Coming to Terms with a Violent Past

As recent case studies on the topic of transitional justice have demonstrated, recovery from the experience of mass violence and political terror and coming to terms with the associated past always constitute lengthy and painful processes, often including contradictions as well.¹ Contributing to this developing field of research, the works of Miriam Dobson and Bettina Greiner focus on the history and public perception of the Stalinist camps and their inmates in the USSR and in the Soviet zone of occupation that later became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Both works seek to understand individual perceptions of the camp experience and various attempts of state, societies, and individuals to come to terms with a past characterized by terror and totalitarian dictatorship.

After Stalin's death in 1953, hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners were released by amnesty. Between 1953 and 1960, the population of the Gulag fell dramatically from 2.5 million to 0.5 million. This exodus included not only victims of the Stalinist purges but also ordinary criminals. In her impressive monograph, Dobson explores the massive departure of prisoners from the Gulag and popular reactions to this process among those to whom the prisoners returned. Presenting the Gulag releases as an event that affected all of society, the book fruitfully combines three different aspects of the problem: the reform policies of Khrushchev and other political leaders; ordinary peoples' perceptions of de-Stalinization and Gulag release; and returnees' perceptions and experiences of life in the postcamp world. Her work accords with a general shift of interest in recent research on the Gulag, which concentrates on the post-Stalinist era and the "dilemmas of de-Stalinization."² Dobson skillfully combines the different perspectives in her book and shows us the big picture of politics and society coping with the results of Stalinist terror. She thus offers insights into everyday life, social and political tensions, and patterns of exclusion and inclusion in the USSR after Stalin.

While Dobson focuses on processes within the USSR, Bettina Greiner investigates the history of Soviet special camps located on the territory of the Soviet zone of occupation and the GDR in the years from 1945 to 1950. Research on the special camps developed in Germany only in the 1990s, when for the first time the Russian archives opened their collections to foreign researchers. By the end of that decade, some primary research and an edition of documents about the special camps had appeared.³ Greiner's monograph represents a continuation of this trend.

In numerical terms, these camps were much smaller than those located in the USSR itself. According to official Soviet accounts, around 160,000 civilian men and women were imprisoned in ten camps, among them prominent resistance fighters like Ulrich Freiherr von Sell (a participant in the plot on Hitler's life of 20 July 1944) and Horst von Einsiedel (a member of the Kreisau Circle, mostly conservative Germans who had opposed Nazism). Most of the prisoners were Germans, while another 35,000 or so were Soviet citizens. Mortality in these camps was extremely high, reaching 35 percent; nearly 43,000 prisoners died from hunger and disease during their prison terms. In her case study, Greiner focuses specifically on Sachsenhausen, which had more than 60,000 prisoners and was thus the biggest special camp in the Soviet zone of occupation. The camp inmates can be divided into two groups. The first were the so-called internees, who were incarcerated for years without trial and consisted mostly of former Nazis. The second, smaller group comprised the convicts of Soviet military tribunals. The prisoners of the special camps simultaneously included perpetrators of crimes and their victims, both followers and opponents of National Socialism. The...