Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies

Description

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers "identities"―the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section surveys "sources" to explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section studies "legacies" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving away from grand metaphorical or theoretical models, Rethinking the Gulag instead unearths the complexities and nuances of experience that represent a primary focus in the new wave of Gulag studies. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Gulag Studies since the Archival Revolution Part I. Identities 2. Religious Identity, Practice, and Hierarchy at the Solovetskii Camp of Forced Labor of Special Significance 3. Censoring the Mail in Stalin’s Multiethnic Penal System: The Use of Languages Other Than Russian in Soviet Inmate Correspondence 4. “Who Are You in Life?”: The Gulag Reputation System and Its Legacies Today 5. The Real Gulag: Commentary on the “Identities” Section Part II. Sources 6. “They Won’t Survive for Long”: Soviet Officials on Medical Release Procedure 7. Applying Digital Methods to Forced Labor History: German POWs during and after the Second World War 8. Framing Gulag Memoirs: A Distant Reading 9. Researching the Gulag in the Era of “Big Data”: Commentary on the “Sources” Section Part III. Legacies 10. The Role of Nature in Gulag Poetry: Shalamov and Zabolotsky 11. “I Would Very Much Like to Read Your Story about Kolyma”: Georgii Demidov, Varlam Shalamov, and the Development of Gulag Prose, 1965–67 12. The Necropolis of the Gulag as a Historical-Cultural Object: An Overview and Explication of the Problem 13. Sites and Sounds of the Camps: Commentary on the “Legacies” Section 14. Afterword / Alan Barenberg and Emily D. Johnson Index