The Gulag remains one of the key symbols of twentieth-century mass political violence. Thanks to recent archive-based investigations, we now understand the scope of the system, variations between different camp complexes, and modalities of the use of forced labour of convicts. At the same time, the work of historicizing the Gulag and systematically evaluating its position within the global history of repression is still to be done. Exploring the emergence of this vast Soviet system of concentration camps in long-term perspective, this book aims to inscribe this process within global histories of coerced labour, forced displacement, and punishment. It highlights the inextricable interconnection of coerced labour and forced displacement as tools of punishment in the multitude of their historical forms.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1 A Threatening Geography: Shifting Usages of Forced Displacement and Convict Labour, 1879–1905
- Early history of exile and katorga
- Legislative framework
- Usages of exile
- The failed abolition
- Modernizing the penal system
- Modalities of convict labour
- Extramural labour
- Conclusion
- 2 Under Pressure: Revolution, Repression, and War in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917
- Coercive regimes and the deployment of punishment
- Subaltern crime and the politics of criminalization
- Dissent, state of exception, and exile
- The advance of extramural prison labour
- Redefining hard labour in the imperial borderlands
- Convict labour for the war effort
- Conclusion
- 3 Blueprints for the Gulag? The Advance of Mass Internment, 1914–1923
- POW camps during World War I
- Camps transform and linger, 1918–1921
- Camps and the new penal system, 1922–1923
- Conclusion
- 4 Revolutionary Utopias and Dystopias: Violence and the Making of the Soviet Man, 1923–1929
- New Soviet labour
- Terror and the Chekist culture
- Measures of social defence
- Conclusion
- 5 “Special Settlements” and the Making of the Gulag, 1929–1934
- Installation of the special settlements
- Ruptures and continuities in the deportations to Western Siberia
- Labour coercion across the rural-urban divide
- Conclusion
- Epilogue: Paroxysms of Violence, 1937–1953
- Bibliography
- Index
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