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  • Researching Daily Life in the Gulag
  • Steven A. Barnes (bio)
Tvorchestvo i byt GULAGa: Katalog muzeinogo sobraniia Obshchestva “Memorial.” Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998. 207 pp. ISBN 578700020-X.
Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova , Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva. Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1997. 227 pp.
Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1960: Spravochnik. Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998. 597 pp. ISBN 578700022-6.
Michael Jakobson and Lidia Jakobson , Pesennyi fol´klor GULAGa kak istoricheskii istochnik (1917–1939). Moscow: Sovremennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet, 1998. 421 pp. ISBN 5901085019.

For more than a decade now, scholars have enjoyed much broader access to the archives of the Soviet state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As scholars mine the previously inaccessible archives on a vast array of subjects, historians' understanding of life in the Soviet Union is evolving in new directions. The same cannot be said so readily of studies of the Gulag over the same period. Countless archival hours have been spent seeking "revelations" about the quantitative aspects of the Soviet terror, political control over the Gulag, and economic production in the camp system; yet life as lived both by the inmates and employees of this system has sadly received little attention. To this day, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago remains the only scholarly attempt to integrate the larger issues of Soviet political, social, and cultural history with the ordinary and extraordinary day-to-day conditions of the Gulag.1 A few recent publications, while not entirely engaging in such a study themselves, should [End Page 377] assist and direct scholars in just such a reevaluation of the Gulag's role in Soviet history.

Certainly, few archival revelations have made for better headlines in the last decade than those about the number of victims in the Soviet Union's vast forced-labor penal system. The intense focus in Western historical literature on determining the numerical population of the Gulag represents the final stage, one can only hope, of an intensely ideological and political debate over the nature of the Soviet Union which drove 1980s historiography. This debate and its main participants are, of course, well known. In terms of Soviet repression, one side consistently chose the lowest feasible number of victims, while the other side consistently chose the highest. The polemics were far from over when the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars took a well-honed quantitative preoccupation with them into the newly opened archives.2 Focused so intensely on numerical issues, these initial scholarly forays into the archives have failed to study real life in the Gulag. With the Cold War largely fading into history, perhaps the time has also come for this "numbers debate" to fade as well. While some of the more discrete points of this research will doubtless figure into the coming evaluation of the Gulag as a lived experience, little new can be learned from a further expenditure of resources exclusively on quantitative issues.3 Whether a scholar chooses the largest or the smallest available figures for the Gulag population, its numbers will be counted in millions. The Gulag was a mass social phenomenon – a brutal institution in a brutal polity. No further "revelation" of the numbers of victims will alter that picture.

The few archival works that do not revolve around the numbers debate, however, have nonetheless said little about the daily life of the Gulag. Historians [End Page 378] have been unable to escape the interpretive framework set up by the first generation of Gulag scholars. Unable to access archival evidence, this first generation of historians was forced to rely almost exclusively on the memoirs of survivors. These sources fostered an abiding conviction that a sentence in the Gulag represented death, inhibiting serious study of the intricacies of Gulag life. The Gulag in these works thus appeared either as a means of extracting slave labor or as a politically efficient means of quashing even the possibility of dissent. Daily life, if discussed at all, amounted to nothing more than the brutal extraction of labor or an inevitable march toward death.4 Unfortunately, even later critics of these interpretations continued to examine Soviet penal policy without reference to life in the camps themselves.5...

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