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  • Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society
  • Golfo Alexopoulos
Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. 352 pp. $35.00.

Steven Barnes is a leading authority on the Gulag who has done as much as anyone to bring its dark history to light. His meticulously researched book on the Soviet Gulag looks at one of the largest and most enduring camps, Karlag, in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. The book draws on wide-ranging archival sources and memoir accounts and examines many key elements in the Gulag’s history: the impact of external [End Page 173] events (famine, terror, war, annexations) on camp life, the ways gender and ethnicity played out on the ground, the Gulag’s use of surveillance techniques, and its construction of social and national hierarchies. This important book deserves a wide audience.

Barnes’s greatest contribution is his brilliant account of the wartime and postwar years—arguably the most significant period in the Gulag’s long history. The book explores the origins and impact of the Gulag’s key innovations of the 1940s: the katorga camp divisions, filtrations camps, special camps, and the policy on permanent exile. The wartime and postwar influx of a new contingent with a new political consciousness, Barnes writes, represents a crucial event in Gulag history. He details how these prisoners with life experience outside the Soviet Union—war veterans and people from the newly annexed territories of western Ukraine, western Belarus, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states, many of whom fought with nationalist organizations and partisan armies—fundamentally reshaped Gulag society and largely produced the camp unrest that emerged in the institution’s twilight years. His multilayered account of Karlag at war is a highlight of the book. One fascinating story concerned Karlag’s director who came under pressure from the Gulag chief for the high mortality rates at his camp during the war. The camp director’s response was to shift blame to his health director and have him fired, only to be sacked himself a year later. In the meantime, the terrible death rates persisted because blame shifting represented the full extent of the problem-solving efforts at all levels. Among other things, Barnes’s book is indispensable for revealing the external pressures, incentives, strategies, and worldviews of those involved in day-to-day camp operations.

Barnes argues that the Gulag represented a transformative space in which the Communist party sought to realize its revolutionary project of reforging human raw material and redeeming the criminal. He writes: “Given the constant release of a significant portion of the Gulag population throughout the institution’s history, it is quite clear that redeemability, at least for some segment of the prisoner population, was never totally abandoned” (p. 12). My chief quibble with the book is that the theme of individual redeemability is overstated and dominates other elements of Barnes’s superb analysis—for example, his treatment of violence. Barnes argues convincingly that violence/death and reform/transformation were inextricable, in both theory and practice. In the memoir literature, violence often appears as the work of individual sadists, but Barnes offers a more complex exploration of violence that merges ideology and practice. He asserts that, “in the Soviet ethos, the coexistence of violence and transformation—creation and destruction—was no contradiction at all. In fact, one was unimaginable without the other” (p. 15). The belief played out on the ground repeatedly, because “Gulag authorities were unembarrassed about the tie between the failure to fulfill labor norms and death” (p. 77).

Barnes also privileges the political over the economic: “the Gulag was in fact a penal institution first, and a productive institution second” (p. 39). Yet he notes throughout the book that the economic and political were tightly interwoven and represented competing tasks that vied for the attention of camp officials. Barnes states: “The Gulag served many different functions—economic and penal—and the demands of one function usually interfered with another. At the local level, camp authorities [End Page 174] were forced to work through these contradictory demands to decide what held priority” (p. 2...

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