Pressa Gulaga (1918-1955), and: The GULAG Press, 1920-1937 (review)

It was no secret that Soviet prisons and concentration camps published journals and newspapers for inmates. In the early 1920s, it was possible to subscribe to some of these periodicals in Russia and even abroad. One can find scattered issues of them in Western libraries.¹ Legal journals devoted articles to the prison press in the 1920s and published a bibliography of it.² By the mid-1930s, camp papers became an institution that was proudly evoked in books about the merits of forced labor.³ These papers did not circulate freely after the late 1920s, and the public by and large forgot them by the time the war came. For all that, a Soviet historian referred to material a deported colleague wrote for camp journals on the past of the Solovetskii Monastery.⁴ He prudently did not recount the type of periodical he was quoting. To be sure, Solzhenitsyn did not hide the nature of his sources when he cited from publications for detainees.⁵

The dissident movement stimulated great interest in the history of the camps. In 1976, Aleksandr Iosifovich Dobkin published a samizdat article on the prison press under the pseudonym N. Stogov.⁶ He used reports on the prison press from the postrevolutionary decade and combed through bibliographic reference works that contain data for the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. Dobkin succeeded in identifying 176 publications, some of which were wall newspapers. He also managed to see a certain number of periodicals to give an overview of their main themes as well as of insights they provide into conditions of detention and the operation of the penal system.

It is understandable that this fragmentary information has provoked the interest of researchers. But Alla Iur´evna Gorcheva's book falls short of satisfying our curiosity. Gorcheva makes a commendable effort to sketch the history of the camp press, and she gives a bibliography that contains 420 titles. She also classifies the different sorts of papers and gives us a certain idea of the writing contained in prison journals. She undeniably enriches our knowledge. Still, her work is hardly more than an introduction, and unfortunately not an entirely reliable propaedeutic in the rudiments of dealing with Gulag publications.

A fair part of the book is devoted to issues that are not without relation to the topic but do not need detailed treatment in this context; in the end, they overshadow the main subject. An entire chapter is spent on a vague outline of the history of Soviet censorship that does not add to what the author says on intervention by the authorities in the work of prison journals. Gorcheva is tireless in detailing the hardships inmates had to endure, and she writes at length about the history of the camp system. No one will deny that her indignation is completely justified. Nevertheless, one cannot help wondering if most of what she recounts is not familiar to the reader and if the cruelty of the camps is not something that can be taken for granted.

Moreover, the author's insistence on enlightening us about the Gulag is likely to undermine trust in the accuracy of her treatment of other issues. For some reason Gorcheva thinks that dispossessed kulaks, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, and foreign Communists were already populating camps in the early 1920s (22). She firmly believes that the draconian law on the theft of public property was promulgated in August 1940 and not eight years earlier (58, 78). She mentions unspecified Western publications according to which up to 80 percent of...