Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies By AlanBarenberg, Emily D.Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022, 320 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978‐0‐253‐05961‐1

This model anthology offers new insights into identities, sources, and legacies of the camps, and the inclusion of section commentaries places the individual chapters in dialogue with one another. The volume is intentionally interdisciplinary, with contributions from scholars of history, literature, geography, and sociology. Section one, “Identities,” focuses on under-studied prisoner populations, with chapters by Jeffrey Hardy (on Orthodox priests and believers in the Solovki camps of the 1920s), Emily Johnson (on the use of non-Russian language in camp correspondence), and Gavin Slade (on the society formed by hardened criminals within the camps), with commentary by Lynne Viola. Hardy demonstrates the remarkable degree of religious autonomy that clergy detained in Solovki had in the 1920s and highlights some of the disputes between religious leaders in the camp, including over how to relate to the Bolshevik regime. His chapter emphasizes the ad hoc nature of the Gulag's early development. Johnson's exploration of languages of prisoner correspondence reveals one way ethnic minorities navigated their time in the camps, pointing both to assimilation (improved use of the Russian language, for example) and to small acts of resistance (occasional phrases in native languages). Despite the book's title, Rethinking the Gulag, Slade's chapter is one of the few that asks us to reconceptualize the camp system. Slade provocatively argues that the practices of the camp criminal population created a “reputation system” that was a “form of prisoner self-governance” rather than only a “subculture” of the system (pp. 84, 67). Slade then links this political culture of the Gulag prisoners to the organized crime of the late 1980s and 1990s. In a sense, then, Slade's chapter is as much about “legacy” as “identity.” Viola's commentary acts like a discussant position in a conference, bringing out significant points and offering suggestions for areas that could be explored (“Yet the study of gender in the Gulag still awaits its historian” [p. 96]). She finds common ground between the three chapters, noting that all three reveal differences between central policies and the situation on the ground. Section two, “Sources,” features work by Mikhail Nakonechnyi (on early medical release and mortality) and by two scholars who apply digital methods to analyze sources: Susan Grunwald (on German POWs in the Soviet Union) and Sarah J. Young (analyzing word use in memoirs). Nakonechnyi's chapter is both a confirmation and refutation of Golfo Alexopoulos's recent monograph on mortality in the camps. Like Alexopoulos, Nakonechnyi confirms (using central and local sources from different ministries and departments, including the Ministry of Justice and the Procuracy) that officials used early medical release to hide or downplay camp mortality rates. However, he sees “the central intervention not as sustained collusion but as a situational cover-up” (p. 122). He also argues, contra Alexopoulos, that the practice did not increase over time; instead, officials made use of this practice the most when the system was the most stressed, that is, during times of famine and war. Grunewald uses digital mapping to show that POW camps were located not primarily in Siberia, as commonly understood, but “in the republics that had seen the fiercest fighting of the war” (p. 138). This makes sense, according to Grunewald, because authorities used German POWs mostly in the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure. Young also uses digital methods, but in her case for linguistic analysis. She takes the titles, prefaces, and first five hundred words of digitized memoirs on the Sakharov Center's “Gulag Memoir Database,” sorting word-use digitally to understand, better, how memoirists framed their accounts. Young's data demonstrate how a large corpus of texts can be fruitfully studied. Particularly striking was the preoccupation with genre found in many of the memoirs. Further dividing the corpus may also yield important results. For example, do men and women frame their experiences differently? As Judith Pallot points out in her commentary, these three chapters have little in common, yet together they highlight the strengths of this book as a whole: an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to studying the Gulag. Pallot usefully brings out key points of significance from all three chapter and adds information about her own work using digital methodologies for understanding the Gulag. Finally, the “Legacies” section features work by Josephine von Zitzewitz on nature in Gulag poetry, Alan Barenberg on the post-camp correspondence between Varlam Shalamov and Georgii Demidov, and Irina Flige on the many marked and unmarked burial sites of the camp system. Von Zitzewitz traces the role of nature in the poetry of Shalamov and Nikolai Zabolotsky, arguing that nature became a “spiritual force” that allowed them to resist the regime's dehumanizing efforts (p. 197). Barenberg examines Shalamov from a different angle, looking at his post-camp correspondence with Georgii Demidov and revealing the tensions that existed among former prisoners who were trying to make sense of their experiences. Shalamov and Demidov debated issues like how to represent the camp experience and who had the authority to do so, and they engaged in these debates at a time when there was no existing cannon of Gulag literature, thus “the stakes were relatively high” (p. 235). Flige's chapter (translated by von Zitzewitz) on the “Necropolis of the Gulag” fits nicely with Nakonechnyi's earlier chapter on hidden mortality. Flige deals with mass burial sites of the camp systems, both their Stalin-era history and their current cultural meanings. In the end, Flige's analysis underscores the localized and incomplete ways post-Soviet Russia has dealt with the legacy of the Gulag: “When, after the first post-Soviet decade, the archives were still not opened and most graves not found, with those that were found largely speculative, the Necropolis of the Terror returned to its basic state: unknown burials of unknown victims” (p. 267). Alexander Etkind's commentary argues that these chapters show the shifting and contested cultural meanings of the Gulag and the camp experience. The book ends with an afterword by Barenberg and Johnson that touches on some of ways Putin's Russia has approached the Gulag, including the “rapprochement” between Solzhenitsyn and the state, and the opening of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow in 2015 (p. 285). They argue that the state has attempted to monopolize the memory of the Gulag to suit its own purposes. Rethinking the Gulag is less about “rethinking” in the sense of offering a new interpretative framework for the system, and more about exploring new topics, sources, and research methods. The relatively short chapters and section summaries make this an excellent choice for a senior or graduate seminar on the Gulag, Stalinism, or the legacy and memory of Stalinist repression. The book's innovative structure sets it apart from other anthologies. Gulag studies has become a rich subfield of Soviet and post-Soviet studies more generally, and Rethinking the Gulag showcases incredibly thought-provoking, interdisciplinary scholarship, from scholars both well-established and others who are just beginning to impact the field.

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.