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
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.007 |
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".