Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De‐Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the issue of de‐convoyed ( raskonvoirovannye ) prisoners in order to argue that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring analogy for the Gulag—the archipelago—is, in many instances, misleading. The practice of allowing significant numbers of prisoners to move, unguarded, outside of the camp zones was widespread throughout the Stalin era, and is especially interesting as a topic of study for Western Siberia, an area where the largest camp subdivisions were located within the city limits of major urban centers, such as Novosibirsk and Tomsk. This article is the first systematic study of the phenomenon during the Stalin era, and assesses the rules of and reasons for de‐convoyed status, prisoners' thoughts concerning unguarded movement, and problems and opportunities (including black market activity) arising from the widespread presence of unescorted prisoners. Ultimately, the Gulag's porous borders meant that Gulag space was not separate, isolated space, despite the best intentions of the regime.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it