Popova Gulag Final

HST421 November 22nd 2012 Polina Popova
Introduction The system of Soviet labor camps started to form almost hundred years ago in 19291 and existed until 19602. An acronym Gulag meant the Chief Administration of Camps of the OGPUNKVD3. Even though the Gulag was a unique historical phenomenon of massive labor and an example of totalitarian penal system, such phenomenon was not deeply investigated by the XXth century historians before the time of perestroika and glasnost.4 This paper will be framed by the historiographic discussions regarding the following questions:
In the autumn of 1929 Stalin made a serious decision to change the way of economical development of the USSR, for
which he needed not only to radically alter economic system, but also to change the whole social system which supported economy.
2
Although some historians, mentioned in this work, date the end of the Gulag as 1956. OGPU Unified State Political Administration, NKVD or Narkomvnudel Peoples Comissariat of Inter nal Affairs. Perestroyka is the name of political movement started by the first president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev in the
second part of 80s, which means the retraction of the Soviet governmental system and the policy of glasnost, i.e. openness.
I.
Volume of the Gulags population in different periods and number of people dead in the Gulag (in different time periods, including collectivization and the Great Terror before 1939, and sometimes the whole time of Gulag existence).
II. III.
Social compounds of the Gulag. Gulags role in the economy of the USSR.
In each listed part I will go from one authors position to another in chronological order. It seems important to emphasize the fact that all of the authors, whose books and articles I used for this research, use Alexandr Solzhnitsyns5 data (or at least mention his work), provided in his book The Gulag Archipelago. In my research I will not use Solzhenitsyns book itself. Although I want to write a few words about this author, since it was Solzhenitsyn, who first started the discussion on the numbers of people suffered from the Gulag, social compounds of the camps people, and the history of the Gulag itself as a part of Stalins totalitarian politics. All of the historians, except Robert Conquest, I quoted in this essay, cited or mentioned Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago and his other works. Conquest referred only to Solzhenitsyns earlier work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.6 Whether I do not have an exact impression on how historians treat Solzhenitsyns work and facts that he gives in his books, they all respect him and see him as not only a writer, but also a historian of the Gulag. As an example, I would like to quote Steven Rosefielde, who very effectively uses Alexandr Solzhenitsyns data from The Gulag Archipelago. Rosefielde draws a picture of
Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was Russian writer and activist. He was awarded the Noble Prize in
literature in 1970.
6
The Gulag Archipelago was first published in 1973 in English (it was not published in the USSR until 1989). One
Day was first published in 1962 in the USSR.
Soviet economical situation. He explains the nature of forced labor in the Gulag with a lot of Solzhenitsyns help: The tenuous nature of prevailing theories about Soviet industrialization has recently been clarified by publication of Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago. The wealth of detailed economic information presented by Solzhenitsyn contradicts received doctrine so blatantly that a complete reconsideration of the causes and consequences of the First Five-Year Plan is imperative. Reappraising Soviet economic development is no easy task, however, even with Solzhenitsyn as a guide. Available data whether from Solzhenitsyn or official sources are highly suspect, and no systematic independent study comparable to that carried out for the Second Five-Year Plan by Western analysts exists to assist in interpreting the earlier period.7
Part I Robert Conquest was one of the first Western scholars, who wrote about the Gulag. In the book The Great Terror: Stalins Purge of the Thirties Conquest estimates only 8 million people as being sent to the camps8 in 1938.9 His estimate for the whole amount of victims of the Gulag was 20 million people.
Steven Rosefielde, The First Great Leap Forward Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago,
Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 559-560.

8
To explain the notion camp or concentration camp I would like to refer to the Russian contemporary historian
Galina Ivanova, who wrote: Occasionally the term concentration camp refers to places of incarceration for a particular category of prisoner, hostages and captives, or to camps under the jurisdiction of the Cheka, which for the most part held citizens who had been arrested administratively, without judicial procedure, just in case. (Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, Armonk, 2000, p. 14)
9
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. Stalins Purge of the Thirties, The Macmillan Company, 1968, p. 333.
In his review on Conquests book Alec Nove brings up that the sources, that Conquest could use, were few, thus, in 1969 Conquests position could not be carefully verified or falsified. Nove tends to believe Conquest, even though he takes such numbers only as an estimation: A figure between 12 and 15 millions is widely accepted for instance by Solzhenitsyn as the total number detained <> in a bad year. Perhaps it was so. But it might after all be better to say that we do not know how many millions, because, in the absence of even indirectly relevant statistics, the margin of error is so high.10 Much later in 1981 another historian and economist turned to the question of the exact numbers of the Gulag prisoners: Steven Rosefielde estimated such number as 16 million people in Gulag in 1938.11 Rosefield based his numbers on Anton Antonov-Ovseenkos evidence. Rosefield also refers to Solzhnitsyn12, however he does not refer to any other historians of Soviet period as Bergson, Nove, Jasny, or Eason, for which he was criticized by R. W. Davis and S. G. Wheatcroft.13 Rosefielde challenges Soviet official statistics. He writes about himself: like Robert Conquest I believe that the 1939 censes was fraudulent and compute a set of excess death estimates on the supposition that the 1937 census published by Antonov-Ovseenko could be accurate.14 Rosefieldes common estimation for excess deaths, attributed to the Gulag, is more than 20 million people. At the
10
Review on Robert Conquests The Great Terror by A. Nove, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), p. 537. Steven Rosefielde An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labor 1929 -56, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33,
11
No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 59.

12
Steven Rosefielde An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labor 1929 -56, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33,
No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 62.

13
R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, Steven Rosefieldes Kliukva, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 600. Steven Rosefielde, Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR: A Rejoinder to Barbara
14
Anderson and Brian Silver, Slavic Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), p. 303.
same time his number for labor forced population, i.e. people, who worked at the Gulag, is 8.8 million.15 In the article about the victims of the Soviet penal system in the years before 2nd World War J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor Zemskov wrote about the different positions of the historians of the time of Great Terror (1936-1939): Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Robert Conquest, Steven Rosefielde, and others have posited relatively high estimates. On the other hand, Stephen Wheatcroft and others working from the same sources have put forth lower totals. Both high and low estimators have bemoaned the lack of solid archival evidence and have claimed that should such materials become available, they would confirm the authors projection.16 In his latest article from 1997 on the excess deaths during the 1930s Rosefielde criticizes Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov that they claimed not more than 2 million people dead from collectivization, famine, terror, and forced labor in the Gulag. He also comments on how to deal with the missing data and uncertainty of NKVDs official numbers: Missing information may be obtained reducing statistical uncertainty, or sensitivity tests can be employed using life expectancy data to evaluate whether specific estimates fall within the realm of plausibility.17 What is most important in Rosefieldes latest research that he gives NKVD criminal homicide data (the TsGAOR archive) and it confirms at least 5.2 million people classifiable as excess deaths perished during
15
Steven Rosefielde, Incriminating Evidence: Excess Deaths and Force d Labour under Stalin: A Final Reply to
Critics, Soviet Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), p. 292.

16
J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rettersporn, Viktor N. Zemskov, Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre -war Years: a
First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence, The American Historical Review, v. 98 (Oct 93), p. 1018.
17
Steven Rosefielde, Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR
During the 1930s, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1997), p. 323.
thirties18, which means, according to Rosefielde, that the actual number was higher; and that Gettys low numbers of Stalins regimes victims were wrong. Stephen Wheatcrofts article on the numbers of the Gulag victims was published in March 1999. There he discussed Solzhenitsyns, Conquests, and Rosefieldes numbers of the total deaths during the Gulag existence. Especially circumstantially he describes Zemskovs numbers19 (which were demonstrated in the article he co-authored with Getty and Rettersporn). In his characterization of Conquests estimations and the critics of such estimation by Zemskov, Getty, and Rettersporn, Wheatcroft tends to criticize Conquests numbers and believe the numbers, given by Zemskov and his co-authors. Not without an irony Wheatcroft points out that by the time Conquests new book The Great Terror: a Reassessment was written, Zemskov already published a set of data on the scale of the labor camps, colonies and special exiles, which included a summary of labour camp population movements for 1934-47. These data showed a total figure for the labour camp population of 0.5 million for 1 January 1934, 1.5 million on 1 January 1941 and 0.9 million for 1 January 1953. Wheatcroft continues criticizing Conquest: These data appear not to have been available to Conquest when he was writing his Reassessment (published in 1990), otherwise it would be difficult to see how he could have claimed that currently available data were supporting his figures.20 Wheatcroft quite harshly criticizes Conquest for not responding to the critics of his numbers: He
18
Steven Rosefielde, Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR
During the 1930s, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1997), p. 329.
19
Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the
Archival Data. Not the Last Word, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 320.
20
Archival Data. Not the Last Word, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 319-320.
[Conquest] failed to make any response to his academic critics in his book and other writings of the time, other than to parody them as Neo-Stalinist Revisionists.21 Conquests defending line in that dispute was that Soviet archival data could be ignored, since it was, according to him, unreliable. Wheatcroft castigates such position, writing that such Conquests distrust to the archival data is a very negative and retrogressive suggestion.
22
Wheatcroft raises a very interesting point of credibility of the NKVD archives. Contrary to Rosefielde, Wheatcroft tends to believe the data provided in Soviet secret materials. The Soviet repressive system was complex and required records and a record-keeping system to operate, writes Stephen Wheatcroft. The managers of the Gulag, labour colony and special exile empires needed a set of accounting data to plan their work. The secret police and judicial authorities needed to keep records. The central party leadership also required periodic reports from the secret police/Ministry of Internal Affairs on developments in the Gulag, labour colonies and special exile areas, and on the policing and mass repression operations. In their time these official records were kept in the appropriate secret archives of the NKVD and the party leadership. These secret accounting materials should not be confused with the non-secret propaganda materials that were published at the time.23 Wheatcroft concludes his critics of Conquest with such words: Western historians who consider that all these data were falsified 60 years ago, and then held in secret to be produced in order to disinform them, appear to be suffering from an exaggeration of their own
21
22
Archival Data. Not the Last Word, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 323
23
Archival Data. Not the Last Word, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 319-320.
importance. <> When MVD leaders were briefing Stalin in their top security Osobye papki24 reports they had good reasons to avoid the charge of misleading him.25 Russian historian Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova in her book Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, published in Moscow 1997 and translated in English by Carol Flath in 2000, concluded that the number of victims of the Gulag between the end of 1920s and the middle of 1950s was no less than 20 million people. She explained that her opinion was based on an analysis of data on the numbers of prisoners convicted by judicial and extrajudicial organs.26 Interesting argumentation against Gettys, Rettersporns, and Zemskovs numbers, defended by Wheatcroft, gives John Keep in his article Wheatcroft and Stalins victims: Comments. Keep writes that Zemskovs and his colleges figure do not include the hundreds of thousands people who were repatriated in the post-war special contingent. Keep claims that it is not certain whether he [Zemskov] included those members of deported ethnic groups who were siphoned off and sent to camps rather than settlements. As a conclusion of the article John Keep wrote: Historians should not let themselves be mesmerized by statistics.27 Three years later in 2002 Michael Ellman in the article Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments preciously analyses the debates between Conquest, Getty, Zemskov, Rettersporn, Rosefielde, and Wheatcroft, taken place during 1990s. In their well known 1993 paper giving a
24
Osobye papki translates from Russian as Special folders. Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the
25
26
Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, Armonk, 2000,
p. 188.
27
John Keep, Wheatcroft and Stalins Victims: Comments, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Sep., 1999), p. 1091.
preliminary presentation of archival repression data, Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov surprised many readers by their unexpectedly high figures for releases. According to this paper, in 1934-52, 5.4 million people were freed from the Gulag.28 Ellman argues with Getty and his co-authors that those high numbers of released prisoners was not a sign of humanity of the system, but more a matter of economical interest: The surprisingly high figures for those freed from the Gulag are partly explained by several decisions to increase the efficiency of the Gulag by releasing invalids and the incurably ill. This was a cost-cutting measure which saved food and guards and other personal, and improved the financial results, but was not a sign of the humanity of the system, and artificially reduced the recorded number of deaths in the Gulag.29 Ellmanss position on Conquests estimations is not unambiguous. At first, Ellman criticized Conquest for the high numbers of the Gulags and repressions victims. Ellman claimed: On the basis of the demographic data for the 1930s it seems that there were about 10 million excess deaths in 1926-39. The total number of excess deaths suggested by Conquest is higher. He suggested a total of perhaps 16-18 million. This is above what seems like on the basis of the demographic data. It can only be made compatible with the demographic data by assuming high birth rates between 1926 and 1937 censuses of babies who soon died and by reducing the 1939 census total. At the same time Ellman mentions that Conquest reduced his numerical estimates in the light of new data. 30 In addition Ellman denounces Conquest for the fact that his estimate of 20 million arrests was based on
28
Michael Ellman, Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov., 2002),
p. 1152.
29
p. 1162.
30
p. 1157.
Sergo Mikoyans31 article in a Soviet newspaper. Ellman argues that the published version of A.I. Mikoyans memoirs, edited by Sergo Mikoyan, presented a somewhat different picture. At the same time Ellman does not blame Conquest very deeply, since neither in the USSR nor elsewhere are newspapers reliable statistics resources, - writes Ellman.32 By the end of the article Ellman comes to the number of Gulags victims of 17-18 million people. It seems to me that such approximations are very close to the numbers, suggested by Conquest. Ellman wrote: It seems that in 27 years of the Gulag existence (1930-56) the number of people who were sentenced to detention in prisons, colonies and camps was 17-18 million. This figure excludes the deportees, prisoners of war and internees, those in the post-war filtration camps, and those who performed forced labour at their normal place of work, and counts people sentenced more than once just once.33 Another scholar, who (as well as Conquest) believed that opening of the Soviet archives did not help the historians of Gulag, was Oleg V. Khlevniuk. In the book The History of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror Khlevniuk writes: Contrary to expectations, Soviet archives do not contain systematic, complete, ready-to-use information on the number of those convicted and imprisoned. Now that the archives are partially open, historians can review many important documents, but elements of the new historical picture being created on the basis of these
31
Sergo Mikoyan (1929-2010), a Soviet and Russian historian and writer, was a son of Anastas Mikoyan (1895-1978)
a Soviet statesmen, who started his political career during Vladimir Lenins government and finished it only during Leonid Brizhnevs government in 1974.
32
p. 1157.
33
p. 1164.
documents are still lacking.34 Already mentioned above Steven Rosefield in the article, written in 1996, raises the same kind of question of whether the date, provided by NKVD, is reliable at all or not.35 In conclusion of his research Khlevniuk confirms Conquests estimates of 20 million people convicted between 1930 and 1941.36 Steven A. Barnes (whose book is chronologically the latest one in my research) gives the number of 18 million people passed through the camps of Gulag during the Stalins era.37 Barnes does not properly explain how he arrives at 18 millions. The author mostly uses data provided by Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov the authors of the book in Russian Lubyanka: spravochnik38, published in Moscow in 1997, and documents about the Soviet history from 1917 to 1960, published with their edition. According to Kokurin and Petrov, as Barnes writes it, 932,000 people died in Gulag during the time of the World War II; around 2 million people died in the period from 1930 to 1956. Such numbers only show the direct victims of the Gulag, who died from the
34
O.V. Khlevniuk, The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004, p.
287.
35
Steven Rosefielde Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labor, and
Economic Growth in the 1930th, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Sep., 1996), p. 980.
36
328.
37
Steven Anthony Barnes Death and Redemption: the Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton University
Press, 2011, p. 1.
38
Lubyanka () is the popular name of the building of the KGB headquarters , situated on Lubyanskaya square
in Moscow.
diseases and hard labor in the Gulag.39 Referring to Kokurin and Petrov, Barnes writes that total numbers of prisoners of Gulag only in 1941 was 2.9 million people.40 Although, as I mentioned below, Barnes does not explain the whole number of the Gulag victims, it seems to me that he simply calculates it summing up all numbers of each year from 1930 until 1956.
Part II The question of the social, age, and gender compounds of the Gulag is not that disputable as the question of numbers of victims, however, this question is widely discussed in the historiographic debates. Robert Conquest wrote that by his approximations almost all kulaks and podkulachniks41 (around 3 million people) were arrested and sent into camps. Conquest also reveals that the arrests mainly affected males.42 At the same time Conquest writes the major accounts of labour-camp life come from intellectuals who were sent to them from 1935 and 1936 on. For the victims of the Yezhov terror included a far higher proportion of urban and of foreign intellectuals than had the repressions of earlier years.43
39
Press, 2011, p. 116.

40
Press, 2011, p. 113.

41
The term kulak was used to designate high-income farmers, who owed relatively large farms. Podkulachnik was a
person who supported or helped kulak.

42
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. Stalins Purge of the Thirties, The Macmillan Company, 1968. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. Stalins Purge of the Thirties, The Macmillan Company, 1968, p. 334.
43
Alec Nove did not agree with Conquests numbers on peasants amongst arrested. He argues that one simply cannot put all of three million adult kulaks into camps.44 Rosefield multiplied Conquests number twice and estimated the amount of kulaks in camps as at least 6 million.45 Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov supported the hypothesis of anti-elite orientation of the penal system (especially in the late 30s). They wrote: Although less educated common folk heavily outnumbered the intelligentsia in the camps, those who had studied in institutions of higher or secondary education were proportionally nearly twice as numerous in the GULAG system as they were in society at large, while those with elementary (or no) education were under-represented.46 Contemporary Russian historian Galina Ivanova in her book specially noted that in her opinion, based on the analysis of data provided by Soviet archives, the number of criminal recidivists was no greater than 10 to 15 percent on average, and the remaining prisoners of the Gulag were simply known, for obvious reasons, as drudges [rabotiagi]. Ivanova drew an interesting conclusion about the frames of the notion of the Gulag itself. She wrote: It was not only prisoners were subjected to concentration camps and forced labor in the Soviet totalitarian state. Millions of other people lived and worked in the country of Gulag whose place of residence was exile, various forms of special settlement, identification and screening camps, labor armies, camps for prisoners of war and internees, educational labor colonies for juveniles, and others. With a few
44
Review on Robert Conquests The Great Terror by A. Nove, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), p. 538. Steven Rosefielde An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag For ced Labor 1929-56, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33,
45
No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 67.

46
J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rettersporn, Viktor N. Zemskov, Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a
exceptions, this structures were not officially part of the Chief Administration of Camps, but their inhabitants most certainly can be considered prisoners and victims of the Gulag.47 Contrary to Ivanova, Michael Ellman argued that the majority of prisoners in Gulag were not political prisoners, but criminals. He explains: Otherwise the Gulag would not have been able to fulfill its tasks. With the hands of intellectuals, which is what the political prisoners were, it would have been impossible to carry out the immense work, in the course of which a mass of heavy manual labour was undertaken. In only 2 years, 1946 and 1947, did the counterrevolutionaries form a majority of Gulag inmates. If more use had been made of the experience of the criminals (e.g. by means of oral history) our image of the Gulag would be substantially different. 48 Such statement automatically raises another question: where was the demarcation line between a real criminal and a person, condemned for stealing 850 grams of grains during Ukrainian famine49, who in fact was a political prisoner, veiled under criminal. Ellman fairly notes that the distinction between criminals and political was blurred under Soviet conditions, the statistics on the classification of the prisoners are misleading, and the concepts themselves are problematic under the conditions of the 1930s.50
47
Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, Armonk, 2000,
p. 188.
48
p. 1156.
49
Robert Conquest, Oleg Khlevniuk and Steve Barnes gave a lot of the examples of such justice, when people could
be sentenced to 1 to 5 years of hard labor in Gulag camps for stealing 2 kilos of beats, or being 20 minutes late for work during war-time.
50
p. 1164.
Part III The question of the role of forced labor in the Soviet economy is the one that was discussed more meticulously and extensively than others. The reason for such interest to this question of forced labor (or even whether it was a forced labor or a slavery?), I believe, lies in the fact that the answer to such question can help to reveal the whole nature of Soviet state phenomenon and especially the nature of totalitarian Stalins government. It is important to mention that the question of how Soviet Gulag system was influencing economic situation is deeply related to another historiographic debate, whether Stalin was a central figure, a brain of the whole process of organization of Gulag system, or it was Ezhov.51 While all of the historians, I was reading for this research, agree on the fact that it was Stalin himself who commanded the organization of Gulag and the beginning of the Great Purge, never the less, it seems interesting to me that Alec Nove and Oleg Khlevnik specially emphasized this fact in their works. Steven Rosefielde explained the rapid heavy industrial growths rate by forced labor of Gulags prisoners.52 Additionally, he disputed that the labor of prisoners could hardly be called a paid labor. At the same time Rosefielde made his position more clear and demonstrated that Soviet industrial growth depended not only on the prisoners labor: Industrial employment, according to official census statistics, rose from 11.2 million in December 1926 to 31.4 million in 1939, increasing at a compound rate of 9.0 per cent per annum. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that
51
Nikolay Ezhov was head of NKVD (secret police) and a main figure of the Great Purge of the 1930s. Steven Rosefielde, Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labor, and
52
Economic Growth in the 1930th, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Sep., 1996), pp. 960-961.
Soviet industrial production did rise substantially, but at rates constrained by the skill level of the transferees and the inefficiencies of the prevailing administrative and managerial mechanisms.53 Davis and Wheatcroft preciously criticize Rosefieldes position: He mixes up GULag with non-GULag forced labor and the total labor force with the narrower category of wage and salary earners. <> He sometimes describes his own estimates as official statistics.54 They also write that Rosefielde offers no proof that the productivity of forced labor was as high as that of free labor.55 According to Davis and Wheatcroft, Rosefield does not have enough evidence that exactly forced labor was the major explanation for the industrial growth. Furthermore they add that Rosefielde mistakenly judges the quantitative results by a period of 1928-1933 or the First FiveYear Plan. They disagree with Risefield: In 1932 and 1933, the proportion of unfinished construction in industry was extremely high, and those projects which had been nominally completed in 1933 were by no means in full production.56 Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova in the Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System made some statements in behalf of a theory that the Soviet system of forced labor did not give much of economical benefit to the country. Moreover, Ivanova emphasized a role of Stalins own despotic ambitions in realization of sometimes meaningless and economically unprofitable projects. A true eastern despot, Stalin loved building canals. The White Sea-Baltic Canal was followed by the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Volga-Don, the Main Turkmen, the VolgaUral Canal, and others. And all of this was done partially by hand, often without any particular
53
Steven Rosefielde, Excess Deaths and Industrialization: A Realist Theory of Stalinist Economic Development in the
1930s, Journal of Contemporary History, 1988, 23, p. 281.

54
R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, Steven Rosefieldes Kliukva, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 596. R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, Steven Rosefieldes Kliukva, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 597. R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, Steven Rosefieldes Kliukva, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 599.
55
56
economic justification, and with no regards for losses and consequences. Its primary purpose was to demonstrate Soviet might, for which instantaneous triumphs and dubious profit were sufficient.57 On the opposite of Rosefield, Oleg Khlevnik writes that the Gulag as an economical instrument was never effective. On the whole, failure of the Gulag to achieve the intended industrialization goals was inherent and predictable. The Gulag economy was never effective, and it survived only through the massive, uncontrolled exploitation of forced labor. <> The 1937-38 repressions converted Soviet camps into extermination centers instead of promoting productivity by supplying additional workers.58 Moreover, Khlevnik draws the conclusion that the repressive system of the Soviet Union was created for the political and not economical reasons. Political goals (extermination of anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary elements) were proclaimed in all the documents regulating mass operations, whereas the economic component (creation of new forest camps, for example) was presented only as the means to achieve the political goals, - writes Khlevnik. He continues: In practice, the growth in the number of prisoners as a result of the Great Terror not only failed to expand the Gulag economy but led to its stagnation and even decline. The NKVD bosses, occupied with repressions, paid little attention to economic issues. NKVD enterprises were debilitated by the arrests of their leaders, as well as by the emaciation of and high mortality rate among workers.59 Almost with the same words as Khlevnik, Barnes privileges the political role of Gulag over the economical and even calls the Gulag financial catastrophe. He wrote: Although Gulag
57
Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, Armonk, 2000. O.V. Khlevniuk, The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004, p.
58
185.
59
332.
authorities attempted almost perpetually to improve the Gulags productivity, the Gulag as an economically profitable institution was always undercut by the Gulag as a highly secretive detention institution for those considered dangerous to Soviet society. Along with Khlevnik he believes that NKVD employees only goal was to save and improve their own lives: Above all, the Soviet secret police organs had a significant self-serving institutional interest in fostering a belief in the profitability of Gulag labor, which would lead to further increases in their own budget and staffing.60 Barnes describes that during the wartime, in spite of the attempts to increase Gulags productivity, it had never been a profitable organization: As early as 1941, the Gulag chief recognized that the typical Gulag laborer produced 50 percents less than did the corresponding free laborer. Barnes implies: If the Soviet Union won the war through economic production, it did so despite the Gulag, not because of it.61 It seems highly important to me that the question of credibility of Soviet statistics is deeply connected with the historiographic debates described below. In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn classified four types of statistic falsification which affected official Soviet statistical data: nonexistent goods, overvalued goods, valueless goods, and social bads. Steven Rosefielde mentioned the construction of Belomor canal62 as a good example of one of such useless projects.63
60
Press, 2011, p. 39.

61
Press, 2011, p. 128.

62
Belomor canal was a ship canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, opened in 1933. Rosefielde describes a pompous
opening of the canal by Stalin himself; after what it was discovered that the canal was too shallow.
Conclusion In this research I made an attempt to examine three main historiographic debates within the researches on the history of the Gulag. The first debates are about the numbers of people sent to the labor camps during 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The contemporary historians Ivanova, Khlevnik, and Barnes suggest that the number was not less than 18 million people. The newest archival evidences, witness testimonies, and memoirs speak in favor of such numbers. The following table briefly demonstrates different numbers of the Gulag victims, given by the historians, whom I cited in the first part of this work: Historian (name) Year of publication of the book/article with the estimation The total number of the Gulag and the Great Terror victims (during 1930s) 12 to 15 million 16 million The total number of the Gulag and the Stalins repressions victims (1930-1956) 20 million More than 20 million Not more than 2 million
Robert Conquest Alec Nove Steven Rosefield J. Arch Getty, Viktor N. Zemskov Stephen Wheatcroft
1968 1969 1981 1993 1999
5,2 million (according to the NKVD archives) No less than 20 million people 17-18 million 18 million
Galina M. Ivanova Michael Ellman Oleg Klhlevniuk Ateve A. Barnes
2000 2002 2004 2011 10 million 20 million
63
Steven Rosefielde, The First Great Leap Forward Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago,
Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 568-571.
From the table we can see that numbers significantly dropped during the 1990s, when the historians started to explore newly opened Soviet archives. However during 2000s the numbers came back to the approximations that were made in 1960s and 1980s. I suggest that such process was a result of more deep analyses of the numbers, memoire literature, archival data, censuses data, and excess death rates by the historians in 2000s. Assuming that the newest estimates are more accurate, I can make another interesting conclusion from analyzing the table, mentioned above. It is that comprehensive historical analyses, made by the historians, like Robert Conquest, Alec Nove, and Steven Rosefielde, who did not have much excess to the Soviet archives (especially the NKVD archives), was more accurate than strict official numbers, released from archives in 1990s. The second part of this text was about the social components of the Soviet labor camps. While all Soviet historians agree on the fact that the percentage of educated Gulag prisoners was very high, the question of kulaks quantity amongst the prisoners is still discussed. Additionally, the question of whether the real criminals were the main part (more than 50 percent, as Ellman suggested) of the Gulags workers, or they were not more than 15 percent of all prisoners, as Ivanova wrote, is still a subject of the historical debates. In the third part I attempted to describe the Gulags economical benefits. In this question only Rosefielde had an opinion that Gulag was economically profitable. Other historians like Davis, Wheatcroft, Ivanova, Khlevnik, and Barnes supported the opinion that the Gulag was more a political instrument in Soviet governments arms and less an economical one. I wish to conclude my research with the words of J. Arch Getty: the GULAG camps were horrible places. Work was hard, rations were barely adequate, and living conditions were
harsh. The inmates were exposed to the exaction of fellow prisoners and especially to the cruelty of the guards. Behind our figures lies suffering of millions of people.64
Bibliography Books (in chronological order): 1. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. Stalins Purge of the Thirties, The Macmillan Company, 1968. 2. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: a Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1990. 3. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, Armonk, 2000. 4. O.V. Khlevniuk, The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004. 5. Steven Anthony Barnes Death and Redemption: the Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton University Press, 2011. Articles (in chronological order): 1. Review on Robert Conquests The Great Terror by A. Nove, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), pp. 536-542. 2. R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, Steven Rosefieldes Kliukva, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 593-602. 3. Steven Rosefielde, The First Great Leap Forward Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 559560. 4. Steven Rosefielde An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labor 1929-56, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jan. 1981), pp. 51-87. 5. S. G. Wheatcroft, A Note on Steven Rosefieldes Calculation on Excess Mortality in the USSR, 1929-1949, Soviet Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 277-281. 6. Steven Rosefielde, Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR: A Rejoinder to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, Slavic Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 300-306. 7. Steven Rosefielde, Excess Deaths and Industrialization: A Realist Theory of Stalinist Economic Development in the 1930s, Journal of Contemporary History, 1988, 23, pp. 277-289.
64
J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rettersporn, Viktor N. Zemkov, Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre -war Years: a
8. Steven Rosefielde, Incriminating Evidence: Excess Deaths and Forced Labour under Stalin: A
Final Reply to Critics, Soviet Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), p. 292.
9. Robert Conquest, Excess Deaths and Camp Numbers: Some Comments, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 5 (1991), pp. 949-952. 10. J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rettersporn, Viktor N. Zemskov, Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence, The American Historical Review, v. 98 (Oct 93), pp. 1017-49. 11. Steven Rosefielde Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labor, and Economic Growth in the 1930th, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Sep., 1996), pp. 959-987. 12. Steven Rosefielde, Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR During the 1930s, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1997), p. 323. 13. Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 315-345. 14. John Keep, Wheatcroft and Stalins Victims: Comments, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Sep., 1999), pp. 1089-1092. 15. Review on Galina Mikhailovna Ivanovas Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System by Bruce F. Adams, The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jun., 2001), pp. 1099-1100. 16. Review on Galina Mikhailovna Ivanovas Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System by Steven S. Rosefielde, Slavic Review, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 441-442. 17. Review on Galina Mikhailovna Ivanovas Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System by Miriam Dobson, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 164-166. 18. Michael Ellman, Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1151-1172. 19. Review on Oleg Khlevniks The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror by Golfo Alexopoulus, Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 189190. 20. Review on Oleg Khlevniks The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror by Wendy Z. Goldman, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 79, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 228-230.

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HST421 November 22nd 2012 Polina Popova

Day was first published in 1962 in the USSR.

Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 559-560.

No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 59.

No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 62.

Critics, Soviet Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), p. 292.

Press, 2011, p. 116.

Press, 2011, p. 113.

person who supported or helped kulak.

No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 67.

1930s, Journal of Contemporary History, 1988, 23, p. 281.

Press, 2011, p. 39.

Press, 2011, p. 128.

1968 1969 1981 1993 1999

Galina M. Ivanova Michael Ellman Oleg Klhlevniuk Ateve A. Barnes

2000 2002 2004 2011 10 million 20 million

Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 568-571.

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