The Soviet Gulag—an Archipelago?

The Soviet Gulag—an Archipelago? David R. Shearer Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 16, Number 3, Summer 2015 (New Series), pp. 711-724 (Article) Published by Slavica Publishers DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2015.0046 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/591096 Access provided by University Of Delaware (2 Feb 2017 17:01 GMT) Reaction The Soviet Gulag—an Archipelago? DAVID R. SHEARER In 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn authorized publication of his monumental study of the Soviet forced labor camp system, Arkhipelag Gulag.1 hat publication not only ofered a searing indictment of the Soviet regime but also created the image of the camp system as an archipelago, an image that has dominated scholarly and popular discussion of Soviet penal practice for a number of decades. his image went hand in hand with discussions of secrecy and the separateness of the Gulag system. his was a closed system, not discussed in wider Soviet society—one that, having ensnared a victim, devoured that victim. In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag world, there was little or no traicking between inside and outside. he Gulag was a separate world with its own rules, habits, and culture. In recent years, a number of scholars have questioned the metaphor of the Gulag camps as an isolated world within Soviet society. New work emphasizes a more dynamic and interactive relationship between the Gulag system and the rest of Soviet society. Scholars have coined new metaphors to characterize this relationship—revolving doors, porous boundaries, mirror images, and continuums.2 he majority of papers in this collection relect this new, more dynamic understanding of the Soviet Gulag, but they also cover the spectrum of discussion that has made the ield of Gulag studies so evocative. As with all things Soviet, the Gulag system relected many of the I am grateful to Michael David-Fox, Paul Werth, and the other Kritika editors for their careful reading and suggestions. 1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 2 Golfo Alexopoulos, “Amnesty 1945: he Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag,” Slavic Review 64, 2 (2005): 274–306; Wilson Bell, “Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia,” Russian Review 72, 1 (2013): 116–41. On continuums, see Kate Brown, “Out of Solitary Coninement: he History of the Gulag,” Kritika 8, 1 (2007): 67–103. For discussion of mirror images and mutual interaction, see Oleg Khlevniuk’s contribution to this issue. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, 3 (Summer 2015): 711–24. 712 DAVID R. SHEARER contradictions inherent in Soviet history, a history that both its and does not it general trends of the 19th and 20th centuries. Dan Healey puts his inger on this peculiarity of Soviet history in discussing Michel Foucault and the philosopher’s ambivalence about how to understand Soviet penal practices. As Healey writes, “Foucault himself could not decide if the Gulag represented a pre-Enlightenment form of punishment or an example of ‘modern’ (in his characteristically Eurocentric sense) incarceration” (532–33). In another work, as Healey notes, Jan Plamper demonstrates how Foucault generated compellingly paradoxical characterizations of Soviet penal policy without ever deciding where it it in his schemes of historical development. As Plamper writes, Foucault was puzzled by the spectacle of a presumptive socialist workers’ state that used labor to deine citizenship but also as a form of punishment.3 One might also point to the seemingly blatant contradiction between the goals and reality of Soviet penal practice—between the supposedly redemptive purpose of labor and the reality of destructive punishment in the camps. In their 1934 publication about the Belomor canal, writers such as Maksim Gor´kii and avant-garde artists such as the photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko teamed up to create a myth of reforging ( perekovka) as the foundation of the Soviet labor camp system. heir book, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni I. V. Stalina (he Stalin White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal), gloriied police oicials such as Genrikh Iagoda and the like as heroes in the creative reengineering of human raw material.4 Healey does not go as far as to endorse this myth, but he does see some attempts by camp medical staf to mitigate the harsher aspects of the camp system. According to Healey, medics tried, within the severe constraints placed on them, to apply criteria of health standards to camp inmates that relected those used more widely in Soviet industrial practice. In making this argument, Healey places camp medical practices within a broader context of what he terms Soviet biopolitics, an idea that he borrows and then develops from Foucault. His paper thus also follows recent trends that place Soviet penal practice on a continuum within Soviet society as a whole. Golfo Alexopoulos will have none of this. By examining the politics of rationing, Alexopoulos rejects the notion that there was any rehabilitative, let alone redemptive, quality to Soviet penal practice. She does not confront Healey head on, nor does she call into question the work of Steven Barnes, 3 See Dan Healey’s article here for this summary. See also Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” Kritika 3, 2 (2002): 255–80. 4 M. Gor´kii, L. Averbakh, and S. Firin, eds., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni I. V. Stalina (Moscow: OGIZ, 1934); Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: he Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1998). THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 713 who argues that we need to take the ideology of rehabilitation and redemption seriously, since the Soviets did so, in their own skewed way.5 But Alexopoulos nonetheless systematically demolishes this argument with statistics and policies taken directly from the Gulag system. She cuts through ideology and academic discourse. In an unequivocal defense of Solzhenitsyn, Alexopoulos argues that the Gulag was nothing other than a deliberate and monstrous system. he primary function of Soviet labor camps was the destructive exploitation of human beings, which occurred by wringing every ounce of work from them before linging them aside to die or scrape by as near-dead invalids. As she shows—and she does so convincingly—releasing thousands of prisoners yearly was not the result of a rehabilitative process but a deliberate policy of jettisoning weakened, dying inmates who could no longer contribute to the positive ledger balance of the system. his, she declares, reveals the true logic of the camp system. here is truth in both Healey’s biopolitical argument and the plain condemnation pronounced by Alexopoulos, although the weight of evidence is more convincing in favor of the argument about pure exploitation. he myth of perekovka was precisely that—a myth concocted by irresponsible intellectuals, in particular Gor´kii, Rodchenko, and Leopol´d Averbakh, the head of the Proletarian Writers Association and Iagoda’s brother-inlaw. Rodchenko’s dynamic and dramatic photographs, produced for the 1934 publication of Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal, bear witness to the utopian mendacity of this group. Police oicials such as Iagoda paid lip service to the notion of perekovka, although barely so, but in their operational communications and policies, it is clear that they did not believe a word of it. he paean to police as engineers of human raw material was published in 1934, the year that the regime reorganized the political police into an agency for the security of the state. hat organization, which operated the Gulag system, no longer functioned as the “ighting” arm of a revolutionizing political party but was now charged to protect the interests of an established state. he revolutionizing program of that state gave way to the agenda of consolidation. Criminals and other deviants were no longer victims of the inequities of a previous society, redeemable through reeducation. Now, according to Stalin, they could be seen only as enemies and dealt with as such.6 Accordingly, and in the next year, a government commission on crime abandoned the myth of incarceration as a “measure of social defense” (mery 5 Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: he Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 6 David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Social Order and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 20–23. 714 DAVID R. SHEARER obshchestvennoi zashchity). Commission members returned to the traditional term of “punishment” (nakazanie), since this was clear and straightforward. Criminals and the general public, so they argued, did not understand what “social defense” meant, but they understood punishment, and punishment was, after all, the purpose of incarceration. In that same year, Iagoda made clear what he thought of the notion of rehabilitation through labor, reacting with near hysteria to the prospect of large numbers of kulak exiles and other deportees coming to the end of their ive-year exile sentences and returning to their homes. his outcome, he argued, was unacceptable; the NKVD opposed “categorically” any attempt to allow exiles to return to their former places of residence. Having been exposed to the underside of Soviet penal life, he argued, exiles needed to be contained in the regions of their exile, even if they were given civic rehabilitation. As a result, local NKVD oicers were left with the task of explaining to exiles that they were about to receive full citizenship rights after fulilling their sentences, including the right to vote, but would still be deprived of the right to live outside the regions of their exile. Finally— also in 1935—Iagoda resisted any relaxation of discriminatory residence laws that would allow former convicts or exiles to live in so-called regime cities, the list of cities and areas having either strategic importance or priority status within the Soviet distribution and supply system. Such restrictions condemned former exiles and convicts to scratch out lives in marginalized, underdeveloped regions of the country. Allowing access to regime cities, he argued, would “bring to nothing” all the work that had gone before to cleanse major population centers of alien, anti-Soviet elements.7 By 1937, Gor´kii was dead, as was Averbakh, a victim of the great purges that were killing hundreds of thousands, and the government had banned publication of the book on the Belomor canal. So much for perekovka. Alexopoulos and Healey both describe the labor camps but not the policerun system of colonies and special settlements. As Lynne Viola has shown, however, after a brutal period of chaos and death, the settlements system—the other Gulag—began to function in something like a regular manner, with commandants even advocating for increased supplies and privileges for their charges.8 Emilia Koustova reinforces this assessment in her contribution and provides a nuanced and textured description of how deportees reacted to their fates in the settlements. Her contribution employs oral histories in a survey of deportees from the new Soviet territories after World War II. She not only inds a surprising range of responses but notes how the postwar settlement 7 Ibid., 95, 261–68, 275. Lynne Viola, he Unknown Gulag: he Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (London: Oxford University Press, 2010). 8 THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 715 system difered from the harshness evident before the war. “In contrast to the situation in camps and probably ‘peasant exile’ in the 1930s,” she writes, “even involuntary work could feature positive motivation and facilitate deportees’ physical survival while helping them overcome stigmatization, attain social mobility, and integrate them more broadly, even to the point of Sovietization” (591).9 Many of those exiles, if they stayed in the regions of their exile, even came to perceive themselves as something like pioneers, colonizing a frontier region, selectively forgetting the initial, physical experience of exile. Reintegration seemed much harder for those who returned to their former homes after their term of exile ended. Koustova’s piece provides an interesting and useful contrast to the majority of pieces, which focus on the labor camps. Similarly, Asif Siddiqi focuses on the relatively comfortable conditions of the sharashki, the prison research and scientiic institutes of the Gulag system. Not surprisingly, Siddiqi inds that state and science, and coercion and knowledge production, are not, in principle, opposed to each other. he focused and well-funded organization of Big Science research institutes was very productive. Siddiqi also demonstrates that the relationship between the Soviet state and the scientiic intelligentsia was far more complicated than one of passive and heroic victims facing an all-powerful regime, and he wonders where the history of the sharashki its within the literature of the Gulag. hat literature, he claims, tends to focus on the physical brutality of the labor camp system. Where, he asks, does the pursuit of knowledge and science it into this kind of narrative? In fact, Siddiqi’s piece its closely with those who, increasingly, emphasize the interpenetration of Soviet society and the world of the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn captured this relationship in his novel V kruge pervom (he First Circle), referring to the sharashki in the language of Dante’s irst circle of hell.10 By placing the world of the sharashki so close to the non-Gulag world, Solzhenitsyn seems to question his own metaphor of the Gulag as a series of isolated islands, and it would be an especially valuable study for someone to compare the world of the scientiic sharashki with the special isolated and often top secret research cities that were established in the 1950s. Siddiqi provides a point of departure and ofers some intriguing suggestions for such an inquiry. Indeed, at irst glance, the similarities seem too startling to be simple coincidence, and what, really, were the diferences? Siddiqi notes that, in the mid-1950s, with the dismantling of the Gulag system, sharashki institutes were simply renamed and inmates became employees. As inmates, of course, specialists were under penal sentence, but 9 See also Nanci Adler, “Enduring Repression: Narratives of Loyalty to the Party before, during, and after the Gulag,” Europe–Asia Studies 62, 2 (2010): 211–34. 10 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968). 716 DAVID R. SHEARER researchers in top secret cities were also imprisoned in a sense, their movements highly restricted and themselves under careful watch by the Ministry of Internal Afairs (MVD) and the Committee for State Security (KGB). As many scholars have asked, where, exactly, was the borderline between free and unfree in the Soviet Union?11 Healey, among others, is correct to point out that such clear-cut boundaries did not exist. Gulag biopolitics existed at the extreme end of a continuum of Soviet industrial practice, and Alexopoulos certainly would not disagree with the argument that the Gulag system merely recreated in the extreme the regime’s overall modus operandi of rule. After all, as Oleg Khlevniuk notes in his contribution, Jacques Rossi, as well as Solzhenitsyn, made the same argument. In all its inhuman brutality, they stressed, the Gulag system relected and reproduced, in quintessential form, the mechanisms of rule of the state that created it. Ironically, this insight has led a number of scholars to challenge Solzhenitsyn’s main metaphor of the Gulag as a system of isolated, secretive islands within the sea of Soviet society. Khlevniuk, especially, emphasizes the “mutual interaction” between the world of the camps and the broader world of Soviet society in his eloquent and evocative phrase Gulag— ne Gulag. As Khlevniuk points out, some 30 million citizens were sentenced to terms of punitive labor at their own places of work, without even seeing the barbed wire of the camps or the inside of a prison. hese included the massive numbers of workers convicted under the harsh labor laws of the 1940s. In the near starvation conditions of the war and immediate postwar era, the situations of these “convicts” were little better than those conined behind fences. Conversely, after an initial period of horriic losses, more than a few police-run penal colonies fared better in the mid-1930s in terms of provisions than the surrounding “free” collective-farm communities. Here, again, we must ask where exactly was the border between coerced and “free,” between servitude and supposed freedom? Khlevniuk is not the irst to make the point about porousness, which Wilson Bell made about the colony and exile system as a whole. In her 2005 article, Golfo Alexopoulos refers to the revolving door of the Gulag.12 In his contribution to this volume, Khlevniuk discusses a continuum of incarceration and, while he describes the more or less restricted incarceration 11 One obvious and signiicant distinction, of course, was that scientists in top secret research cities could live with their families. Sharashki inmates could not. On one such community, see Maria Rogacheva, “A History of a Town hat Did Not Exist: he Soviet Scientiic Intelligentsia in the Post-Stalinist Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2013). his work examines the history of an academic community in Chernogolovka, a formerly closed scientiic town near Moscow, from 1956 to the present day. 12 Bell, “Was the Gulag an Archipelago?”; Alexopoulos, “Amnesty 1945.” THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 717 of bodies, Kate Brown, in an insightful 2007 article, lays out a continuum of incarcerated space. Brown refers to the barbed wire and towers of the Gulag system as the extreme manifestation along a continuum of incarcerated geographies within Soviet-style socialism.13 In the increasingly complex system of residence laws and internal passportization, almost no citizen was free from some kind of oicial restriction about where he or she could live and work or travel. Space within the Soviet Union was divided into an increasingly complex hierarchy of privilege and exclusion, according to the criteria of access to goods and services.14 he forced labor camps were at one extreme. he system of penal colonies and special settlements was less extreme, but then the line blurs between these colonies and the spaces not administered by the Gulag. hroughout the Stalinist era, and beyond, the vast majority of rural inhabitants—collective farmers—were in efect incarcerated on their farms. hey were not issued passports and needed special permission and papers to travel beyond the geographic conines of their region. In essence, they lived in exile in their own villages. In terms of restrictions, these “free” citizens lived little diferently from former kulak exiles, also conined to the regions of their exile, even after completing their sentences. he combination of deportation and forced migration of undesirable populations created a geographic mosaic of spaces within the Soviet Union. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, alienness or social nearness was not just a matter of simple inclusion or exclusion. Alienness became a matter of degree, a continuum of geographic and physical restriction. It depended on the kinds of restrictions placed in a person’s internal passport or on the degree to which an individual was subject to physical isolation within the Gulag system— sharashka, penal colony or special settlement, labor camp, or maximum security prison for especially dangerous criminals. Passportization of the population—with its various levels of privilege and restriction—evolved in an intimate relationship with the Gulag’s system of spatial and bodily incarceration, and it was a system that outlasted the Gulag. he complex hierarchy of residence and work laws remained largely intact, and in fact was reinforced, as hundreds of thousands of Gulag inmates were freed in the mid-1950s. Only in the 1970s did the regime begin to relax residence and travel laws, allowing rural residents to have passports for the irst time. 13 Brown, “Out of Solitary Coninement.” Elena Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia”: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008); David R. Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932–1952,” Journal of Modern History 76, 4 (2004): 835–81. 14 718 DAVID R. SHEARER his division of space and people stands in sharp contrast to trends in other European countries. In most European states, identity regimes tended to impose civic (if not social) homogeneity on populations, the civic “leveling” about which many historians have written.15 Categories of inclusion and exclusion corresponded to the physical borders of the nation and the property boundaries of places of incarceration. As states homogenized civic forms of identity, so too they homogenized civic, if not private, space. In contrast, the Stalinist civic order did not relect a “Newtonian” universe of civic administration supposedly characteristic of late 19th-century Europe, whereby social groups interacted with the state and each other according to universally administered laws. Bodies in the Stalinist cosmos interacted in ways analogous to medieval notions of Aristotelian space, in which objects in diferent spaces, or spheres (earthly or celestial), obeyed diferent laws of motion. In the Soviet Union, diferent categories of the population occupied diferent geographic spaces and interacted with the state and one another according to laws peculiar to each group and the space that that group inhabited. his system evolved in increasingly complex ways as police continued to diferentiate the regulations governing mobility and civic rights. As a result, the accretion of regulations became diicult to understand, let alone to enforce. By the end of the 1930s, few oicials in the Soviet Union understood all the diferent kinds of passport restrictions and regulations—to whom they applied and under what conditions. he system readily lent itself to abuse both by citizens hoping to avoid restrictions and by oicials easily bribed to issue illegal passports and residence permits or unwitting enough to enforce regulations haphazardly.16 How far should we take the notion of porousness or continuum? In some instances, it seems as if the physical boundaries among camps, colonies, and “free” society begin to blur into nonexistence. People seemed to circulate in and out of and through the Gulag system on a regular basis, as they did through the supposedly rigid system of spatial organization of Soviet socialism. In this issue of Kritika, Khlevniuk writes about how criminal elements controlled 15 John Torpey, he Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Torpey, “he Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport,” in Documenting Individual Identity: he Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 256–70. 16 In addition to Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien,” see Nathalie Moine, “Passeportisation, statistique des migrations et contrôle de l’identité sociale,” Cahiers du monde russe 38, 4 (1997): 587–600; and Moine, “Le système des passeports à l’époque stalinienne: De la purge des grande villes au morcellement du territoire, 1932–1953,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 50, 1 (2003): 145–69. THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 719 some camps, even guarding themselves, coming and going as they saw it. Strict passport and travel laws did not seem to hinder the many millions who moved back and forth across the Soviet landscape during the 1930s and after the war. Records abound of bandit gangs who simply relocated to a diferent oblast or part of the country when police seemed to be getting too close. Robbers were apparently able to shed and take on new identities, literally, by a change of clothing and a move to other jurisdictions. Within the camps themselves, criminal elements transferred themselves, seemingly at will, in order to get away from a particular gang or to reinforce the rule of a camp by their own gang. Camps and colony inmates seemed able to escape, almost at will, by the hundreds of thousands a year in the irst half of the 1930s. Even in the more tightly controlled system of the later 1930s, individuals could slip through the cracks in the system and avoid detection by moving and taking on new identities, then moving again. Some seemed able simply to slip away from a transport column or just to walk away from a camp when the weather got better and made for easier traveling. While acknowledging the huge gaps in the system, we should probably not let ourselves go too far down this path. For everyone who “walked away” from a camp, many more could not and instead died slow and withering deaths from harsh, extractive labor. For everyone who seemed to defy residency and passport laws, many more lived out lives of impoverishment in out-of-the-way places, simply because they did not qualify for registration in major cities. As a system of social and spatial incarceration, the Soviet system worked well enough, and the Gulag, as Solzhenitsyn noted, embodied the essence of that system. Solzhenitsyn ofered his relection as a means to explain the Gulag. he labor camps were the essential product of the state that produced it, yet, as Aidan Forth shows, some of the essential characteristics of the Gulag were not peculiar to the Soviet Union. Categorical forms of population control, systems of harsh labor camps, starvation exploitation of inmates, the extrajudicial coninement of populations deemed to be alien—all these elements characterized not only the Soviet system but also concentration camps under British rule in India and South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even the blatant contradiction between paternalistic rehabilitative ideology and harsh labor exploitation also characterized the British, Spanish, and German colonial camp systems. It was the British who invented concentration camps, irst for indigent and famine-stricken populations in South Asia, and then for whole categories of suspect civilians during the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the 20th century. 720 DAVID R. SHEARER Forth provides a rich and provocative contribution to this issue and shows, once again, the value of comparative history. He suggests that, while British and Soviet camps difered in terms of the duration and conditions of encampment, they nonetheless shared hitherto unrecognized and at times unsettling similarities and even common origins. Forth locates the latter in the processes of modernity that emerged from the forces of industrialization and factory discipline common to the Western world. “At a fundamental level,” he notes, “British and Soviet camps materialized within the structural conditions of a shared Western modernity. hey developed according to similar frameworks of purity and contagion and emphasized productive labor, iscal restraint, and fears of social and political danger” (676). Despite this common origin, as Forth is careful to point out, two signiicant diferences separated British concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag system. hese diferences centered on the geographic dimensions of empire and the racial context of colonialism. According to Forth, blunt sovereign force and physical detention were more readily unleashed in the overseas territories of the British Empire than in the metropole. In Britain proper, where state and society were more deeply integrated, social control depended on what Michel Foucault described as “liberal governmentality,” an internalization of norms and a difusion of power far more subtle and sophisticated than external restraints alone. his was not true in colonial territories, with their racially diferent and supposedly inferior populations. Forth highlights the medicalized language of hygiene, contamination, and racial typing that justiied British and other European carceral practices, and he notes that racial attitudes were fundamental to the creation of British concentration camps. he functioning of those camps would have been literally unthinkable without the racial distinctions that the English drew between themselves and their colonial subjects. In faraway colonies, brute force and categorical policies were more suited to the surveillance and control of alien and largely illegible masses. Camps and restricted migration proved particularly useful to arrest the movement of nomadic, and therefore menacing, and potentially diseaseridden colonial populations, ixing them to a particular geographic space. In contrast to other European powers, Russia pursued imperial ambitions in areas contiguous to its own borders rather than outside the continent. As a result, claims Forth, the distinction between metropole and colony was not nearly as pronounced as in the British Empire. he mixing of ethnic Russian and non-Russian populations within the same imperial borders mitigated some of the harsher aspects of race ideas, and biologically based conceptions of ethnicity did not develop in Russia to the extent that they did elsewhere. THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 721 Moreover, as Forth argues, the Soviets, in their turn, rejected the kinds of genetic biopolitics common in other countries. hey rejected the biological theories of criminality and social deviance that dominated European criminology and anthropology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In their practices of mass incarceration, the Soviets adopted the language of class enemies, socially dangerous elements, and other sociological categories of analysis. Soviet penal policies were based not on race but supposedly on social criteria of behavior and class background. he distinctions that Forth highlights have been pronounced by others. It is true that the British state did not establish concentration camps in the metropole. But the Soviet government did exactly that, and this should make us consider the proposition that the Soviet state’s relationship toward its own population was a colonial one, extractive in the sense that colonialism always has been. hat the Soviet state functioned as an extractive state is not a new idea, but it gains new force when compared to the remarkably similar policies applied by other states to their colonial populations. he relationship between the Soviet state and the population over which it governed was one of internal colonization. he evolution of that relationship followed a trajectory like other colonial relationships, with the same logic of brute extractive force, harsh discipline, and exclusionary restrictions. Most of the Soviet population, like other colonial populations, was denied the civil rights and freedoms granted to citizens who would have been part of the metropole. If there was a geographically deined metropole in Stalin’s USSR, it surely would have been the handful of elite regime cities in the country. hese relatively wellsupplied and comfortable areas constituted an archipelago in their own right, a converse image of the archipelago of forced labor camps.17 he argument that the Soviet system represented a form of internal colonization is not just an argument in retrospect. During the mid- and late 1920s, government documents and oicials referred to the process of settling underdeveloped areas as colonization (kolonizatsiia). he designation 17 On internal colonization, see Edward Hallett Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 1:519–30; Alvin W. Gouldner, “Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,” Telos, no. 34 (1977–78): 5–48; Niccolo Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: he Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazakh Herdsmen, 1928–1934,” Cahiers du monde russe 45, 1–2 (2004): 153–59; and Viola, he Unknown Gulag, 185. Carr describes colonization mainly as migration and settlement, particularly of sparsely populated areas. Gouldner, Pianciola, and Viola discuss internal colonization primarily in relation to peasant–state relations. I am suggesting here a broader application of the idea to encompass most of the Soviet population. For an insightful and provocative discussion of internal colonization in the Russian context, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 722 DAVID R. SHEARER of penal colonists as “special settlers” distinguished them from voluntary settlers, whom the government also encouraged to settle in the (mostly) nonEuropean areas of the Soviet Union. In keeping with their “special” status, penal colonists were engaged in what was described as spetskolonizatsiia. In the early 1930s, the language of colonization was dropped in favor of the more neutral term of “mastering” (osvoenie), but in the late 1920s, oicials still used the language of colonization unabashedly, whether it was forced or voluntary colonization.18 And what of the racial component of colonialism? It is true that the Soviets rejected the kinds of biologistic language common in other countries. At the same time, as the literary historian Ricardo Nicolosi most recently argued, there existed a strong discursive connection between the language of biology and sociology. he language that Soviet police and other oicials employed to describe enemies may have been sociological in content, but that language, and the thinking behind that language, was no less categorical and deterministic than the racial tropes used by the British to justify concentration camps in colonial areas. According to Nicolosi, Soviet rhetoric and practice from the 1930s expressed a kind of atavism that depicted antiSoviet “elements” as incorrigible and as radically other, and their anti-Soviet behavior as a class-instinctual and irredeemable threat to the existence of socialist society.19 Such a racialized attitude toward anti-Soviet “elements” pervaded police and leaders’ discourse and practice throughout the 1930s and found its ultimate expression in Stalin’s 1948 decree that all those who had been deported to exile should remain permanently in exile. Here is yet another structural parallel between the Soviet Gulag system and the society of which it was an integral part. hroughout the 1930s, there existed an administration for voluntary resettlement, and from time to time, it advertised for volunteer settler families. he organization of “echelons,” provisioning, shipment, and voluntary settlement bore striking similarities 18 See, e.g., the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) decree of 18 August 1930 “O meropriatiiakh po provedeniiu spetskolonizatsii v Severnom i Siberskom kraiakh i Ural´skoi oblasti,” repr. in Naselenie i vlast´: Ocherki demograicheskoi istorii SSSR 1930-kh gg., ed. S. N. Golotik and V. V. Minaev (Moscow: Ippolitova, 2004), 117. Also see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 3260, op. 9, dd. 6, 27, 28, and 34—all of which, from 1928 and 1929, refer to colonization and resettlement plans. See also the 1936 report by I. I. Pliner, assistant head of the Gulag, on plans to “colonize” territory associated with construction of the Baikal–Amur rail line (GARF f. 9479, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 28–29, repr. in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920 kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh gg. Sobranie dokumentov, ed. Aleksandr Bezborodov et al., 7 vols. [Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–5], Doc. no. 49, 5:226–27). 19 Riccardo Nicolosi, comments given at the conference “he Born and the Common Criminal: he Discourse of Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in the Late Russian Empire and the Early Soviet Union (1880–1941),” Munich, Germany, 13–14 February 2015. THE SOVIET GULAG—AN ARCHIPELAGO? 723 to the administration of “special” settlers, although very little is known about the voluntary resettlement programs—how many were in fact recruited, where they were sent, how they fared—especially in comparison to the penal settler colonies. In at least one instance, several voluntary resettlement colonies also experienced some of the same diiculties faced by “special” settlers. Voluntary collective farms composed of Red Army veterans and their families, established near the border areas of the Azov–Black Sea District in the early 1930s, were abandoned or severely depleted within a year of their founding. hey were disbanded amid conditions of poor supply, disease, and even death of a number of the members.20 he parallels between voluntary and special settlement are suggestive. Documents from the voluntary administration are eerily similar to documents that circulated within the Gulag special settlement administration. hose parallels highlight a process of colonization that afected both space and population, and both “free” and unfree labor. As Judith Pallot shows, this colonization process extended both forward and backward in time. he Gulag, she argues, created the imprint for both the spatial politics of peripheral colonization and the system of labor and harsh punishment of the modern Russian penal system. At the same time, both the Gulag and modern Russian penal practices relect yet older traditions of communal organization and collective responsibility, practices that harken back to the rural system of Russian life in the 18th and 19th centuries. here exists a continuity of practice, she writes, that situates the Gulag within the arc of a long historical evolution. Daniel Beer’s essay also points to that continuity, although he does not make the connections explicit. Beer’s description of the horrors and chaos of 19th-century transport mirror many of the same problems that plagued the Gulag system of the 1930s. he most signiicant diference turned on the amount of time for transport, which was much shorter by the 1930s—weeks and months, instead of months or even years. Still, central Soviet authorities had many of the same kinds of problems controlling the process of transport as their 19th-century counterparts. Massive numbers of escapes, inadequate preparations, underadministration of transport stations and colonies, bribery, corruption, and death and disease were but the most prominent of similarities. Beer also highlights a point made by both Judith Pallot and Emilia Koustova about the centrality of the transport process to the exile experience. Whether in the 19th, the 20th, or the 21st century, most exiles sufered what was probably the most brutal and dangerous aspect of their deportation not 20 GARF f. 5446, op. 71, d. 176, ll. 109–13. On general problems in voluntary settlement programs, see, e.g., a report by the Soviet Control Commission from March 1935 in ibid., op. 16a, d. 261, ll. 1–4. 724 DAVID R. SHEARER in the fulillment of their sentence but in the actual process of civic separation and physical transport. In the 19th century, at least, physical transport was not even counted as part of the deportee’s sentence but rather incidental to it, even as it made up the most horriic part of the whole experience. Analogously, Koustova notes that many exiles in the mid-20th century could, in hindsight, reimagine their sentences as a pioneering experience. At the same time, former deportees often remembered the actual transport as a distinct event, separate from the fulillment of their sentences, and in the most humiliating and degrading terms. Pallot also notes the symbolic importance of spatial distancing of prisoners in post-Soviet times. As Beer points out, the act of deportation expressed the sovereign power of the autocrat to move his subjects around the territory of the empire at will. his same autocratic and colonial power found expression in the Soviet exile system, and more broadly in the extension of that system to the whole population through internal passport and residence laws. It was no coincidence that the passport and residence system evolved in tandem with the Gulag and colony system. he practice of policing, and the administration of Gulag camps and colonies during the 1930s and 1940s, gave the lie to any ideology of rehabilitation. Solzhenitsyn was correct about that. he Gulag functioned to exploit human material, without mercy, to build and maintain a massive industrial military state. We may qualify Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor of the camps as a series of islands, interconnected, and isolated from Soviet society, but he and Jacques Rossi were also correct, as Oleg Khlevniuk writes, to characterize the Gulag as the quintessential incarnation of the state that created it. Nearly all the papers in this collection airm this. he Gulag system reproduced, in the purest unmitigated forms, the fundamentally coercive ways in which the Soviet state interacted with Soviet citizens. Coercion, colonization, and violence were at the heart of the Stalinist state. Leaders after Stalin attempted to mitigate that coercion, to replace it with the makings of an authoritarian welfare state, but elements of the Gulag system continued and still characterize penal practice in that part of the world. Dept. of History 236 Munroe Hall University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA dshearer@udel.edu