Gulag Archives - Not Even Past

by Andrew Straw

Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag argues that the first and most heinous of Stalin’s notorious purges was the attack on wealthy or successful peasants known as kulaks, and their exile to desolate special settlements in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This account of “dekulakization,” is vital in understanding how the Bolshevik experiment with the New Economic Policy, or NEP (a limited market economy with communist party control), abruptly ended in the late 1920s when Stalin launched the radical industrialization and collectivization goals of the Five Year Plans. The NEP economy had allowed peasants to maintain their key prize of the revolution, land ownership, but this concession was seen by many Bolsheviks as undesirable and temporary and was ended by Stalin’s breakneck drive towards rapid industrialization, which required total state control of agriculture. The internal “colonial” settlements that housed the supposed “enemy” elements of the peasant population, were the foundation of what Solzhenitsyn later called the “Gulag Archipelago.” They set the precedent for the processes of political repression in the Stalinist Soviet Union, but among Stalinist crimes they are relatively “unknown” or understudied by historians. Viola asserts that the attempted elimination of the kulaks as “class enemies” was a disaster. The project was unrealistic, based on ideology rather than realistic planning; it was fiercely resisted, and only exacerbated the socio-economic problems of the USSR it was meant to solve.

Viola guides the reader through the full chronology of the dekulakization campaign by exploring the thinking of officials who organized a war against the peasantry, the construction of kulak identity, transport to exile, and the settlement conditions. Concurrently, Viola’s narrative humanizes the victims by unearthing grim accounts of the horrific deportation process and internment conditions, as families were loaded into trains and subjected to unspeakable conditions in settlements and by contrasting that reality with the deceptive propaganda used to disparage the kulaks in public. Victims’ testimonies are further supported by the first hand accounts of Soviet officials who confirmed the nightmarish conditions, particularly during the famine of 1932-33. By outlining the conditions in the countryside, initial orders from above, the “classifications” of peasants as kulaks, and the workings of the OGPU (Secret Police), Viola allows the reader to understand the archival evidence of kulak repression in the context of the inter-war USSR.

Max Alpert, “Seizing grain hidden by kulaks,” November 1930 (Wikimedia)

According to the author, the kulak identity was a form of “internal colonization” similar to western European ideas about the need to “civilize” the colonized races, but focused on the transformation of the peasants through “socialist reeducation.” However, Soviet attempts to apply progressive reasoning to dekulakization is exposed as almost entirely superficial and Viola stresses that the real effect was the creation of a kulak identity defined as an exploited class of peasants that was treated as resource for economic and state development. The haphazard building of special settlements and the authorities’ lack of preparation for the surviving deportees confirms the hypocrisy of a Soviet policy that hoped to exploit labor, only to have many able-bodied people die because they had no shelter or food. This kulak identity was internalized by all the victims, even the ones who came back into the Soviet mainstream through service during World War Two or repatriation after the death of Stalin. Equally important was the fact that this system of gulags did nothing to ameliorate the Russian and Soviet problems of rural underdevelopment, but merely created a Soviet superpower as a “Leviathan” built on the backs of the peasantry.

“Exclude the kulak from the collective farm” (LSE Digital Archive)

In sum, Viola convincingly argues that the “unknown gulag” provided the slave labor crucial to sustaining an otherwise unsustainable planned-economy and constructed a social distinction between those peasants moving up through the Soviet system and those enslaved as counter-revolutionaries. Anyone interested in Stalin’s Soviet Union will benefit from reading the Unknown Gulag because Viola successfully humanizes the victims of Stalin’s first attempt at reshaping the economic and social structure of the Soviet Union, while thoroughly examining the people and ideology that brought such plans to fruition. The “other Gulag’ of dekulakized peasants and the settlements where they suffered as “state enemies” now has a fitting account that will preserve their memory.

You might also enjoy:

Yana Skorobogatova’s review of Anne Applebaum’s, Gulag: A HIstory, here on NEP

Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, an online exhibit of Gulag history

by Yana Skorobogatov

“Through Labor – Freedom!” read a sign above the entrance to Solovetsky, just one of the 476 camps that comprised the Soviet gulag system. This prison network – what Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously termed “the gulag archipelago” – is the subject of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum’s excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book. It is an impressive compendium of firsthand accounts taken from countless memoirs, archives, and oral histories conducted by both Applebaum and the organization Memorial, which was founded in 1987 to preserve the memory of those who died in the gulag. Written in a journalist’s engaging style with a historian’s attention to detail, Gulag offers readers unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Soviet prison labor camp system and the lives of the people who survived it.

Applebaum is wise to structure her book thematically in order to maximize her reader’s immersion into each facet of gulag life. Chapters devoted to the individual characters one would encounter in a gulag camp – corrupt guards, tattoo artists, women and children – animate otherwise gruesome descriptions of the processes – arrest, transport, labor, and punishment – that gulag inhabitants were forced to undergo. Several nuanced discussions of the complex power structures formed inside the gulag zona will surprise even those readers familiar with Stalinist terror. For example, a camp boss’ order that identifies the prison brigadier as “the most significant person on the construction site,” shows how the system’s industrial imperatives presented average prisoners with opportunities for upward mobility. Other details, like one man’s account of his terminally ill wife being pushed to the floor by a prison guard, underscore the brutality upon which the gulag regime was founded.

The author supplements her detailed narrative with refreshing insight on the origins of Stalinist terror, a topic that has inspired heavy debate among Soviet historians. She joins the likes of J. Arch Getty, James Harris, and Michael Jakobson to argue that the gulags were a product of on the spot improvisation rather than a premeditated master plan. In the early 1930s, the Soviet leadership in general, and Stalin in particular, constantly changed course. Neither the OGPU nor the secret police made clear their ultimate goals about the future of the gulag system. It became common, for example, for the OGPU to labor over the issue of overcrowding in prison camps and declare amnesties for prisoners as a solution, only to issue another wave of repression and new plans for camp construction shortly thereafter. Cycles like these indicate that despite Stalin’s political, economic, and even personal investment in the gulag system, its origins were haphazard and the policies that shaped it inconsistent.

Readers will notice Applebaum’s penchant for infusing her own moral insight into her narrative, a tactic that will appeal to her non-academic audience but may disquiet a few historians. She portrays the novelist Maxim Gorky as morally corrupt and opportunistic, someone who made a career out of serving the Soviet regime by praising gulag prisons (“it is excellent,” he wrote of the Solovetsky camp) and convict labor projects like the White Sea Canal. Jean-Paul Sartre is criticized for supporting Stalinism throughout the postwar years, while Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are condemned for smiling in photographs taken with Stalin during the Yalta Conference. Applebaum expresses disdain for most leftist intellectuals and politicians who excuse Stalin’s crimes and denounce Hitler’s in a single breath. The issue of unintended consequences makes it difficult to identify and condemn immorality in retrospect, which is why most academic historians tend to keep their moral judgments at bay when writing histories of even the most reprehensible of regimes. That Applebaum – a journalist by profession – chose to stray from the facts in her introduction and closing chapters betrays an otherwise impeccable book, whose subject – the history and legacy of Stalinist injustice – is capable of commanding a reader’s moral compass all on its own.

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola (2007)

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004)

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