“The scale of the Gulag contrasted with its futility” (274). So writes Aleksandr Etkind in aptly summarizing why the Gulag remains a complex and important topic in academic studies. From the earliest camps on the Solovetskii Islands of Russia's Far North, to today's male prisons in Russia and former Soviet republics, these sites and their practices have left, for better and worse, a legacy of material for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, literary scholars, and other scholarly disciplines. The significance of this volume is announced in its title–to “rethink” a field of inquiry that was initially largely defined by the (typically privileged) members of the intelligentsia who had been incarcerated as political prisoners. Instead, the fourteen contributors to Rethinking the Gulag broaden the scope to include previously understudied groups such as ethnic minorities, religious inmates, peasants, and criminals. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume requires a broad range of approaches, with everything from close readings of poetry and correspondence to data mining and mapping.
Rethinking the Gulag is organized into three sections, each with three articles and a commentary. Emblematic of the diversity of materials and approaches that characterize the volume, the first section, Identities, opens with “Religious Identity, Practice and Hierarchy at the Solovetskii Camp of Forced Labor of Special Significance,” Jeffrey Hardy's article on shifting relationships between the Solovki camp administration and religious inmates in the 1920s. His careful analysis of the often improvisational nature of these experiences adds an important piece to our knowledge of this under-researched topic. Emily Johnson's contribution, “Censoring the Mail in Stalin's Multiethnic Penal System,” addresses the practicalities faced by camp authorities when censoring the mail of non-Russian camp inmates, and the varied uses of Russian and non-Russian languages. Gavin Slade, in his answer to “Who are You in Life? The Gulag Reputation System and Its Legacies today,” examines the role of everyday Gulag criminal practices in the lives of both Gulag and contemporary criminal inmates. As is true of all three sections, the commentator's, in this case historian Lynne Viola's, comments provide a concise and insightful overview of the preceding articles.
As its title might imply, the second section, Sources, incorporates new quantitative and qualitative methodologies to further illuminate the relationships between the macro and the micro-purposes of the Gulag's administrators, between the realms of statistics and individual stories, between maps and memoirs. Here, as Judith Pallott summarizes in her excellent commentary, scholars incorporate a variety of computer-assisted techniques to address “the enduring debate about the quantification of the victims of repression” (181). In his groundbreaking contribution, “They Won't Survive for Long: Soviet Officials on Medical Release Procedures,” Mikhail Nakonechnyi uses archival Gulag mortality and release records for the period 1930–55 to address questions of intentionality and manipulation by the Soviet regime. In her chapter, “Applying Digital Methods to Forced Labor History,” Susan Grunewald uses digital mapping of German prisoners of war in labor camps (as opposed to Gulag camps) in postwar reconstruction. In “Researching the Gulag in the Era of ‘Big Data,” literary scholar Sarah Young incorporates corpus analysis of the large (almost 43 million words!) body of memoirs and testimonies housed at the Sakharov Center in an effort to understand and explain the subjective role of the Gulag in individual former zeks’ lives. The methodologies of these three scholars vary widely but each is representative of the fruitful application of new methods of archival analysis to gain a broader perspective on these rich materials.
The third section, “Legacies,” begins with a close reading of one of the most traditional of literary topics: “The Role of Nature in Gulag Poetry,” by Josephine von Zittzewitz, in which she contrasts the use of the topic by two widely known but very different Soviet poets, Varlaam Shalamov and Nikolai Zabolotsky. While certainly a departure from the sweeping reach of most of the other chapters in this volume, it is a refreshing reminder that, as she concludes, “lyric poetry born out of the camp experience can be read as a courageous act of resistance” (214). Shalamov reappears in Alan Barenberg's chapter on the relatively brief but troubled correspondence in the mid-1960s between Shalamov and fellow zek and writer Georgii Demidov. Barenberg's focus is on the different notions of authorial authority laid out by the two survivors, set against a background of prison fiction, newly emerging in the post-One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich space. The last chapter of “Legacies,” Irina Flige's “The Necropolis of the Gulag as Historical-Cultural Object,” returns to a broader topic: death and its documentation in the many physical sites (the often secret burial sites, mass graves and cemeteries) and in the memories of surviving relatives and families. Flige's contribution, part of a book-length project, left me eager for a fuller treatment of this innovative approach to memory studies, and I look forward to the appearance of the book.
Rethinking the Gulag is a model of collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship. The intersection of multiple generations of experienced and emerging scholars of the Gulag, drawing on diverse scholarly methodologies, is apparent and appreciated. I finished reading the volume wanting to be told by the editors that this is the first in a planned multi-volume project. Certain topics, including the role of gender in the Gulag, remain unaddressed. Others, such as the interrelationships between political and criminal zeks, need to be expanded beyond Soviet-era stereotypes. Archives remain to be uncovered and analyzed, for both their nuances and their national level revelations, even though continued access to Gulag archives in Putin's Russia can be hard to predict, as the editors acknowledge in their Afterword. The scholarly work of remembering the unknown and the un-mourned continues.
