Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De‐Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".