The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (review)

This impressive book is one of the latest volumes in Yale University Press’s remarkable Annals of Communism series. The volume provides a history of the penal system in the Soviet Union run by the Main Administration of Labor Camps, Labor Colonies, and Places of Confinement under the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. The acronym for this agency, GULag, is now widely used as the designation for the camp network itself.

The History of the Gulag is more than just a collection of primary sources. The 106 documents are embedded within a longer descriptive and analytical text, and the reader is skillfully guided through them by one of the leading experts on the Stalin era. In contrast to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, this collection is based not on the testimony of prisoners but on the internal correspondence and reports of the officials of the system. Few of the documents come from the top of the political system; the main exceptions are reports commissioned by Nikita Khrushchev in the mid-1950s to quantify the excesses of the Stalinist gulag. Occasionally the book strays from the subject of the gulag proper, notably with an extended treatment of the origins of the Great Terror. However, from a historian of Oleg Khlevniuk’s stature this additional material is a positive rather than negative feature.

The gulag officially existed from 1934 until 1956, so the main title of the book is somewhat misleading. The story of the wartime and postwar situation in the gulag is also very important, as are the revolts and dismantling after Josif Stalin’s death in 1953. Fuller coverage would, however, have led either to an impracticably long volume or to superficial treatment. Khlevniuk begins by taking us back before the formal creation of the gulag to the mass expulsion of kulaks (more prosperous peasants) starting in 1929. This is the event that made a massive penal apparatus necessary, so it surely is an essential part of the story. The subtitle is also slightly inaccurate insofar as the treatment extends beyond the Great Terror of 1937–1938 to deal with the 1938–1941 mass deportations of border nationalities.

In general, the documents are clearly presented and annotated. Some of the larger tables could have been laid out more clearly, and the map of gulag sites unfortunately gives few details. The book would have been improved by fuller maps, making it possible for the reader to locate the various camp complexes discussed in the text. These are, however, only minor flaws.

The documents are fascinating. What particularly emerges is the abuse of power by lower-level officials coupled with the top leaders’ willful ignorance of reality. Although some attempts were made to punish officials and guards who exceeded their authority, such excesses were nothing compared to the brutal social engineering organized from above. Moscow’s plans sometimes went badly wrong, for example in the abortive attempts in 1932–1933 to create labor settlements in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. The volume also makes clear the practical problems of accommodating hundreds of thousands of prisoners, let alone finding productive work for them to do. The lack of infrastructure in labor camps transformed them into “provisional death camps,” and the book contains a vivid report of the horror of Nazino Island in 1933. The documents demonstrate the physical limits of the gulag, and Khlevniuk suggests that one of the reasons for the mass shootings in 1937–1938 was that the camp system could not be expanded to accommodate the growing number of “class enemies.” Of special interest is the chapter on numbers of inmates and their characteristics, with reports prepared in the 1950s. Precise numbers of deaths will never be known, but Khlevniuk argues that the official statistics must represent a minimum.

Khlevniuk convincingly argues that the policy of repression was orchestrated from above, in particular by Stalin himself (rather than his chief of secret police, Nikolai Ezhov). The...