Gulag Tourism: Khrushchev's "Show" Prisons in the Cold War Context, 1954-59

Gulag Tourism: Khrushchev’s “Show” Prisons in the Cold War Context, 1954–59 JEFFREY S. HARDY I n 1959 a judge from New York visited a small corner of the vast Soviet penal apparatus commonly known as the Gulag.1 Impressed with what he saw compared with the oppressive prisons back home, Samuel S. Leibowitz penned a laudatory report that quickly graced the pages of the June 8, 1959, issue of Life magazine. This created a bizarre juxtaposition. After reading about John Foster Dulles’s funeral, complete with an editorial extolling his fight against communism (including Khrushchevism, with its shrewd “mixture of terror and talk”), and after digesting the feat of the “native American” monkeys Able and Baker, “the first living passengers to return safely from a ballistic journey through space,” American readers were treated to the spectacle of “healthy and robust” Russian prisoners who were “laughing and enjoying themselves” while engaged in a friendly game of soccer. “You have to know intimately the sickly, sullen atmosphere of the average American prison exercise yard,” Leibowitz declared, “to appreciate what I saw and what I felt as I watched these Russian convicts on this brilliant, sunny day.”2 The judge questioned whether he had been duped, but in conclusion still averred, “the whole Russian prison system has undergone a remarkable transformation in the past five years.”3 Not long after the Life article appeared, I am deeply grateful to a number of individuals who commented on various drafts of this article, especially Stephen Kotkin, Michael Gordin, Marc Elie, and Michael Jakobson. I would also like to acknowledge the participants of the International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, held in Washington DC in April 2010, and the “Gulag in History and Memory” conference held at Miami University’s Havighurst Center in October 2010 for their probing questions and insightful comments. Special thanks are due to Stephen Norris of the Havighurst Center for proposing and coordinating this bloc of articles and to Eve Levin and the anonymous reviewers at Russian Review for improving the article both stylistically and substantively during multiple rounds of revision. Research for this paper was funded in part by U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays program, the Princeton University History Department, and by a Brigham Young University Graduate Research Fellowship. 1 In this article the term “Gulag,” actually a bureaucratic acronym standing for Main Administration of Camps, will refer both to the central penal administration of the Soviet Union and more broadly to the entire penal apparatus. 2 Samuel S. Leibowitz, “The Two Faces of Justice in Russia,” Don Schanche, “Able and Baker, U.S. Heroes, Come Back,” and Editors, “Dulles the Peace Keeper,” all in Life (June 8, 1959): 156, 40, and 46B, respectively. 3 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 160. The Russian Review 71 (January 2012): 49–78 Copyright 2012 The Russian Review 50 Jeffrey S. Hardy it received a favorable review in Izvestiia; before reciting Leibowitz’s infamous words of praise for the Soviet penal system, the author introduced him as “an intelligent, observant, and experienced penologist.”4 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, however, had a different take: “Oh, fortunate New York State, to have such a perspicacious jackass for a judge.”5 Far more than an arms race or space race, the Cold War was a global competition among two universalizing ideologies (or three, if one includes Maoism along with MarxismLeninism and democratic capitalism), fought on a host of social, economic, political, and cultural levels.6 Indeed, for the Soviet Union the Cold War was a total war, a matter of mobilizing all resources toward demonstrating the superiority (or at least rapid ascendency) of the socialist system. Everything had to be superior to its counterpart in the West, from milk consumption to kitchen appliances, from athletics to academics. And while all of these minor competitions fed into the larger question of which socioeconomic system would eventually encompass the globe, a few matters were of existential importance for the Soviet Union. First, the “worker-owned,” non-market, planned economy had to eventually outpace its capitalist counterparts.7 And second, man, through a combination of science and society, had to be shown to be reformable, even perfectable.8 If man could not be perfected, if the stains of capitalism could not be bleached from his character, then there was little point struggling toward communism, which presupposed such a transformation. Although the perfectability of man could be demonstrated in a variety of spheres, the penal system and its correctional facilities were in a sense ground zero for proving not only that man was malleable, but also that the Soviets understood how to mold him into an honest, working, socialist man. After all, the penal system was where the greatest transformation had to occur—perevospitanie (re-education) and ispravlenie (correction) rather than just vospitanie (education/upbringing). Moreover, given their inherently repressive nature, penal institutions boasted a controlled environment where the full range of tools, both persuasive and coercive, could be applied. In addition to demonstrating the ability to reform man within the context of the Soviet socialist system, the penal system of the USSR was an appealing avenue for promotion (and investigation) for more universal reasons. As David Caute notes, the Cold War struggle for moral, ideological, and cultural supremacy was possible only because of greatly overlapping values between East and West, both founded as they were on classical European culture and the ideas of the Enlightenment.9 Such values extended to conceptions of what penal institutions were supposed to look like and how they were supposed to function. 4 L. Sheinin, “Verit' v cheloveka,” Izvestiia, January 22, 1960. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 3 vols., trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York, 1974–78), 2:147. 6 On this see, for instance, Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Baskingstoke, 1997); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); Lorenz Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, 2008); and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, England, 2005). 7 Richard B. Day, Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975 (Armonk, 1995), 8. 8 Amir Weiner, “The Empires Pay a Visit: Gulag Returnees, East European Rebellions, and Soviet Frontier Politics,” Journal of Modern History 78 (June 2006): 374. 9 Caute, Dancer Defects, 4. 5 Gulag Tourism 51 Moreover, many people of this time regardless of patriotic allegiance or political persuasion, but especially those who saw themselves as reformers, progressives, and modernizers, accepted the old adage that the true measure of a civilization is how it treats its most vulnerable members, including prisoners.10 So even without the question of how to achieve communism by means of socioeconomic and deeply personal transformations, a “progressive” penal system that treated inmates with respect and prepared them to succeed as members of a broader society could help demonstrate that the socialism of the Soviet Union in the 1950s was a humane alternative to the capitalist world. Curiously, however, while in the 1920s and early 1930s the Soviets comprehended the importance of demonstrating to the world the supremacy of their penal system, inviting thousands of foreigners to visit its prisons and labor colonies, from the late 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953, little to this end was accomplished.11 The infamous Stalinist Gulag, as hundreds of memoirs and official documents attest, not only lost sight of its proclaimed primary mission of re-educating convicts, it became shrouded in multiple layers of secrecy.12 As production and wartime concerns became paramount both within and without the Gulag, and as paranoia regarding foreigners peaked and became institutionalized during the Great Terror, the Soviet Union in essence withdrew its claim of world leadership in penal affairs.13 Rather than hearing conflicting reports on the nature of the Soviet Gulag as before, therefore, the Western world was treated almost solely to damning accounts of a murderous system of slave labor, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s.14 10 As Winston Churchill held, “the mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.” Cited in David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (Chicago, 1990), 215. 11 On the visits of the 1920s and 1930s see especially Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 3; Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (Oxford, 1981), 142–56; and Lenka Von Koerber, Soviet Russia Fights Crime (New York, 1935). See also the written account of the construction of the Belomor Canal, which served much the same purpose as the visits (Maxim Gorky, L. Auerbach, and S. G. Firin, Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea [New York 1935]). By contrast, the infamous visit of Henry A. Wallace and Owen Lattimore during World War II to Kolyma highlights how the Soviet Union particularly from the late 1930s until Stalin’s death hid rather than promoted its penal system. See Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2008), 225–82. 12 For this standard narrative of re-education largely disappearing as an aim of the Gulag in the mid-1930s (or not seriously existing in the first place), see, for instance, Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago; G. M. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, 2000); Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven, 2004); and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford, 2007). For an opposing view, which holds that re-education remained paramount throughout the Stalinist period, see Steven A. Barnes, “Soviet Society Confined: The Gulag in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan, 1930s–1950s” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). 13 On the institutionalization of antiforeigner sentiment, especially in regard to the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, chap. 8. 14 See, among many others, V. V. Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets, trans. Nicholas M. Oushakoff (Boston, 1935); I. L. Solonevich, Escape from Russian Chains: A Record of Unspeakable Suffering, trans. Warren Harrow (London, 1938); David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, 1947); Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Gold: My Life as a Slave Laborer in the Siberian Mines, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, 1949); V. A. Kravchenko, I Chose Justice (New York, 1950); and Albert Herling, The Soviet Slave Empire (New York, 1951). A few letters to the editors of British newspapers 52 Jeffrey S. Hardy Yet if the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War, then almost wholly closed to outsiders, exhibited relatively little concern for how it was perceived abroad, the Khrushchev era witnessed far greater openness to foreigners coupled with an almost paranoid insecurity regarding image control.15 Foreigners were again invited in mass numbers to the Soviet Union, Soviet delegations traveled abroad to demonstrate Soviet superiority in science, sport, and culture, and Khrushchev proclaimed a new era of “peaceful coexistence,” under which such exchanges could thrive.16 Already by 1960, Frederick Barghoorn and others were writing extensively of the “Soviet cultural offensive” that marked a new chapter in the Cold War.17 And, as part of this move toward increased (though still very limited) transparency and socioeconomic rather than military competition, the Soviet Union again lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding the Gulag and invited foreigners to personally witness the superiority of Soviet corrections. The purpose of this article is to explore visits by foreigners to two Soviet penal institutions—Moscow’s Butyrka Prison and the Kriukovo Correctional-Labor Colony— and set them within a context of Soviet penal reform and the global Cold War. Preparations for the tours, the visits themselves, and the eyewitness accounts published by foreign visitors after returning home will all be discussed in order to give a holistic account of the tours and their impact. Butyrka and especially Kriukovo represented the vision of Gulag reform in the post-Stalin era: humane treatment and re-education rather than repression and labor exploitation. As such they were presented in very similar terms to domestic, East Bloc, Third World, and Western audiences, reaffirming that domestic and foreign propaganda for the Soviets was often identical. Similar to the show prisons of the 1920s and the 1930s, the institutions visited by foreigners in the 1950s were not particularly representative of Soviet punishment generally, especially after appropriate preparations had been conducted; rather they demonstrated both an ideal type and, just as importantly, the trajectory of dynamic Gulag reform as the Soviet penal system emerged out of an admittedly more repressive era. Indeed, as the post-Stalin reforms proceeded apace in the 1950s, Kriukovo especially was becoming somewhat more representative of the penal system generally as the extensive labor camps were liquidated and living conditions generally for prisoners improved. Thus, although the sites were carefully selected and there was a certain amount of staging involved in showing Kriukovo and Butyrka, the Soviet penal system was in fact moving toward the ideal placed on display. And one of the resulting successes of the tours was that foreigners, while questioning to some extent the representativeness of what they had been shown, nonetheless came away convinced that they had been shown not “Potemkin” facades, but actual places of confinement. In the end, however, favorable reports published in the West composed by Andrei Stakhanov and law professor A. Trainin, together with a feature article in the USSR Information Bulletin, did little to stem this tide (Barnes, “Soviet Society Confined,” 366–69; “How Justice is Administered in the Soviet Union,” USSR Information Bulletin [February 25, 1952]: 129). 15 Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000), 60. 16 On this see Robert F. Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958–1975 (Bloomington, 1976); and Yale Richmond, U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958–1960: Who Wins? (Boulder, 1987). 17 Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1960). Gulag Tourism 53 could not overcome entrenched Cold War stereotypes and the lurking suspicion, supported by a steady stream of damning memoir accounts of the Stalinist (and eventually post-Stalin) Gulag and the reluctance of Soviet officials to open more institutions to foreign scrutiny, that what was placed on display was a farce rather than reality. BACKGROUND: GULAG REFORM AND INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION, 1953–60 Although not the primary focus of this article, the reform of the Gulag under Khrushchev and its intersection with Cold War competition is an important backdrop to the prison tours under discussion. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand the tours themselves or their impact beyond the Soviet Union without an understanding of the message the Soviets were attempting to convey. Shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, his heirs proclaimed a return to socialist legality aimed at removing the excesses and illegalities of the preceding two decades.18 While never resolving the fundamental tension between the rule of law and the extralegal nature of the Communist party, this campaign resulted in a host of new legal codes, a strengthened Procuracy, a better-educated corps of judges and lawyers, and renewed academic study into the nature of crime and punishment. As part of this campaign, Stalin’s heirs undertook a fundamental transformation of the Gulag, the highlights of which, especially the 1953 amnesty and the release of most political prisoners from 1954 to 1956, are already well-known.19 Through these and other early-release mechanisms Stalin’s heirs greatly reduced the size of the Gulag and the percentage of political prisoners relative to total prisoner population: the number of Gulag inmates fell from 2.47 million on January 1, 1953, to 721,899 on January 1, 1958, and the percentage of political prisoners was slashed from 21.8 percent to just 1.9 percent.20 But the post-Stalin penal reform was not only about releases; Stalin’s heirs also sought to change the qualitative experience of imprisonment. Condemning the brutality and economic orientation of the late Stalinist corrective-labor 18 As Miriam Dobson rightly points out, the campaign for a new level of socialist legality was actually initiated in 1948, but this was then altered and reinvigorated by Stalin’s heirs in 1953. See Dobson, “‘Show the Bandits No Mercy!’ Amnesty, Criminality and Public Response in 1953,” in The Dilemmas of DeStalinisation: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly A. Jones (London, 2005), 21–22. For more on the socialist legality campaign and its results see, among others, Leon Lipton, “Socialist Legality: The Road Uphill,” in Russia under Khrushchev, ed. Abraham Brumberg (New York, 1962), 434–69; John N. Hazard and Isaac Shapiro, The Soviet Legal System: Post-Stalin Documentation and Historical Commentary (Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1962); and Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009). 19 On these early post-Stalin releases see, among others, Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002); Dobson, “‘Show the Bandits No Mercy!’” 21–40; Marc Elie, “Les politiques à l’égard des libérés du Goulag: amnistiés et réhabiliés dans la region de Novosibirsk.” Cahiers du monde russe 47 (January–June 2006): 327–48; Weiner, “Empires Pay a Visit,” 333–76; and Andrei Artizov, ed., Reabilitatsiia—kak eto bylo: Dokumenty Prezidiuma TSK KPSS i drugie materialy, 3 vols. (Moscow, 2000–2004). 20 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 1, 10; ibid., d. 1427, l. 11. In a related move Stalin’s heirs released nearly all exiles and special settlers. See V. N. Zemskov, “Massovoe osvobozhdenie spetsposelentsev i ssylnykh (1954–1960gg.),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1991, no. 1:5–26. 54 Jeffrey S. Hardy camps and colonies, Khrushchev and his peers aimed to transform them into the correctional facilities that their names implied. As Kliment Voroshilov instructed Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov on February 8, 1954, “the most important thing is to pay attention not to [economic] construction but to the correction of people.”21 Or, as Kruglov’s successor and dedicated reformer Nikolai Dudorov quipped at a Gulag conference in 1958, “What could be more humane or important than the work that we perform in the matter of remaking man?”22 This correctional drive spurred the introduction of a number of concrete reforms and programs in the penal system from 1953 to 1960, many of which were put on prominent display during the Gulag tours. The “special” camps for political prisoners, distinguished by numbered uniforms and locked barracks, were transformed into regular corrective-labor camps. The Gulag greatly expanded correspondence rights and allowed visits from family members, including conjugal visits by spouses. It restored inmate-led cultural groups, organized sporting events and chess tournaments, greatly increased the frequency of movie showings, and allowed the purchase of televisions for inmate use. Emblematic of the new focus on making imprisonment more closely approximate to life outside the barbed wire, the Gulag no longer mandated prison uniforms and shaved heads. The working day was cut to eight hours and steps were taken to replace hard, unskilled labor such as mining with specialized work requiring vocational training. The Gulag began to pay wages to all working inmates. Rations were improved both in variety and in portion size, and stores boasting a wide range of food and other products appeared, as did self-service kitchens, vegetable gardens, and special “commercial” dining rooms that offered better culinary offerings than the standard mess halls. The Gulag formed self-governing institutions in each penal facility, allowing inmates to help administer many aspects of camp life. It restored both workday credits and parole, providing prisoners with specified paths toward early release. A change in the physical plant of the Gulag occurred as well. The extensive labor-camp complexes of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far North were gradually liquidated, replaced by localized networks of corrective-labor colonies designed to hold convicts in their home provinces. New “lightened-regimen” colonies were created for well-behaved inmates, and the Gulag greatly expanded and legitimized the existing practice of allowing certain prisoners to live without guard outside the barbed wire. Instructions were issued to local administrators and guards requiring them to be respectful toward inmates, which were to be viewed not as enemies of the people but as fellow citizens. Finally, increased oversight of penal facilities by the Procuracy and various local organizations resulted in a marked reduction in violence and other illegalities.23 21 A. A. Fursenko et al., eds., Prezidium Tsk KPSS, 1954–1964: Chernovye protokol'nye zapisi zasedanii, stenogrammy, postanovleniia, 3 vols. (Moscow, 2003–8), 1:21. 22 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 311, l. 9. 23 For more on these reforms see my “Khrushchev’s Gulag: The Evolution of Punishment in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union, 1953–1964” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2011), chaps. 1–3; Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, 2011), 201–53; Elie, “Les anciens détenus du Goulag: Liberations massives, réinsertion et réhabilitation dans l’URSS poststalinienne, 1953–1964” (Ph.D. Diss., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2007); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 294–97; and Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago 3:485–88. Gulag Tourism 55 This aim of re-educating convicts and preparing them for reintroduction into society, rather than simply punishing and extracting labor from them, was certainly not new to Soviet corrections. It had been trumpeted both to domestic and foreign audiences under Stalin, and the propaganda was not a wholly empty façade. Particularly in the 1920s and early 1930s many inmates benefitted from early release procedures, cultural and educational opportunities, self-governing institutions, and vocational training. As recent research by Maria Galmarini demonstrates, there were even sanctioned institutions devoted to improving prison conditions and helping prisoners gain release.24 True, the reforging (perekovka) of the 1930s, as Stephen Barnes, Julie Draskoczy, and others point out, was often a violent and subjective affair that was interpreted in various ways by local officials (and inmates).25 And much of the re-educational drive of the early Stalin era was repressed from the late 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953. Still, it is notable that nearly all of the Gulag reforms of the 1950s either expanded on existing policies and procedures or resurrected abandoned ones from the 1930s. De-Stalinization in the Gulag, therefore, was not a clean break from the past, nor was it a return to some sort of Leninist ideal; rather, it elevated one set of Stalinist practices and policies over another. Crucially for the success of the Gulag tours, however, the Soviet penal reforms of the 1950s were much more than a resurrection of early Stalinist policies; they put into practice many of the leading planks of the international prison reform movement.26 Not all penal institutions in the Soviet Union benefitted equally from the reforms of the 1950s; similar to Soviet society at large, living and working conditions for many (notably in the logging camps, which persisted into the 1960s) remained miserable, complaints about food and medical care continued, and violence by guards and low-level administrators never disappeared completely. The Gulag continued to be, after all, a penal system, plagued by the shortage of funding, lack of qualified personnel, and inherently unequal power relationships that characterize virtually all systems of imprisonment. Moreover, not all Gulag officials bought into the new mission of re-education through improved conditions, and in this they were in part supported by the continued importance placed on production figures.27 Re-education, it turned out, proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed society. Despite these challenges, however, living and working conditions for Soviet inmates by the late 1950s were considerably more tolerable than they had been a decade previously. The mortality rate of Gulag inmates, driven primarily by disease and malnourishment, was more than halved in the years following Stalin’s death, from 24 See, in this issue of Russian Review, Maria Galmarini, “Defending the Rights of Prisoners: The Story of the Political Red Cross, 1918–38.” 25 For more on the subjective nature of re-education amidst a massive re-education campaign in the early 1930s see, also in this issue of Russian Review, Julie Draskoczy, “The Put' of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal.” See also Barnes, Death and Redemption. 26 For more on this see my “The Gulag and the Penitentiary Reappraised: Post-War Penal Convergence in the United States and Soviet Union, 1950–1965,” in Rivals of the Twentieth Century: USA and USSR in Competition, ed. Eva-Maria Stolberg (forthcoming). 27 Dobson notes that the broader Soviet population was also reticent to accept the new focus on re-education in penal facilities, lobbying rather for them to remain places of retribution and isolation (Khrushchev’s Cold Summer). On this see also my “‘The Camp is Not a Resort’: The Campaign against Privileges in the Soviet Gulag, 1957–1961,” Kritika 13 (Winter 2012). 56 Jeffrey S. Hardy 0.84 percent annually in 1952 to 0.36–0.37 percent in 1957–59. Meanwhile, the number of prisoner-on-prisoner murders fell from 515 in 1954 to 115 in 1959, and incidents of banditry (organized group assaults on either fellow prisoners or guards) dropped from 410 in 1954 to just 28 in 1958.28 Although these data (especially concerning banditry) cannot be accepted at face value, their general trend is well-supported by memoirs and Procuracy reports, both of which tend to exaggerate rather than minimize violence and privation.29 The available evidence, therefore, paints a compelling picture of substantive reform. The Soviet penal reforms of the 1950s also had an international component that is vital for understanding the necessity of again showing the Gulag to foreigners. Although the majority of prisoners of war from World War II had already been repatriated by 1953, more than 18,000, most of whom had been charged with crimes, remained behind; in addition, the Soviet Gulag housed thousands of other foreign nationals convicted of a wide variety of legal infractions. These two categories combined meant that 32,465 foreigners were held in various places of confinement in the Soviet Union immediately prior to Stalin’s death.30 Through amnesties, case reviews, and negotiations with foreign governments, Stalin’s heirs quickly began the process of releasing and repatriating the vast majority of this foreign contingent. Already by January 1, 1954, the Soviet Union held only 9,749 prisoners of war along with 7,448 other foreign nationals; by January 1, 1956, those numbers had been slashed respectively to 2,884 and 701.31 Additional releases were made in 1956 as the last prisoners of war were allowed to leave.32 Although Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) reports assured the Politburo that most foreigners were grateful for their release and harbored no ill will toward the Soviet Union, once home, many of them related to the world the abhorrent living conditions and rampant abuses of the Gulag.33 Thus, even while Khrushchev was enacting substantive penal reform at home, the Soviet Gulag to which the West was being exposed was that of the 1940s and early 1950s. Although the actual reforms implemented by Stalin’s heirs in the penal sphere appear to have been motivated by internal rather than external pressures, penal officials were aware of how their system was perceived in the West and how Soviet penal demographics compared with Western prison systems. In addition to reports by recently released prisoners in the 28 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 318, l. 137; ibid., d. 2883, ll. 111, 251; and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 13, op. 1, d. 764, l. 139. 29 For Procuracy reports chronicling improving living conditions from 1953 to 1959 see GARF, f. R-8131, op. 32, dd. 2229–6399; and GARF, f. A-461, op. 12. For memoirs see, among many others, Karlo Štajner, Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, trans. Joel Agee (New York, 1988), 358–60; Ts. I. Preigerzon, Dnevnik vospominanii byvshego lagernika (1949–1955), trans. I. B. Mints (Moscow, 2005), 62–66, 178–277; Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner, trans. Ivan Jaworsky and Halya Kowalska (Edmonton, 1984), 208–347; Nadezhda Ulanovskaia and Maiia Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem'i (Moscow, 1994), 249–66, 334–56; and Karl Tobien, Dancing Under the Red Star (Colorado Springs, 2006), 256–78. 30 M. M. Zagorul'ko, ed., Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2000), 789–90, 901. 31 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 478, l. 269. 32 Ibid., d. 479, l. 307. 33 See, for instance, Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta, trans. Robert Kee (London, 1954); “Freed Yanks Tell Red Prison Camp Horrors,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1954; “Soviet Slave Market,” New York Times, April 17, 1954; Harrison E. Salisbury, “Russia Re-Viewed: The Prison Camps of Siberia,” New York Times, September 27, 1954; and John H. Noble, “Jailed American Caged in Rail Car,” New York Times, April 4, 1955. Gulag Tourism 57 foreign press and longer exposés such as Joseph Scholmer’s Vorkuta and Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, both of which were translated by the MVD into Russian for internal consumption, the Gulag during the 1950s periodically composed reports on the number of prisoners in other countries and their respective incarceration rates.34 One such document from late 1959, which reflected a steep cut in the Soviet prisoner population due to the 1959 case reviews, compared inmate figures and incarceration rates of the United States, England, France, West Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Georgia.35 While the rates of the smaller Soviet republics (which sent a portion of their inmates to Russia) were roughly equal to those of the “capitalist states,” Russia’s, at 610 per 100,000 was more than double that of West Germany and nearly six times higher than that of the United States.36 Thus, even as the Soviet Union slashed its inmate population— under Stalin the incarceration rate (not including special settlers) reached almost 1,400 per 100,000 population by the early 1950s—the MVD leadership and its superiors in the Presidium were acutely aware that the USSR remained by far the most carceral country in the world. Given the magnitude of such figures, it is not surprising that many senior justice officials in the Soviet Union in the 1950s were embarrassed by the state of their criminal justice system. In 1955 the MVD, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined an invitation to participate in the First United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, held in Geneva in September 1955, and decided that other international legal conferences must also be avoided until a new criminal code had been passed and the penal system had been sufficiently reformed. When invited in 1956 to participate in a working group in preparation for the Second UN Congress to held in 1960, Minister of Justice Gorshenin made a similar reply to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.37 Still coping with Stalin’s legacy, Soviet justice officials felt unprepared to face international gatherings of criminologists. This attitude would persist until 1960, when the decision was finally made to attend the Second UN Conference on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, held in London in August 1960, in order “to show the democratic essence of Soviet laws, [and] the high principles of socialist humanism in relation to prisoners.38 Only seven years after Stalin’s death had enough progress been made to allow Soviet officials to go abroad and defend their revamped correctional system against the slanderous reports dominating the Western media. 34 Scholmer’s and Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s books are available in translation at GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, dd. 1799–1800. 35 For more on the case reviews see Elie, “Les anciens détenus du Goulag,” 191–205. 36 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 1427, l. 104. 37 Notably, Poland and Romania were also invited to the working group, but after consulting the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to decline the invitation as well (GARF, f. R-8131, op. 32, d. 4578, l. 29). 38 Ibid., d. 6414, l. 229. They were also instructed to interrupt any pernicious remarks about the Soviet Gulag made by Western representatives and to point to the class nature of punishment in their own countries. More specifically, they were to criticize the West, and America in particular, for “racial discrimination in the prisons of the USA, corporal punishment, indeterminate sentencing, the weakness or complete absence of re-educational elements in administering criminal punishment, and so forth” (ibid., d. 6614, l. 232–33). For the official account of this conference see Second United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (New York, 1960). 58 Jeffrey S. Hardy PREPARING FOR VISITS Although Soviet justice officials remained sequestered within the USSR during the 1950s, Stalin’s heirs quickly approved another method for countering the increasing number of Western reports on the abuses of the Soviet penal system, spread largely by the very prisoners they were releasing. Just as many of the penal reforms of the 1950s drew on existing models from the 1920s and early 1930s for inspiration, so too did the solution to negative press: Khrushchev decided to re-open the Soviet penal experiment to the world. The period of absolute secrecy concerning Soviet prisons had to end; slander would be met not with silence, but with tangible proof of reform. From 1954 to 1959, dozens of foreign delegations were invited to tour the Gulag, giving the Soviet Union a chance to demonstrate to the world the professed humanity and enlightened practices of its penal sector. Yet even with conditions in penal facilities improving markedly, Soviet officials, cognizant of the uneven pace of reform across various camps and colonies and intent on demonstrating a humane alternative to both Western prisons and the Stalinist Gulag, clung to the notion that the visitors’ experiences had to be tightly controlled. This was achieved by careful selection of visitors, restrictions on which sites could be visited, and meticulous planning of the tours themselves. Thus, even though substantive change in the penal system was occurring during the 1950s, the Soviet state still insisted on highly structured and carefully planned experiences that had the potential, by raising the question of “Potemkin Villages,” of undermining their entire effort. One of the easiest ways to control the experience of visiting the Gulag and the resultant message was for the KGB to vet potential visitors and only admit those perceived as friendly to the Soviet Union.39 A large number of visitors came from the Soviet bloc (including an Izvestiia reporter in 1956), and many Western visitors were affiliated with left-wing political movements.40 There was also impetus to invite respected opinion leaders, especially those with intimate knowledge of corrections, as their expertise would lend credence to their testimonials. Even with these restrictions, however, a fairly wide variety of foreigners visited Gulag sites (see Table 1). Conservative American governors, French socialists, English lawyers, West German journalists, East German prison officials, Italian and Indian parliamentarians, and South American criminologists were all admitted. In 1957, several delegates to the World Festival of Youth and Students were given prison tours.41 While the foreign penal experts made special request to visit Soviet places of confinement, most of the nonspecialists were simply offered the opportunity to visit Kriukovo or Butyrka as one stop on their more general tourist itinerary. This practice of admitting foreigners without 39 For examples of this see RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 277, ll. 6–7; and GARF, f. R-9412 (Department of Juvenile Labor and Educational Colonies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, USSR), op. 2, d. 1, ll. 1–2. 40 The resulting Izvestiia article was the first press treatment of the Gulag in the post-Stalin era, following decades of silence on the matter. And perhaps not surprisingly, the visit and resulting report bore strong resemblance to those by foreigners. Healthy prisoners wearing civilian clothes, impeccable cleanliness, hearty meals, a well-stocked store, plenty of leisure time for reading or playing games, and the promise of early release through workday credits were all trumpeted as signs of a humane and scientific attitude toward convicts which would help lead to a time “when there will be no need for prisons in our country,” the author averred. See Val. Goltsev, “V Butyrskoi tiur'me,” Izvestiia, September 13, 1956. 41 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, ll. 78–83. Gulag Tourism 59 TABLE 1 Partial List of Foreign Visitors to the Soviet Penal System, 1954–59 Butyrka Italian Women, including lawyers English Jurists, led by John N. Pritt English Parliamentarians West German Journalists Chinese Jurists, led by Minister of Justice Shi Liang Dossio Orudi, a Brazilian Criminologist H. W. Seymour Howard, Mayor of London, and First Esquire William T. Boston Danish Editors Chinese Ministry of Social Defense Officials Hungarian Ministry of Justice Officials Delegation of French Socialist Party Foreign Participants of the 6th Congress of the International Association of Democratic Jurists Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean Jurists French Jurists Greek Lawyers North Korean MVD Officers N. Majdalani of the Lebanese Progressive Socialist Party Korean Prosecutors Delegation from UN Women’s Group (10 in all, from Bulgaria, England, Iran, Syria, Ceylon, and Belgium) Vietnamese and Mongolian MVD Officials Finnish Jurists League of Ceylon-Soviet Friendship Members French Lawyers Iranian law professor, journalist, and literature professor Society for Anglo-Soviet Friendship Members Deputy Chairman of the Ceylon Parliament and Head of the Ceylon Delegation to the World Youth Festival Chilean Delegates to the World Youth Festival Delegation of the Free-Soviet Society Italian Member of Parliament English Cooperative Workers Delegation of English Women Ida Rokhauge-Anderson, Deputy Director of the Danish Prison Administration Delegation of the International Association of Democratic Jurists West German Jurist and Communist Party Member Karl Pfannenshvarts Indian Parliamentarian Delegation of the Austrian Communist Party Hungarian Prosecutors Delegation of English Social Organizations New York State judge Samuel S. Leibowitz Minister of Justice of the Indian State of Kerala Burmese Municipal Council Members English Delegation led by Charles Irving, Mayor of Cheltenham Prison Administrators from the GDR Romanian Police Officers Vincent Hallinan W. Averell Harriman Colombian Delegation led by a Parliamentarian American Publicist Norman Cousins American Judge Abraham N. Geller and his wife American Governors and Reporters Delegation of Social-Democratic Youth from Sweden English Parliamentarian Anthony Greenwood Ben Golden and Borton Goldberger, activists of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship Bulgarian MVD Officials Kriukovo 03 JUN 1955 24 JUL 1954 20 SEP 1954 21 OCT 1954 11 MAY 1955 04 JUL 1955 16 JUL 1955 25 JUL 1955 15 SEP 1955 1956 11 JAN 1956 12 MAY 1956 15 JUN 1956 16 JUL 1956 02 AUG 16 AUG 22 AUG 07 SEP 13 SEP 1956 1956 1956 1956 1956 22 AUG 1956 21 SEP 1956 1956 20 FEB 1957 07 JUN 1957 16 JUL 1957 19 JUN 1957 21 JUN 1957 05 AUG 1957 09 AUG 1957 12 NOV 1957 Late 1957 Late 1957 Late 1957 Late 1957 Late 1957 26 NOV 1957 08 JAN 1958 23 JAN 1958 18 APR 1958 02 JUN 1958 31 JUL 1958 13 AUG 1958 08 SEP 1958 09 SEP 1958 15 NOV 1958 28 NOV 1958 11 MAY 1959 18 MAY 1959 13 JUN 1959 24 JUN 1959 29 JUN 1959 09 JUL 1959 16 JUL 1959 01 AUG 1959 19 AUG 1959 SEP 1959 SEP 1959 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, dd. 451, 464, 465, 466, 478, 480, 481, 490, 499, 505, 506; GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 319; RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, dd. 277, 312. 60 Jeffrey S. Hardy correctional expertise was not always welcomed by penal officials. On June 12, 1957, the head of the MVD’s prison department, P. S. Bulanov, complained to Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs M. N. Kholodkov both about the sheer number of visitors and their lack of experience in corrections. Many of them were not jurists or otherwise associated with penal affairs, he lamented; most recently, members of the League of Ceylon-Soviet Friendship had been given a tour even though they were bankers, engineers, and doctors.42 But despite Bulanov’s complaint the visits continued. Superiority in Soviet corrections was to be demonstrated not just to foreign specialists, but to a much broader range of policymakers and opinion leaders. More restrictive than the process of vetting potential visitors was the list of sites available for visitation. In order to control as best as possible the impressions of their guests, the MVD coordinated tours of basically four institutions out of the approximately 2,500 prisons, corrective-labor colonies, and corrective-labor camp subdivisions: the Kriukovo Corrective-Labor Colony and Butyrka Prison, which will comprise the focus of the present paper (along with a solitary foreign visit to the Tula Corrective-Labor Colony), the Iksha Juvenile Labor Colony, and, from 1954 to 1956, the camps holding Japanese prisoners of war.43 Contact by foreigners with other prisons or prisoners was to be avoided. The Provincial Party Commission of Crimea in 1956, for instance, complained that deconvoyed prisoners were wandering around Simferopol, a city that had a number of tourists and foreigners. The MVD responded by changing the local corrective-labor colony from a lightened-regimen (minimum-security in U.S. penal parlance) to a standard-regimen (medium-security) institution to limit the number of de-convoyed prisoners.44 Similarly, in 1959 the U.S. military attaché requested permission for two American diplomats to visit the northern mining city of Vorkuta. MVD boss Dudorov responded to the Central Committee that there were prisoners and guards everywhere in the region, even in the middle of Vorkuta itself. For this reason both he and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested that Vorkuta be kept off-limits to foreigners.45 One might think that allowing foreigners to see prisoners outside the barbed wire would emphasize the humane correctionalism the Soviet Union was promoting, but two concerns proved overriding. First, Soviet authorities feared potential unscripted, even criminal, behavior by de-convoyed prisoners. Perhaps more importantly, though, in light 42 Ibid., l. 66. The list in Table 1 is no doubt incomplete, especially regarding visits to Kriukovo. Whereas the prison administration files include an extensive though not exhaustive list of visitors from 1955 to 1959, no such document exists (at least to my knowledge) in the Gulag records for Kriukovo, which no doubt received many more visitors than listed above. The purpose of this chart, therefore, is not to chronicle every visit to Soviet penal institutions in the mid-to-late 1950s, but to illustrate the variety of groups and individuals that were invited to tour Butyrka and Kriukovo. 43 On January 1, 1954, there were 2,221 camp subdivisions and colonies and 588 prisons; two years later those figures stood at 1,922 and 412 (GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 478, ll. 264, 267; A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, eds., GULAG: Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, 1917–1960 [Moscow, 2000], 166). The only other visit to the Tula Colony of which I am aware occurred in May 1961 and is detailed in D. Nikolaev, “Glazami inostrantsev,” K novoi zhizni, 1961, no. 7:10. For visits to Iksha see GARF, f. R-9412, op. 2, d. 1. On visits to the camps holding Japanese POWs see GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 464, ll. 8, 512–16; and ibid, d. 466, ll. 150– 54, 189–92. 44 Tsentral'nii derzhavnii arkhiv gromads'kikh ob'ednan' Ukraini (TsDAGO), f. 1, op. 24, d. 4300, l. 261–64. 45 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 506, ll. 16–17. Gulag Tourism 61 of sensationalized estimates of the Soviet prisoner population found in the West, Khrushchev and the MVD sought to dispel the notion that the Soviet Union was a giant prison camp. Thus, while Khrushchev sought to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet penal system, the vast majority of the Gulag was to remain, as under Stalin, out of sight. That does not mean that the sites visited were “Potemkin villages” in the strictest sense of the term: empty façades set up purely for show. As approved stops for foreign tours they were certainly demonstration or model institutions, although MVD documents never refer to either as pokazatel'nyi, variously translated as “demonstration” or “show,” or obratsovyi, meaning “model.” But it cannot be ignored that both Kriukovo and Butyrka were functioning places of confinement, even if they could not be considered typical. Built in the late nineteenth century on the site of a previous prison-fortress and thoroughly remodeled after World War II, Butyrka was the largest of Moscow’s prisons. In 1954 it contained 380 cells, 76 investigatory rooms, 22 punishment cells, and a hospital with 140 beds. With an official capacity of 3,000 prisoners (at 2.5m2 per prisoner of living space), it held 2,136 inmates on April 3, 1954, and 3,036 on May 4, 1956; staffing in 1954 stood at 785.46 As with most Soviet prisons, Butyrka was not primarily a prison in the Western sense, but rather a jail or remand prison, where suspects were held and investigated in pretrial detention. It did, however, hold small numbers of convicted inmates awaiting execution along with dozens of convicted prisoners who serviced the prison. In its function, therefore, Butyrka in the 1950s was typical of Soviet prisons. In other respects, however, it was fairly atypical. First, it was an enormous prison, holding thousands of inmates rather than the couple hundred or fewer that most of the hundreds of local prisons held. Second, it received better funding than other prisons, despite the economies of scale that could have been achieved in such a massive institution. A survey of eleven large prisons conducted in 1958 found that Butyrka had the highest expenditures at 20.71 rubles per inmate per day, against an average of 15.36 rubles.47 It appears likely, therefore, that Butyrka, whether due to its location in central Moscow or its availability for foreign visits, was kept in somewhat better conditions than the average prison. Finally, Butyrka was atypical due to its notorious reputation both inside Russia and abroad. Indeed, along with its convenient location, its reputation may have prompted the MVD to select Butyrka as its “demonstration” facility for pre-trial detention. Where better to show that reform had occurred than inside one of the historical symbols of repression in Russia? After sentencing, the vast majority of offenders in the Soviet Union were sent not to prison but to a corrective-labor camp or corrective-labor colony and it was at one such colony, Kriukovo, that foreigners could become acquainted with the details of their longterm incarceration. The Kriukovo Corrective-Labor Colony, officially referred to as Camp Subdivision No. 2 of Moscow Province up to 1957, and Corrective-Labor Colony No. 2 of Moscow Province thereafter, was located some forty kilometers north of Moscow in what would later become Zelenograd. Originally founded in 1922 as a house of correction (ispravdom), Kriukovo in the 1930s was an open colony (without walls or fences and with only minimal guarding) occasionally shown to foreigners.48 Between 1954 and 1959 its 46 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 185, l. 116; ibid., d. 198, l. 15. GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 1. 48 Von Koerber, Soviet Russia Fights Crime, 185–93. 47 62 Jeffrey S. Hardy inmate population, by then enclosed by perimeter fencing, fluctuated between 880 and 1,070, most of whom had been convicted of minor crimes and were serving sentences ranging from one to ten years.49 It featured a living zone with three two-story dormitories, a number of outbuildings (kitchen, club, store, administrative building, and so forth), and an attached production zone comprised of six buildings where prisoners produced various items such as aluminum dishes and automobile oil filters.50 Unlike Butyrka, Kriukovo was virtually unknown in the West, raising immediate and legitimate concerns among Western visitors about its typicality. It was certainly not Vorkuta or Kolyma, both well-known labor camp sites. So why was Kriukovo selected, and how typical was it? It must first be noted that it would have been incredibly difficult logistically to show a large labor camp to multitudes of foreigners because of their distant location. There simply was no equivalent of Kolyma within driving distance of Moscow. Second, the Soviets were in the process of shuttering their labor camps in favor of localized correctivelabor colonies such as Kriukovo, a process they intended to complete by 1960. Since the point of the tours was not to show what punishment had looked like under Stalin, but what it was becoming, the MVD had little incentive to show off the remaining camps. True, the camps did not disappear as quickly as planned; from 1953 to 1956 approximately 65–70 percent of Gulag inmates were held in the camps, and by 1959 that figure had been lowered only to around 40 percent due to the persistence of the logging camps.51 The better-known mining camps of Vorkuta, Norilsk, Karaganda, and Kolyma, however, were replaced by small networks of colonies. The Kolyma camp complex, for instance, which housed around 150,000 inmates in early 1953, was liquidated in 1957; by early 1959 only 10,000 prisoners remained in the corrective-labor colonies that replaced it.52 Thus, when the Gulag tourism of the 1950s began only a minority of Soviet inmates were housed in institutions like Kriukovo, but by the late 1950s the colonies held a slight majority of all prisoners. But typicality cannot be measured by the type of institution alone; the hundreds of colonies in the Soviet Union were not all alike, differing in terms of living conditions and inmate demographics. Regarding the latter, colonies were assigned a security regimen— lightened, standard, or strict—based on the type of crimes, number of crimes, and sentence lengths of inmates. As a standard-regimen colony, the most common type, Kriukovo in its mix of prisoners and level of security was fairly typical among Khrushchev-era correctivelabor colonies. With respect to living and working conditions, colonies in general were better kept than the camps, but even among the hundreds of colonies conditions varied widely. Those in European Russia and the western republics were generally in better condition than those in Asiatic Russia and Central Asia, and those in urban environments usually boasted better living and working conditions than those in the countryside. This 49 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, ll. 86, 194, 286; ibid., d. 465, ll. 90, 239, 281; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 52; RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 312, l. 35. 50 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 52. 51 Ibid., d. 1398, l. 1; ibid., d. 1427, l. 132–33. On the logging camps see Judith Pallot, “Forced Labour for Forestry: The Twentieth Century History of Colonisation and Settlement in the North of Perm' Oblast',” EuropeAsia Studies 54 (November 2002): 1055–83. 52 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 747, l. 113; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Magadanskoi oblasti (GAMO), f. R-137, op. 16, d. 58, l. 15. Gulag Tourism 63 was due not only to better climactic conditions and a higher level of development in general, but also to the ability to attract and retain higher-caliber personnel. In this regard Kriukovo was at a significant advantage due to its proximity to Moscow. Moreover, although there is no evidence beyond the preparations discussed below that Kriukovo was administered differently because of its status as a “show” colony, it seems likely that just as Butyrka was able to spend more per prisoner, so too was Kriukovo endowed with greater financial resources than the typical corrective-labor colony. One could reasonably expect, therefore, that Kriukovo inmates enjoyed cleaner facilities, newer equipment, better medical care, more devotion to re-education, and more professional guards and administrators than the average Soviet penal institution. Thus, Kriukovo was certainly not a typical penal institution in the mid-1950s, and even in the late 1950s it could not be considered particularly representative due to its proximity to Moscow and its status as suitable for foreign visitors. Without doubt it presented a more favorable picture of Soviet imprisonment than what would have been gleaned from a visit to one of the large corrective-labor camps. Even with the visitors and sites preselected, the MVD went to considerable trouble to prepare for each visit. Prior to each tour a meticulous plan would be drafted, approved, and then sent to the warden of Butyrka or Kriukovo. A checklist of preparatory activities was fairly standard in such reports. A 1956 plan for Butyrka, for instance, required the warden to conduct a thorough cleaning of the facilities, provide new clothing and bedding to the prisoners where needed, and isolate the worst inmates in other prisons in the city. In addition, on the day of the visit, the number of prisoners and staff moving around the prison was to be reduced to a minimum to give an impression of well-kept order.53 Similarly, more than a month prior to the July 9, 1959, visit to Kriukovo by American governors and reporters, officials were ordered to bring the roads to the colony and the surrounding area into order, to repair a broken water pipe, and to perform minor remodeling to the club, dining hall, school, and one of the prisoner barracks. They were instructed to organize a volunteer workday among the prisoners to clean up the colony, change out all the visual propaganda, replenish the library with books (especially foreign-language literature), and acquire food and other products to stock the colony store. The worst prisoners were to be sent to work on construction sites for the day, and the seven female staffers were to be given the day off. Although such plans may sound as if deception was the goal, this is true only to a certain extent. It must be remembered that virtually all institutions conducted similar routines in preparation for inspections, be they internal or external.54 In addition to general housecleaning items, tour plans often provided a step-by-step description of how the tour should proceed. In fact, on May 3, 1956, Dudorov approved a standardized 11-point plan for showing Kriukovo to foreign delegations, which began by pointing out that “Deputy Commander of the GULAG MVD USSR comrade Shchekin (in 53 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 17. In this regard I can bring my own past experience in retail management to bear: visiting corporate guests and regional managers invariably saw a somewhat cleaner store and more friendly associates than the average customer could expect. Not surprisingly, the United States played similar games with visiting Soviet delegations during the Cold War. To cite just one amusing anecdote from Khrushchev’s visit to America, Marilyn Monroe was asked to wear her “tightest, sexiest dress” to a Hollywood luncheon with Khrushchev and to leave her husband at home. Cited in William Taubman. Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003), 430. 54 64 Jeffrey S. Hardy civilian garb) will accompany by vehicle the delegation from their hotel in Moscow to the camp subdivision,” and then instructing that The warden of the camp subdivision, Major Gromov, will meet the delegation at the gate of the camp subdivision and lead them into his office. In the office the warden of the camp subdivision comrade Gromov will begin a discussion with the delegation with the question, “What would the delegation like to become acquainted with while visiting the camp subdivision?”—and will give preliminary information on the fundamental tenets of the corrective-labor policies of the Soviet Union. He will point out that labor lies at the basis of the re-education of convicts. Every prisoner must work. ... [and so on for several sentences] The discussion with the delegation should have an active character, it should not only answer questions that interest members of the delegation, but willingly tell them about the humane attitude of the Soviet state toward convicts. It should also, in turn, question the delegates about how the re-education of criminals is organized in their country.55 The remaining points detail for each stop on the tour what information the delegation should be told, from the prisoners’ unlimited and uncensored correspondence rights to the recent production achievements of the best workers in the colony. Tours were thus heavily scripted and conversations were designed to invite comparisons with Western prisons. Plans for Butyrka included less explicit detail on how the tours were to be conducted but often featured extensive lists of anticipated questions along with appropriate, if not always truthful, answers. These lists are remarkable for a few reasons. First, they show an obsession with projecting a penal system that was much smaller than it actually was and with downplaying or refusing to admit the presence of counterrevolutionary (political) prisoners. Second, most information outside these two areas of concern was honestly provided to foreigners; in terms of policy and to some extent practice, after all, the Khrushchev-era penal system had much to recommend it to a worldwide audience. Finally, there is evidence in the documents of uncertainty among Soviet officials on how much to divulge to visitors. Gulag administrators struggled to define the boundaries of secrecy as they moved toward limited openness regarding penal affairs. They were keen to demonstrate substantive reform from the Stalinist era and even superiority in their treatment of inmates in contrast to the West, but they were also acutely aware that the continued legacies of the previous decades could leave visitors with a negative impression if fully admitted. They were thus left negotiating a fine line between honesty and authenticity on the one hand, and deceit and disbelief on the other. A plan from 1955 on how Butyrka should prepare for a visit by H. W. Seymour Howard, the mayor of London, demonstrates these tensions. If he inquired as to the number of prisoners, prison officials were to respond that although there was space for 1,700 inmates, the prison only held 1,232 at that time (the actual figures were 3,000 and around 2,000). If asked what types of crimes they were in for, the correct—and honest—response was a variety of offenses, including hooliganism, theft, and (perhaps surprisingly) murder. Even more astonishing, the original document allowed the admission that “there is also a small 55 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, ll. 52–55. Gulag Tourism 65 number of prisoners brought in for political crimes (spies),” but this line was crossed out before the document was approved. Similarly, if queried as to the presence of death row inmates, the prison staff was to admit that there were several murderers awaiting execution; again, however, this admission is crossed out and the word “no” is written in the margin. Regarding prisoners beyond Butyrka Prison, Howard was to be given an artificially lowered figure for Moscow Province, but the chaperones were not to divulge any sense of the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union at large. Outside of matters related to inmate statistics, political prisoners, and capital punishment, the given answers were true. On living conditions, Howard was to be honestly told that prisoners enjoyed 3–4m2 of living space. In addition, the document instructed officials to give the “actual” caloric data for rations and add that prisoners could purchase additional provisions at the prison store. Finally, if asked about prison labor, officials were to truthfully answer that investigatory prisoners did not work, but some prisoners who had already been sentenced were retained to help service the prison; their labor was compensated, Howard was to be informed, and they were eligible for parole and workday credits.56 Similar to the 1955 document, a May 1956 plan for the visit of French socialists to Butyrka included a similar list of possible questions and the appropriate answers. On the numbers of prisoners, guests were to be informed that the prison held 2,000, even though the actual figure by that point was 3,036. Interestingly, in its report to the Central Committee on this visit, the prison department related that the delegation was provided with a figure of 1,200 rather than 2,000. Thus, either the appropriate response was modified downward after the report was issued, or else the prison department lied to the Central Committee. Either scenario seems plausible. The visitors were to be told if they asked about social classes and ages of prisoners that they came from all classes—workers, peasants, the service class, and, surprisingly enough, recidivist thieves—and that they were mostly from 30–45 in age. This last figure is interesting because it is obviously false: most inmates in the Soviet Union, as in the West, fell into the 18–30 age bracket.57 Admitting as much, however, was problematic because the Soviet Union was intent on promoting the inherent socialist morality of its youth.58 But again, not all was deceit; in fact, if queried about counterrevolutionary criminals, prison officials were to frankly admit that there used to be some in Butyrka, but they had been sent to the camps.59 Thus, even as the number of prisoners was artificially lowered, the presence of political prisoners in the Gulag was confirmed. Interestingly, not all delegations were to be lied to regarding prisoner demographics. Many visitors came from within the East Bloc and some were policemen or penal officials 56 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, ll. 7, 13–14. On January 1, 1959, for instance, 62.6 percent of all prisoners were under the age of 30 (Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG, 218). 58 Allen Kassof, The Soviet Youth Program: Regimentation and Rebellion (Cambridge, MA, 1965), 24–31. See also Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010). 59 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, ll. 15–19. According to a guide who frequently accompanied foreigners on their excursions to Butyrka, all inquired about political prisoners “even though they all know from speeches by the head of the Soviet government N. S. Khrushchev that there are not any political prisoners in the Soviet Union.” See N. Gladkikh, “Amerikanskii iurist govorit: ‘To, chto Ia uvidel, menia porazilo,’” K novoi zhizni, 1960, no. 1:72. 57 66 Jeffrey S. Hardy who came explicitly for training. As such they were treated differently from guests from the West or from developing countries. In instructions concerning a visit by Ministry of Social Defense officials from China, the prison staff at Butyrka was told to provide actual figures for prisoners and guards.60 Nor were such delegations necessarily limited to Butyrka and Kriukovo. A 1959 delegation of Bulgarian MVD officers, in addition to the standard sites, was given access to two Moscow Province jails, the Mozhaisk Corrective-Labor Colony for women, and all the Leningrad corrective-labor colonies.61 To such foreigners practical concerns of governance took precedence over demonstrating the superiority of socialism, which was a given. Thus, even as the Soviets attempted to demonstrate to the West the extent of reform, security service visitors from the East Bloc were presented a much more complicated picture. Even they, however, were kept from the labor camps in favor of urban colonies in European Russia. RECEIVING GUESTS With preparations in place and answers to potential questions learned, the tours could commence. Foreign delegations were usually accompanied by high-ranking Gulag officials dressed in civilian garb; indeed, all officers except the warden were to wear civilian attire on tour days, likely to give the impression that they were not aloof from the prisoners but actively engaged in their re-education.62 In addition to MVD officers, there were sometimes other chaperones, including officials from the Ministry of Justice, the Procuracy, the Supreme Soviet, and the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.63 As noted in the instructions provided above, at the beginning of the tour it was typical to have a lengthy discussion, often lasting an hour or so, on the USSR’s corrective-labor principles, paying special attention to the issue of re-education.64 They would also discuss the contingent of prisoners and other specificities of the detention facility they were touring. After this discussion the visitors would be led on a tour of the institution, which for Kriukovo included a dormitory, the 500-seat club, the library, the dining rooms and kitchen, the store, the hospital, a visitation room, the locker room, the bathhouse, and the workshops.65 At Butyrka the tour typically featured several cells with prisoners, the reception room, the investigatory rooms, the kitchen, bathhouse, hospital, library, store, and the exercise yards.66 Some tours were even allowed, upon request, to see the isolation cells, and beginning in 1956 the MVD began to show off the new prison workshop, where prisoners could receive a small wage and begin their process of re-education, and a room devoted to cultural and educational pursuits.67 By 1959 the visits to Kriukovo for some guests also included unstructured time when the visitors could meander around the colony, talk with prisoners 60 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 12. Ibid., ll. 171–72. 62 Ibid., l. 169. 63 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 465, ll. 89, 91. 64 See, for instance, ibid., d. 451, l. 86; and GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 35. 65 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, l. 86. 66 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 14. 67 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 480, l. 135; ibid., d. 481, l. 330; GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 16. 61 Gulag Tourism 67 or guards, and look into any building they pleased without the constant presence of a chaperone.68 The actual tour of the facilities usually lasted two or three hours, although it could be shortened or lengthened depending on the guests’ other obligations.69 One group of South American jurists spent nearly eight hours at Kriukovo!70 Perhaps surprisingly, photography was usually allowed at both Butyrka and Kriukovo.71 The details of the tour, both physically and conversationally, largely followed the scripts penned by the MVD. Delegates often took special interest in the library, asking questions about the number of books (there were 4,500 at Kriukovo in 1954 and 12,000 at Butyrka in 1955), and expressing approval of the readers’ conferences organized among the prisoners and the amount of foreign literature available which was, of course, tailored to the nationality of the guests.72 A Chinese delegation inspecting Kriukovo in 1955 could even find the classics of Chinese literature.73 The medical section was usually pronounced exemplary.74 In the kitchen guests could review the menu for the week and were always asked—and few refused—to sample the food being prepared for the inmates. Without exception they proclaimed it to be tasty and healthy.75 The quantity of products in the stores surprised guests; a Japanese jurist even bought a pouch of tobacco (makhorka) from the Butyrka store.76 While inspecting the visitation rooms, guests often expressed astonishment at the availability of multi-day conjugal visits, a unique feature of the Soviet penal system at the time that penal reformers in the West had long advocated.77 Visitors thought highly of self-governing organizations such as the activists councils and often requested (likely with some prompting) to meet with the activist council head.78 Many were shown musical concerts put on by prisoners, others watched chess matches or sporting events.79 Finally, as labor was viewed as “the primary education of convicted criminals,” the prison or colony workshop was the centerpiece of the tour.80 Its importance is stressed in the plan to prepare Kriukovo for an afternoon visit in 1959. Prisoners that day were to start work only at noon and were to be finished with lunch by 2:00 P.M. (meaning that the 68 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 160. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, ll. 198, 290; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 37. 70 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 481, l. 65. Similarly, Hans Ulrich Kempski spent five hours in Kriukovo (GARF, f. R-9414, op. 3, d. 96, l. 357). 71 West German journalists visiting Kriukovo in 1955 were told not to photograph, but one got away with just a warning after snapping a picture of the colony. Most, it appears, were not given such restrictions, however (GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 465, l. 93, and d. 466, l. 129; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 3. d. 96, l. 356; GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, ll. 14, 17). See also the few photographs accompanying Leibowitz’s article and photographs of the Tula Corrective-Labor Colony taken by Marceau Pivert, available at http://histoiresociale.univ-paris1.fr/Voyages/Toulacadre.htm. (last accessed March 23, 2010). 72 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, ll. 87, 194, 288; ibid., d. 465, l. 88; ibid., d. 466, l. 127; ibid., d. 481, ll. 64, 331. 73 Ibid., d. 465, l. 240. 74 Ibid., d. 481, l. 331. 75 Ibid., d. 451, l. 196; ibid., d. 465, ll. 87, 93, 279; ibid., d. 466, l. 127; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 203, ll. 130–43. 76 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, l. 287; ibid., d. 465, l. 96; ibid., d. 466, l. 128; ibid., d. 480, l. 310. 77 Ibid., d. 451, l. 196; GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 203, ll. 130–43. 78 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, ll. 197–98; ibid., d. 465, l. 282; ibid., d. 466, l. 125, 127. 79 Ibid., d. 465, l. 93; ibid., d. 466, l. 129; ibid., d. 478, l. 215. 80 Ibid., d. 451, l. 195. 69 68 Jeffrey S. Hardy work day would continue until 9:00 P.M.). Gulag officials apparently wanted the prisoners to be not just working during the afternoon visit, but having the appearance that the work was relatively easy and interesting. A late start and late lunch would ensure they were neither tired nor hungry when the delegation arrived.81 During the tours visitors were allowed, even encouraged, to talk with any of the prisoners, even, at least from 1956 onward, death-row inmates in Butyrka.82 They often asked inmates about their crimes, sentence length, family situation, perspective for release, and the quality of life in the colony or prison. Although there is no documentation to this effect, it is certain that Gulag officials warned prisoners how to behave and interact with the foreign guests. And for the most part they dutifully played the part. An English delegation in 1954 spoke with prisoner Sidorov, who told them about his vocational training and the money he was able to earn and send home to his family, and prisoner Kalashnikov, who was excited to be freed the following month through a combination of workday credits and parole after serving just over three years of his ten-year sentence.83 In a moment that must have especially pleased Gulag officials, a Kriukovo inmate in 1954 asked a group of English parliamentarians what they were doing to bring about the reunification of Germany.84 Prisoners being prisoners (and Soviet planning being Soviet planning), however, there were unexpected responses. Danish newspaper editors in 1955 actually found one prisoner at Kriukovo, Popov, who had been sentenced under Article 58–10 of the Russian criminal code to ten years imprisonment for anti-Soviet propaganda. Popov confessed his guilt to the foreigners, but said his sentence was too harsh and he had therefore requested a case review to get it reduced.85 In 1956 an inmate at Butyrka complained to the group of French socialists about the length of his sentence.86 Perhaps more shockingly for the MVD, a Kriukovo prisoner in 1956 approached a visiting Chilean jurist and handed him a note, asking that it be passed on personally to Voroshilov. At the end of the visit, however, the note, a plea to let the inmate’s mother live in the Moscow Province village of Shcherbinka, was simply handed over to the MVD hosts with the request that it go to its intended destination.87 Thus, while not all interactions with prisoners went according to plan, none were too damaging to the controlled message sought by the MVD. At the end of the tour, visitors were usually invited to a meal and conversation in the warden’s office. The post-tour meal at Kriukovo in 1959 was a luscious spread that included caviar, sturgeon, and vodka, along with coffee and cake.88 It was also customary at the conclusion of the meal for the warden and sometimes a delegation of prisoners to present visitors with gifts, usually products made in the colony or prison workshop.89 Leibowitz, 81 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, l. 167. Ibid., l. 16. 83 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, l. 196. In the redacted report sent to Khrushchev these details were summarized in the formulation that the prisoners all gave good answers to questions posed by the foreigners “in the spirit of Soviet patriotism” (GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 203, l. 137). 84 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, l. 288. 85 Ibid., d. 466, l. 128. 86 Ibid., d. 480, l. 135. 87 Ibid., d. 481, l. 65. 88 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 160. 89 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 466, l. 94; ibid., d. 481, l. 65. 82 Gulag Tourism 69 for instance, received flowers from the prisoners and “a prison-made tea kettle and a chafing dish” from the warden.90 The MVD clearly knew how to make a good final impression. And, true to script, at this point the delegates usually expressed gratitude to their hosts, an exercise often accompanied by high praise for the visited institution and explicit comparisons with their home institutions. A British politician was recorded to have expressed pleasant surprise at “the absence of bars in the colony, and the free, unguarded movement of the prisoners.”91 Others were delighted with “the system of re-educating prisoners, the humane relations with the prisoners, and the free, unforced manner of address of the former to the administration.”92 A Swedish parliamentarian with close knowledge of his country’s penal system reportedly praised the system of vocational training and the requirement that all prisoners work, noting that no equivalent could be found in Swedish institutions.93 Italian women expressed great delight with Kriukovo, noting that Italy could boast of nothing similar and promising to tell about the “incredible reforging of people” that was achieved there through labor.94 The French socialist Marceau Pivert reportedly declared that “the Soviet Union in matters of corrective-labor policy is at the avant-garde of other countries.”95 Japanese jurists reported that their jails did not preserve the dignity of man like Butyrka did, while their Greek counterparts claimed that as Greek prisons were aimed “at destruction,” they could not even compare to the Soviet re-educational institutions.96 A Lebanese politician, after condemning his own prison system, remarked of the prisoners in Butyrka that “he saw joyful expressions on their faces and faith in the future in their eyes.”97 Similarly, a Belgian jurist also noted that in all her experience with prisons she had “never seen on the faces of prisoners the expression of such joy of life as we saw in the Butyrka prison.”98 A French lawyer touring Butyrka in 1957 went so far as to say “he would not be against committing a small crime in order to land in this prison.” In return, he was graciously told that for a small crime he would not end up in prison at all.99 In a more tempered response, French jurists said that conditions in Butyrka were comparable to prisons in Paris, except that French inmates did not have televisions, movies, or comparable medical care.100 Only Seymour Howard, mayor of London whose responsibilities included prison inspections, completed a (rushed) tour without remarking how much he was impressed with Butyrka.101 THE FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR While laudatory comments made by foreign visitors during visits to Butyrka and Kriukovo certainly pleased the MVD and other Soviet officials, the real justification for the tours 90 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 160. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 451, l. 198. 92 Ibid., l. 289. 93 Ibid., d. 465, l. 95. 94 Ibid., d. 451, l. 87. 95 GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 37. 96 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 480, l. 311. 97 Ibid., d. 481, l. 271. 98 Ibid., l. 331. 99 GARF, f. R-9413, op. 1, d. 198, ll. 74–75. 100 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 481, l. 165. 101 Ibid., d. 465, l. 279. 91 70 Jeffrey S. Hardy came in the form of favorable accounts in the Western press. Delegates who visited various areas of the Soviet criminal justice system were constantly admonished to “be objective” in how they reported their findings back home.102 By “objective,” of course, Soviet officials meant for their guests to publish what they had actually seen and heard during their strictly regulated visits, not what they may have heard or deduced about the rest of the penal system. Far from all published the details of their visit to Butyrka or Kriukovo. The editor of Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, for instance, wrote several favorable articles about his visit to USSR, but never mentioned his trip to Kriukovo.103 Likewise, a group of American governors was silent on their visit to Kriukovo after returning home.104 And West German photojournalist Rainer M. Wallisfurth apologized for not expounding on the Soviet penal system, considering his visit to Kriukovo insufficient material for delving into such a contentious subject.105 Here the Soviet propaganda machine appears to have failed. While they may have been impressed with their visit to Kriukovo, many visitors likely (and rightly) assumed that what was presented to them was at best incomplete. With only limited and highly structured exposure, they could not be sure that what they were shown was real. More damaging than silence, at least one prominent guest, Henri Dusart from the French socialist delegation, penned a less-than-favorable report in Le Populaire of their visit to the Tula corrective-labor colony. Although Dusart noted many of the standard tour talking points—the library, sports, films, workday credits, wages, sufficient food supplement by the store, and conjugal visits—he did so unenthusiastically. Moreover, he sarcastically referred to the colony as a country house (maison de campagne), bemoaned their hosts’ refusal to take them to Vorkuta or another large labor camp, and noted that the film the prisoners were watching on the day of the visit depicted two men engaged in a brutal fight in a swamp. “Re-education through homeopathy, of some sort,” Dusart pointedly remarked. Finally, a full one-third of Dusart’s article mockingly detailed the criminal record of a few inmates with whom the French socialists conversed, highlighting the idiocy and harshness of Soviet laws.106 The attacks were vicious enough to warrant a retort in Pravda, one of the few mentions of foreign visitors to the Gulag in the Soviet press, which accused the socialist delegation of spreading malicious lies and charged that instead of viewing the achievements of socialism, they had only wanted to visit a prison and corrective-labor colony, along with some old sections of Moscow.107 The majority of visitors who did publish their impressions of the Soviet Gulag, however, gave the “objective” report that Soviet officials sought. Likely the first publication to 102 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 147, 152; GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 465, l. 94. See, for instance, Norman Cousins, “Interview with a Soviet Official,” Saturday Review (August 1, 1959): 10–11, 32–34. 104 They did, however, characterize the Soviet legal system as “an adjunct of the political system, [which] is used as a means to establish, to maintain and to perpetuate the communist government in Russia.” See Proceedings of the Governors’ Conference, 1959 (Chicago, 1959), 24. 105 Rainer Maria Wallisfurth, Sowjetunion: Kurz belichtet (Munich, 1955), ii. 106 Henri Dusart, “Visite à un ‘camp de correction par le travail,’” Le Populaire, June 4, 1956. The official report submitted to the Central Committee on the French socialist visit to Tula, however, noted that the prisoners “behaved honorably and with restraint and did not make any complaints about the incorrectness of their sentences” (GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 255, l. 36). 107 “Za vzaimoponimanie i sotrudnichestvo v mezhdunarodnom rabochem dvizhenii,” Pravda, July 28, 1956. 103 Gulag Tourism 71 emerge from the visits of foreigners to the post-Stalin Gulag was D. N. Pritt’s “Prisons in the USSR,” printed in the Anglo-Soviet Journal, an unabashedly pro-Soviet publication. Recipient of the International Stalin Peace Prize in 1954 and former Labour MP who had been expelled for his defense of the Soviet invasion of Finland, Pritt had previously visited and extolled the superiority of the USSR’s prisons in the 1930s, and his 1954 visit only confirmed his earlier impressions.108 The prisoners at Kriukovo, he wrote, enjoyed a spacious and well-equipped “wide open” institution, watched by only five unarmed (at least during the day) guards. (Here there appears to have been some deception or at least misunderstanding; while internal guards [nadzirateli] were indeed few in number and unarmed in Gulag institutions, standard-regimen colonies such as Kriukovo had armed guards monitoring the fenced perimeter.) They enjoyed good working conditions—some even worked without guard outside the colony—and received a full 80 percent of the wages of free workers (the standard prisoner wage was in fact only 50 percent that of free workers). During their ample leisure time they pursued their education or vocational training; they had television, movies, and 4,000 books, as well as various cultural circles. They earned workday credits which provided for early release, they often received sentence reductions, and many were paroled before their term expired. Prisoners were on cordial terms with the colony administrators, who took a keen interest in the well-being of their wards. And the MVD official who accompanied them, Pritt continued, “talked to [the inmates] in a most friendly fashion, asking after their particular problems and anxieties, and encouraging them in many ways.” Visits, including conjugal visits, were frequent, prisoners enjoyed a wellstocked store, they sent money home to their families, and they had the right to complain to various authorities. In sum, Pritt concluded, the Soviet penal system is imbued with “a wholesome mixture of plain humanity and plain common sense. ... Nothing is done to degrade or dehumanize the prisoners; nor is there any sentimental coddling.” This was for Pritt a model penal institution for global emulation, not “what the slanderers of the Soviet Union call a concentration camp, where—they tell us—a man may not call his soul his own, nor indeed his body.”109 The MVD, understandably thrilled by this article, swiftly translated it in full into Russian and sent it to the Central Committee.110 A similar report of the Soviet penal system was presented to the American public several years later by Vincent Hallinan, a left-wing lawyer and onetime Progressive party presidential candidate who visited Butyrka Prison in 1959, having previously sat in a U.S. federal prison for tax evasion and for a contempt citation stemming from his defense of labor leader Harry Bridges.111 After reciting the many progressive aspects of Soviet penal policy, Hallinan described his visit to the prison: televisions, a movie theater, ubiquitous radios, a library staffed by six librarians (an atypically large number for Khrushchev-era penal institutions), dormitory life rather than solitary confinement, lockers for personal belongings, an impressive hospital with free medical care, a store for purchases, and food 108 D. N. Pritt, “The Russian Legal System,” in Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia, ed. Margaret I. Cole (London, 1933), 160–64. 109 D. N. Pritt, “Prisons in the USSR,” Anglo-Soviet Journal 15 (Winter 1954): 2–7. 110 GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 464, ll. 100–102. 111 For his memories of and thoughts on the U.S. penal system see Vincent Hallinan, A Lion in Court (New York, 1963). 72 Jeffrey S. Hardy of the same standard as “the Ukraine Hotel, the swankiest in the Soviet Union.” The lone critique Hallinan leveled was the small size of the exercise yards, a point that his hosts acknowledged with the (false, it turns out) promise that Butyrka would soon be replaced with a more modern facility. Similar to Pritt, Hallinan ended his account of the prison with the comment that the Soviet approach to crime and punishment is “humane and scientific.”112 Pritt’s and Hallinan’s publications, tainted by known personal bias and limited by the narrow distribution of their writings, were at best minor victories for the MVD. In fact, one could argue that such reports caused as much harm as good. By inviting Pritt and Hallinan the Soviets only perpetuated the generally recognized model of known apologists accepting and reproducing Soviet propaganda at face value. Such accounts thus may have actually undermined their purpose. But the Soviets succeeded in obtaining favorable reports not simply from the likes of Pritt and Hallinan; in June 1959 the MVD scored two major victories in the “Soviet cultural offensive.” The first was a front-page New York Times article by W. Averell Harriman on his visit to Kriukovo. The well-known former ambassador to the Soviet Union, a prominent Democrat but certainly not a Soviet sympathizer, reported his belief in Khrushchev’s statement that slave labor camps were a thing of the past (in part, as Khrushchev himself admitted, due to the low productivity of their labor on giant works projects) and that only prisons and “corrective colonies” remained. He then described his impressions of Kriukovo: impeccably clean dormitories; “healthy and tanned” prisoners playing table tennis, volleyball, and basketball or performing a variety of traditional folk songs and jazz numbers; a library boasting worn translations of Mark Twain, Jack London, and other Western authors; a diet of 3,600 calories; frequent conjugal visits; excellent discipline; decent wages; and a wellstocked store that sold, among other items, “gaily colored cotton shirts.” To conclude his report of the colony Harriman related a particularly touching moment when the prisoner in charge of the communal garden presented him with a bouquet of lilacs and the admonition, “‘Take these with greeting to your fellow countrymen and tell them we want their friendship and peace.’ The inmate then added, his eyes twinkling slyly, ‘That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?’”113 The MVD could hardly have dreamed of a better presentation of their prisons and prisoners.114 The second flattering report of the Soviet penal system in 1959 was Leibowitz’s article in the June 8 edition of the widely-read American magazine Life. Under the editorship of its founder Henry Luce, who just ten years earlier had called communism “the most monstrous cancer which ever attacked humanity,” Life was certainly no pro-Soviet publication.115 And Leibowitz, a well-respected justice in New York’s King County Court in the 1950s, could hardly be called a Communist sympathizer either, although early in his legal career he helped the International Labor Defense, which was associated with the U.S. Communist 112 Vivian Hallinan and Vincent Hallinan. A Clash of Cultures: Some Contrasts in American and Soviet Morals and Manners (San Francisco, 1960), 43–52. 113 W. Averell Harriman, “Soviet Penal Reform Noted by Harriman,” New York Times, June 3, 1959. 114 Harriman soon followed his article with an expanded travel account, which confirmed his initial reporting of Kriukovo, Peace with Russia? (New York, 1959), 107–10. 115 Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York, 2010), 358. Luce was also famous for campaigning for the rule of law, which helps explain his willingness to publish Leibowitz’s account in the first place (ibid., 380). Gulag Tourism 73 party, defend the so-called Scottsboro Boys. Indeed, the first section of his Life article lambasted the “bleak and disheartening” Soviet court and pre-trial detention systems, notably for their lack of “concern for the right of the individual,” and his general views on politics and justice led Hallinan to call him a “reactionary” (not to mention an archetypal “Ugly American”).116 Yet despite this, even Hallinan admonished that “the portion of Judge Leibowitz’s article dealing with Soviet prisons should be read by every American who has the least feeling that, in some way, he should be his brother’s keeper.”117 As with Harriman’s article, therefore, the forum of publication combined with Leibowitz’s respected standing and moderate political views combined to produce a much more effective propaganda piece than anything Pritt or Hallinan could provide. Leibowitz strove to impress upon his readers that he did not accept Soviet statements at face value. He pressed the Soviet Union’s prosecutor general, Roman Rudenko, on a few contradictions in Soviet law and readily disproved a false impression of crime in Moscow given by Chief of Police M. V. Barsukov.118 Moreover, on the way to Kriukovo he reportedly grilled his host, Deputy Head of the Gulag V. M. Bochkov, about the Soviet Union’s infamous slave labor camps—finally obtaining a concession that there had been a few such camps but they no longer existed—and openly wondered if he was about to visit a “tourist attraction.” Yet he apparently accepted his host’s “serious” reply that Kriukovo was simply an “average Russian prison of its type.”119 Although the buildings were drab, Leibowitz noted, the inmates, dressed in civilian attire, “did not have the beaten, shamed look of the American convict.” Rather, they were playing soccer, “laughing and enjoying themselves,” studying engineering, eating plentiful amounts of “excellent borscht” and other food, and working in the factory. There was only one inmate in the hospital—”a most eloquent tribute” to the humanity of the institution, Leibowitz thought—and one “cheerful” inmate serving a two-day sentence in the large isolation cell. Prisoners received wages for their labor (while keeping the institution self-sufficient financially), made purchases at the store, sent money home, enjoyed conjugal visits, and prepared to leave the colony by learning a trade. And the primary complaint of prisoners was that the equipment sometimes broke down in the workshop, preventing them from working. In the final analysis, Leibowitz concluded that although the physical plant was “shabby ... by American standards,” the atmosphere of hope and progress that pervaded Kriukovo confirmed the monumental changes that had recently occurred in the Soviet penal system.120 Leibowitz’s article was perceived by the Soviets as a major victory in the cultural cold war. Soon after its publication in the West, large sections were reproduced not only in Izvestiia, as noted above, but in K novoi zhizni, the MVD’s internal journal for correctional officers.121 Indeed, the extent to which Leibowitz’s Life article was valued by justice officials in the Soviet Union is evidenced by a November 2, 1960, letter from Aleksandr Fedorovich Gorkin, chairman of the Supreme Court, to P. N. Pospelov of the Central Committee 116 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 153, 156; Hallinan and Hallinan, Clash of Cultures, 24–27. Hallinan and Hallinan, Clash of Cultures, 43. 118 Leibowitz, “Two Faces of Justice,” 152–54. 119 Ibid., 156. 120 Ibid., 162. 121 Gladkikh, “Amerikanskii iurist govorit,” 73. 117 74 Jeffrey S. Hardy apparatus, attacking the article “Man Behind Bars,” which appeared in Sovetskaia Rossiia on August 27, 1960.122 This article and the readers’ comments that were subsequently printed on September 17, 1960, he charged, misrepresented the state of the country’s penal system by profiling depraved, uncorrected, and unrepentant criminals living a life of comfort until their eventual early release on parole. What is remarkable is that Gorkin used statements from Leibowitz’s article to substantiate his charge that “Man Behind Bars” and its followup were both “incorrect and politically harmful.” Gorkin warned that “it is not coincidental that these articles have been republished in the bourgeois press with the slanderous aim of demonstrating that the Soviet Union is now supposedly turning away from humane principles of correcting and re-educating prisoners in places of confinement.”123 In Gorkin’s view, the positive propaganda achieved through Harriman and Leibowitz was being undermined by the regime’s own press. Indeed, as Gorkin feared, some in the United States were attempting to discount the reports of Harriman and Leibowitz, and not only by reprinting “Man Behind Bars.” David J. Dallin, co-author of the damning account of the Soviet Gulag that made its way into the MVD archive, wrote in the New York Times in late 1959 that “the Kryukovo Colony ... is obviously maintained and manned as a show piece for guided tours.” And while Dallin acknowledged that conditions in the USSR’s prisons had likely improved under Khrushchev, the “hasty conclusions” of Harriman and Leibowitz should not be believed as “neither of them took the pains of going to the well-known vast camps of Vorkuta and Kolyma.”124 An expert on Russian affairs, Dallin knew that visiting Vorkuta and Kolyma was not a matter of simply “taking the pains” to go. His bias here is obvious. But thanks to Khrushchev’s continued insistence on keeping most of the penal system off-limits to foreigners, Dallin could not have known that Vorkuta and Kolyma were no longer the center of enormous penal empires. Nor could he or other skeptics be convinced, given the information available, that Kriukovo was anything other than a “show piece.” In addition to Dallin, certain members in the U.S. government, notably the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities, by 1960 became concerned with “a strange phenomenon on the American scene, namely, a parade of outstanding American personalities to the Soviet Union to learn all about some phase of life under communism on a two-week journey, and then to report the ‘facts’ to the American people.” Most disconcerting among these reports were those proposing that “a new era of benevolence has dawned” in the Soviet penal system.125 To counter what in their view were such obvious lies, the Committee on Un-American Activities heard and published statements from Adam Galinski. A Polish survivor of the Stalin-era Vorkuta camps who was freed under Khrushchev, Galinski reported to have heard through the prisoner grapevine that “there existed certain camps which were simply sham and which were made for tourists to see. The inmates of 122 For more on this article and the movement it epitomized see Hardy, “‘The Camp is Not a Resort.’” RGANI, f. 5, d. 34, l. 70, l. 21. Indeed, this article was reported (though without any “slanderous” commentary) in the United States. See Seymour Topping, “Prisons in Soviet Called Too Soft,” New York Times, August 28, 1960; and “Soviet Prison System Called Too Soft,” Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1960. 124 David J. Dallin, “Soviet Labor Camps,” New York Times, June 16, 1959. 125 House Committee on Un-American Activities, Soviet “Justice”: “Showplace” Prisons vs Real Slave Labor Camps, 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960, 5. 123 Gulag Tourism 75 those camps are not prisoners, but MVD soldiers who are disguised as prisoners and coached in the types of answers which they are to give to foreign visitors.”126 If such was the case, Galinski testified, then they were obviously a farce, for the real Gulag was bent on the destruction of its inmates. Thus, even as visits to Butyrka and Kriukovo helped the Soviets present to the world the image of a reformed and enlightened penal system, potent narratives of death and privation from survivors of the Stalinist Gulag, together with continued secrecy under Khrushchev, continued to thwart their efforts. The penal system had indeed been reformed, though not quite to the extent displayed at Butyrka and Kriukovo, but by insisting on highly structured visits and presenting only limited information about political prisoners and the large camps, the Soviets left ample room for doubt and disbelief. Visits by foreigners to penal institutions in the Khrushchev era constituted a small yet important part of the Cold War. Even though their broader mission of convincing the world of Soviet superiority failed, the tours largely succeeded in impressing their immediate guests. In many cases one can write this off to ideological predisposition. But in other instances, notably the visits by Leibowitz and Harriman, this appears to not be the case. Certainly the visits were successful in part because they were carefully managed tours of preselected sites, but the institutions visited were not “Potemkin villages” in the strict sense. They were not empty façades set up wholly for show, even if the tours were to some extent staged, with a deliberately incomplete picture being presented. Indeed, foreign visitors believed that what they were being shown was real precisely because of their tangible genuineness. The prisoners and guards were real. The somewhat shabby dormitories were real. The death-row inmates were real. The admission at Kriukovo that other colonies with harsher regimes existed was real.127 Except for a few matters such as inmate statistics, what visitors were told was true. In short, there was a palpable authenticity about Butyrka and Kriukovo, the two primary penal institutions visited by foreigners. The abandoned remnants of larger camps seen by Harriman in Karaganda and Wallisfurth in Transcaucasia constituted additional tangible proof of a reformed penal policy, as did the well-publicized amnesties and reforms to the criminal justice system in general. The tours were also successful because of the international postwar conjuncture in penal affairs. The 1950s globally was a time when the idea of re-education (usually termed “rehabilitation” in the West) in the penal sphere triumphed over custodialism, retribution, and labor extraction.128 In most places, however, the United States in particular, this newly dominant philosophy translated slowly into institutional practice. Prisoners remained in oppressive and brutalizing prisons, were given limited access to educational, cultural, or 126 Ibid., 48. This rumor has since been repeated in, for instance, Brian Freemantle, KGB (New York, 1982), 158. 127 Harriman, Peace, 109; Travel notes of Marceau Pivert, http://histoire-sociale.univ-paris1.fr/Voyages/ Toulacadre.htm. 128 See, for instance, Francis A. Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (New Haven, 1981); Herman Franke, The Emancipation of Prisoners: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Dutch Prison Experience (Edinburgh, 1995); D. L. Howard, The English Prisons: Their Past and Their Future (London, 1960); and First United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (New Yorks, 1956). 76 Jeffrey S. Hardy vocational programs, were often not provided with labor (which is universally acknowledged among penologists as necessary for re-education), and enjoyed very limited rights and no forms of self-government.129 In many ways, therefore, what inmates in the Soviet Union came to enjoy in the 1950s, and what was placed on display at Kriukovo, was the dream of penal reformers globally. Prisoners were kept in so-called open institutions with communal living quarters instead of cells and minimal or even no guarding. They enjoyed self-governing organizations, libraries, cultural groups, educational and vocational courses, and conjugal visits. They were released early through parole and workday credits. They had significant correspondence rights and clear channels for complaints. They worked, earned wages, made purchases at the prison store, and wore their own clothing. Certainly, scarce resources, entrenched habits, and other factors meant that not all prisoners enjoyed these benefits to their fullest extent. The tours, in suppressing the challenges of reform and the persistence of violence and other problems throughout the Soviet Gulag, gave a more favorable impression of the Soviet penal system than is found in internal MVD and Procuracy reports on the state of the Gulag from the 1950s (although one must keep in mind that the Procuracy and many officials within the MVD had an inherent interest in highlighting the problems of the Gulag rather than its successes). Yet the point remains that the Soviet Union was making a good-faith effort to transform the hellish Stalinist Gulag into a humane penal system. And foreigners, familiar with their own repressive prison systems, were naturally impressed when confronted with what the Soviet Union was both aiming toward and displaying at Butyrka and Kriukovo. In the end, however, the favorable reports presented by Averell, Leibowitz, and others did little to sway public opinion. In part this was due to the staged nature of the tours and the continued insistence on keeping most institutions out of reach and much information under wraps. In ensuring that the tours themselves went smoothly, the Soviets simultaneously undermined their broader goal of convincing the world that substantive reform had occurred. That said, less-structured visits by foreigners to more typical places of confinement would have left visitors unimpressed, even if significant improvements in living conditions from the Stalin era had already occurred. But other, external factors also contributed to the broader failure of the Soviet “cultural offensive” in the penal sphere. Damning accounts of the Stalinist system, notably Within the Whirlwind by Evgeniia Ginzburg and The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, kept the worst abuses of the past in the forefront of the Western imagination. Moreover, these were joined in the 1960s and 1970s with a few memoirs of camp life under Khrushchev, especially Anatoly Marchenko’s My Testimony, published in the West in 1969, which argued that “today’s Soviet camps for political prisoners are just as horrific as in Stalin’s time.”130 (Although this statement is manifestly false, as a 129 Some American penologists went so far as to label their own system “totalitarian,” an unveiled reference to the repression of the Soviet Union. See, for instance, Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, 1958), xxxii. 130 Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, trans. Michael Scammell (New York, 1969), 3. For similar first-hand accounts of the Gulag under Khrushchev and Brezhnev see, among others, Edward Kuznetsov, Prison Diaries, trans. Howard Spier (New York, 1975); Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, trans. Michael Scammell (New York, 1979); and Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, trans. Guy Daniels (New York, 1982). Gulag Tourism 77 close comparison between My Testimony and about any memoir from the Stalinist period reveals.) Ultimately, the so-called Soviet cultural offensive in the penal sphere failed to effectively counter the dominant Cold War narrative of the Gulag as both a system of slavery and a synecdoche for a larger system of slavery, the Soviet Union itself. EPILOGUE The mid-to-late-1950s constituted a second apex of Gulag tourism. In contrast to the 1920s and early 1930s, however, it proved to be shorter-lived. The early 1960s witnessed a period of counterreform in the Soviet penal sphere that emphasized the retributive function of judicial punishment and resulted in somewhat harsher conditions for inmates. As part of this backlash against the reforms of the 1950s, the Soviet penal apparatus lost its appetite for showing its institutions to foreigners. But the end of Gulag tourism resulted not only from reduced desire by the Soviets to show off their prisons, but also from shifting attitudes in the West, which in the 1960s was beginning to experience its own pushback against the golden age of rehabilitation. Thus, although occasional visitors continued to visit Kriukovo after 1960, their numbers dropped significantly and their impact declined dramatically.131 No longer were Soviet penal institutions presented to the world by foreign guests of the MVD as humane or enlightened alternatives to Western prisons. Indeed, by the 1970s Kriukovo came to be widely recognized in the West as a show prison that, while interesting as a tourist destination, did not present an accurate depiction of Soviet imprisonment.132 None other than Solzhenitsyn himself labeled Kriukovo a “Potemkin structure” (although he personally declined a visit when offered), and pronounced condemnatory judgment on foreign guests of the Gulag: “And oh, you well-fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens,” he charged, “how much you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding in areas where you did not grasp a lousy thing.”133 In the face of such a scathing attack by the revered Nobel laureate, presenting a favorable account of Soviet penal institutions was simply impossible. Curiously, Gulag tourism has to some extent been revived in post-Soviet Russia. In 2009 the International Festival of Detective Films and TV Programs on Law-Enforcement Themes, held in Moscow and boasting 268 films from 60 countries, treated its participants to a number of excursions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the list included visits to both Butyrka and Kriukovo.134 That same year, actor Mickey Rourke was given a tour of Butyrka as preparation for playing a Russian mobster in the Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man 2. He talked with prisoners, tested out the beds (more comfortable than his sofa), tried the food 131 For reports of visits from the early 1960s see John P. Conrad, “What Lenin Foresaw,” Observer, July 2, 1961; Peter Archer, Communism and the Law (London, 1963), 87; and E. Perry and M. Stone, “Impressions of the I.S.T.D. Study Tour to the U.S.S.R.,” British Journal of Criminology 4 (September 1963): 170–76. 132 “Counting Russia’s Camps,” Economist (April 2, 1977): 64; Avraham Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union (Uhldingen, Switzerland, 1980), 37. 133 Solzhenitsyn was also offered to see Dubravlag, which is notable because, as the primary detention facility for political prisoners, this was anything but a show prison (Gulag Archipelago 2:147 and 3:503). 134 DetectiveFEST 2010 Booklet (Moscow, 2010), 12, available at www.detectivefest.ru/addition/files/ detectivefest_12_boolket_eng.pdf (last accessed March 12, 2010). 78 Jeffrey S. Hardy (and even asked for a loaf of the delicious black bread to take with him), visited the exercise room, and, commenting on the availability of conjugal visits, quipped, “that’s very humane.”135 135 Nikita Kartsev, “Mikki urka,” Moskovskii komsomolets, March 14, 2009, available at www.mk.ru/social/ highlife/article/2009/03/13/238621-mikki-urka.html; and “Mikki Rurk ‘otsidel’ v legendarnoi Butyrke,’” Komsomol'skaia pravda, March 13, 2009, available at www.kp.ru/daily/24259/456497/.