from the camp authorities or as the result of violence

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 STALIN’S GULAG: DEATH, REDEMPTION & MEMORY 739
meted out by other prisoners; they had not necessarily been condemned
as forever unfit to rejoin the Soviet family. And had those released been
redeemed? Barnes maintains, rightly, that this is unknowable. The
Belomor texts suggest that those released had carried out sufficient labour
and were now healthy members of the Soviet family, but whether Gulag
and other law-enforcement officials were always so confident about the
Belomor message is not clear. Certainly by the 1950s the authorities were
very concerned about recidivism and the pernicious influence of Gulag
returnees, and frequently regarded the camps as a site of corruption, not
redemption.
Barnes’s account finishes with the major releases of the 1950s, and he
concludes the book by noting that the ‘mammoth complex’ of the Stalinist
period never re-emerged. It was this post-Stalin period which allowed
survivors the necessary conditions — time, paper, ink, warmth, relative
privacy and a degree of security — to write about their experiences, though
many did not publish until the late perestroika or post-Soviet era. Anne
Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History (New York, 2003), a work with
which Barnes engages at several points, has now brought out a collection of
short extracts from this body of Gulag memoirs, some previously available
in English, others appearing for the first time. Applebaum rightly notes
that the Gulag canon is always skewed — those who died cannot write
but nor do those who were illiterate or poorly schooled. She does perhaps
show a preference for those who became critics of the regime: she writes
that arrest and incarceration ‘helped [Russian prisoners] understand
the evil of Soviet communism’ (p. xii); this is true, though — as Nanci
Adler’s recent work shows 1 — a significant number remained loyal to the
Communist cause. Applebaum also writes that ‘the only authentic piece of
Gulag literature ever published by an official Soviet publishing house was
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’
(p. xi). What makes a Gulag work authentic is surely questionable: are only
the works of those critical of the Soviet regime genuine? These points aside,
it is a powerful and effective book, with segments from different authors’
accounts used to narrate the terrible Gulag odyssey through from arrest,
interrogation, transit, camp life and finally liberation. Many pieces are
moving. Applebaum writes that the chapter from Hava Volovich’s memoir
‘is one of the most difficult to read in all of Gulag literature’ (p. 96) and it is

1
Nanci Adler et al. (eds), Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the
Aftermath of Atrocity, New Brunswick, NJ, 2009, and Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor:
Beyond the Soviet System, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002.

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740 MIRIAM DOBSON
hard to dissent. Volovich’s account of giving birth to a child who then dies
from neglect in the camp nursery is an intense piece of writing, especially
her conclusion that, ‘in giving birth to my only child, I committed the
worst crime there is’.
Tamara Petkevich’s book is billed as the Memoir of a Gulag Actress but
it is in fact much more than that. Closer to an autobiography, it devotes
considerable space to her childhood in the 1920s, the romantic adventures
of her youth and her troubled first marriage living with difficult in-laws,
members of the exile community in the city of Frunze. It also of course
describes life in the camps, including not only her involvement in the
theatre, but also her experiences of friendship, love and motherhood
which, although her child survives, was — as for Volovich — unbelievably
painful. Her son was raised by his father and new wife, who prevented
Petkevich reuniting with him even after release by abruptly leaving their
home without trace; by the time she tracked them down six years later it
was too late: ‘I never managed to reach through to my son’s heart. All my
attempts failed’ (p. 445).
It is Petkevich’s ability to depict herself as a person, not just a victim,
which makes this such a moving book, and one that deserves its place in
the canon alongside classics like Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind.
Petkevich eschews the temptation to depict pre-arrest life as perfect;
everything afterwards as hell. She does not shy away from depicting the
difficulties of family relationships, particularly with her violent father, a
Bolshevik scarred by Civil War, and her distant mother who threatened
her with the orphanage (a very real presence in 1920s Petersburg). She also
shows the complexity of human relationships within the camps: the father
of her child, a camp doctor and former prisoner, ultimately acts with great
cruelty towards her, but earlier had been her ‘only defender’ (p. 223), and
she continued to feel confused emotions towards him for many years. For
young people like Petkevich the Gulag was perhaps all the more difficult
because they had not been allowed the time to construct a stable life
before arrest: on one occasion, looking at the older inmates, she thought to
herself,

You really do have it easier, you can find solace in the undergrowth of your
biographies, you have had time to make Fate your own, but I have nothing
to creep away into. (p. 163)

She learned to accept that her life did not stop with arrest: it was a life of
sorts too, a point also echoed by Barnes in his discussion of Stefanskaia.

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 STALIN’S GULAG: DEATH, REDEMPTION & MEMORY 741
And it was within the camps that Petkevich met the true love of her life,
Kolya, and established the network of deeply meaningful friendships
which would sustain her after his death and through post-camp life.
Camp memoirs, including Petkevich’s, include numerous encounters
with officials and guards, some providing unexpected kindness, others
unbelievable cruelty. Whilst their texts suggest the system gave a great
deal of latitude to its employees, they can shine little light on how the
Gulag employees themselves came to be working in the camps, how they
viewed their work, and why their attitude to prisoners varied so much. The
academic literature on guards remains relatively limited, although Barnes
does provide some useful background, particularly regarding recruitment
practices and relationships between prisoners and employees. What
remains elusive, however, is the perspective of the guard himself. This is
understandable: the urge to tell others of their ordeal was often strong for
prisoners (Petkevich writes: ‘On that night transport from Djangi-Djir, a
strange fancy or, perhaps, a distant hope arose in me: someday I’ll tell all
this in such a way that at the moment I myself wasn’t able to understand;
maybe to a child, or perhaps to a man who would listen to me. Maybe of
other people, too, but I will definitely speak of what I had seen and lived
through’, p. 171); for employees this kind of ‘aspiration’ did not exist in
the same way. During the debates about the Gulag which emerged during
de-Stalinization, some camp guards did put pen to paper to defend or
explain their work, but this was rare, and little autobiographical work
has been published. The publication of Fedor Mochulskii’s Gulag Boss in
2011 was therefore an important landmark. It is the product of friendship
between Deborah Kaple, a researcher whose early work explored the
relationship between Stalinism and Chinese Communism, and Fedor
Vasilevich Mochulskii, who had worked as an advisor to the Chinese on
ideological and Communist Party matters for many years. Earlier in his
career, however, Mochulskii had been employed in the administration of
forced labour camps and written a manuscript account of his time as a
‘Gulag boss’ between 1940 and 1946.
Mochulskii graduated from Moscow Institute of Railroad Transport
Engineering before the war and accepted a position in one of the new
camps being opened to exploit raw resources for the war effort. Mochulskii
presents his decision to accept the post as being an act of patriotism:

What could I say? Wasn’t I that young, strong, citizen of our motherland,
a kid who had been brought up in the Komsomol and Pioneers all those
years?’ (p. 9)

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742 MIRIAM DOBSON
Here, and throughout the memoir, Mochulskii portrays himself as a patriot
motivated by his desire to serve the war effort, not someone interested in
pursuing an NKVD career or fanatical about the punishment of ‘enemies’.
This comes through clearly in his account of his first Gulag experience, a
hastily constructed sub-camp where prisoners were sleeping on the bare
ground: ‘When we entered the prison camp, I was gripped with horror
at what I saw’ (p. 32). Realizing that the prisoners would not survive
long, he hatched a plan which involved inventing production figures (a
practice known as ‘tufta’) to give the prisoners time to build themselves
living quarters; to do so, he had to get the prisoners on side and ensure no
intelligence of the plan leaked out to higher authorities. The subsequent,
perhaps rather self-aggrandizing, account which follows casts him as a
heroic leader, able to unite prisoners and employers to work collectively for
a shared goal, and he writes:

At my meeting with the prisoners, under the open sky inside the camp, I
explained my understanding of our situation and how Volodia and I had
decided to try and resolve it. [...] In the dimming eyes of the worn-out men,
hope lit up. They became animated, and as a chorus might, they all agreed
to the plan I proposed. (p. 37)

This account suggests that he took risks and bent rules for two goals: one
a humanitarian one — preserving life; the other, rather more political —
reaching production targets; in his eyes, the two were not contradictory.
Elsewhere he acknowledges that his own self-preservation was also a factor
in the kind of rule-bending he practised: explaining a deal he cut with one
of the criminal prisoners, he asked:

What could I do? For the boss and foreman of a unit, which I was at that
time, work is work, and the main thing was that the prisoners worked and
fulfilled the plan. Otherwise, there would be scandal, persecution, and
unpleasantness. (p. 150)

Although these rhetorical questions suggest a degree of self-questioning,

there is little sense that Mochulskii felt strong personal culpability for his
role in Gulag management. As the translator and editor, Deborah Kaple,
notes, he describes his story ‘as if it had taken place in a normal workplace’
(p. 173). In a concluding section Mochulskii adopts a rather more critical
tone than elsewhere in the memoir and raises several questions regarding

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 STALIN’S GULAG: DEATH, REDEMPTION & MEMORY 743
the injustices of the Stalin era, but lays the blame for this squarely with
the Soviet leadership. In comparison with the rich literature on the role
of guards and administrators in the Nazi camps there is still a long way
to go in terms of understanding this important aspect of the Gulag, but
Mochulskii’s memoir makes a very valuable start.
Each of these works under review enrich our understanding of the
Soviet penal system in important ways. The memoirs are compelling
if painful reads and open up different dimensions of the Gulag ordeal.
Barnes’s work is provocative, at times unsettling. In addition to the
contribution it makes to debates about the origins of the Gulag, it also
offers a detailed and compassionate picture of the camps which should
make this a core text on many university reading lists, and also, it is to be
hoped, beyond the walls of academia.

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