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 OGPU-

NKVD3. 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:

1 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.

3 OGPU – Unified State Political Administration, NKVD or “Narkomvnudel” – People’s Comissariat of Internal Affairs.

4 “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 Gulag’s 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. Social compounds of the Gulag.

III. Gulag’s role in the economy of the USSR.

In each listed part I will go from one author’s 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 Solzhnitsyn’s5 data (or at least mention his work), provided in

his book “The Gulag Archipelago”. In my research I will not use Solzhenitsyn’s 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 Stalin’s totalitarian politics.

All of the historians, except Robert Conquest, I quoted in this essay, cited or mentioned

Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and his other works. Conquest referred only to

Solzhenitsyn’s earlier work “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.6

Whether I do not have an exact impression on how historians treat Solzhenitsyn’s 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 Solzhenitsyn’s data from “The Gulag Archipelago”. Rosefielde draws a picture of

5 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

Solzhenitsyn’s help: “The tenuous nature of prevailing theories about Soviet industrialization has

recently been clarified by publication of Solzhenitsyn’s 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: Stalin’s 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.

7 Steven Rosefielde, “The First “Great Leap Forward” Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyn’s 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. Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties”, The Macmillan Company, 1968, p. 333.

In his review on Conquest’s book Alec Nove brings up that the sources, that Conquest could

use, were few, thus, in 1969 Conquest’s 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-Ovseenko’s 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

Rosefielde’s

common estimation for excess deaths, attributed to the Gulag, is more than 20 million people. At the

10

Review on Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror” by A. Nove, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), p. 537.

11 Steven Rosefielde “An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labor 1929-56”, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33,

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


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

13 R. W. Davies, S. G. Wheatcroft, “Steven Rosefielde’s Kliukva”, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 600.

14 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), 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 author’s 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 NKVD’s 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 Rosefielde’s 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 Forced 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.

thirties”18

, which means, according to Rosefielde, that the actual number was higher; and that

Getty’s low numbers of Stalin’s regime’s victims were wrong.

Stephen Wheatcroft’s article on the numbers of the Gulag victims was published in March

1999. There he discussed Solzhenitsyn’s, Conquest’s, and Rosefielde’s numbers of the total deaths

during the Gulag existence. Especially circumstantially he describes Zemskov’s numbers19

(which

were demonstrated in the article he co-authored with Getty and Rettersporn). In his characterization

of Conquest’s estimations and the critics of such estimation by Zemskov, Getty, and Rettersporn,

Wheatcroft tends to criticize Conquest’s numbers and believe the numbers, given by Zemskov and

his co-authors. Not without an irony Wheatcroft points out that by the time Conquest’s 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.


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

Conquest’s 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

Conquest’s 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

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. 323


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 papki”24

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 Getty’s, Rettersporn’s, and Zemskov’s numbers, defended

by Wheatcroft, gives John Keep in his article “Wheatcroft and Stalin’s victims: Comments”. Keep

writes that Zemskov’s 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”.



26 Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, “Labor Camp Socialism: the Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System”, Armonk, 2000,

p. 188.

27 John Keep, “Wheatcroft and Stalin’s 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

Ellmans’s position on Conquest’s estimations is not unambiguous. At first, Ellman criticized

Conquest for the high numbers of the Gulag’s 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 Michael Ellman, “Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments”, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov., 2002),

p. 1162.


p. 1157.

Sergo Mikoyan’s31

article in a Soviet newspaper. Ellman argues that “the published version of A.I.

Mikoyan’s 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 Gulag’s 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 Lenin’s government and finished it only during

Leonid Brizhnev’s government in 1974.


p. 1157.


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 Conquest’s 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 Stalin’s 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:

spravochnik”38

, 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 O.V. Khlevniuk, “The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror”, Yale University Press, 2004, p.

328.

37 Steven Anthony Barnes “Death and Redemption: the Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society”, Princeton University

Press, 2011, p. 1.

38 Lubyanka (“Лубянка”) 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

Steven Anthony Barnes “Death and Redemption: the Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society”, Princeton University

Press, 2011, p. 116.


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. Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties”, The Macmillan Company, 1968.

43 Robert Conquest, “The Great Terror. Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties”, The Macmillan Company, 1968, p. 334.

Alec Nove did not agree with Conquest’s numbers on peasants amongst arrested. He argues

that “one simply cannot put all of three million adult kulaks into camps”.44

Rosefield multiplied Conquest’s 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 Conquest’s “The Great Terror” by A. Nove, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), p. 538.


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.


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.


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 Stalin’s 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 growth’s rate by forced labor of

Gulag’s 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 prisoner’s 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.

52 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. 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 Rosefielde’s 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 Five-

Year 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 Stalin’s 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 Volga-

Ural 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.




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.


185.


332.

authorities attempted almost perpetually to improve the Gulag’s 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 Gulag’s

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

Steven Anthony Barnes “Death and Redemption: the Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society”, Princeton University

Press, 2011, p. 39.


Press, 2011, p. 128.

62Belomor 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)

The total number

of the Gulag and

the Stalin’s

repressions victims

(1930-1956)

Robert Conquest 1968 20 million

Alec Nove 1969 12 to 15 million

Steven Rosefield 1981 16 million More than 20

million

J. Arch Getty, Viktor N.

Zemskov

1993 Not more than 2

million

Stephen Wheatcroft 1999 5,2 million

(according to the

NKVD archives)

Galina M. Ivanova 2000 No less than 20

million people

Michael Ellman 2002 10 million 17-18 million

Oleg Klhlevniuk 2004 20 million

Ateve A. Barnes 2011 18 million

63

Steven Rosefielde, “The First “Great Leap Forward” Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyn’s 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 kulak’s 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 Gulag’s 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 Gulag’s 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 government’s 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. Stalin’s 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 Conquest’s “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 Rosefielde’s Kliukva”, Slavic Review, Vol. 39,

No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 593-602.

3. Steven Rosefielde, “The First “Great Leap Forward” Reconsidered: Lessons of

Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago”, Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 559-

560.

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 Rosefielde’s 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 Stalin’s Victims: Comments”, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51,

No. 6 (Sep., 1999), pp. 1089-1092.

15. Review on Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova’s “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.


Soviet Totalitarian System” by Steven S. Rosefielde, Slavic Review, Vol. 60, No. 2

(Summer, 2001), pp. 441-442.


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 Khlevnik’s “The history of the Gulag: from Collectivization to the Great

Terror” by Golfo Alexopoulus, Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 189-

190.

20. Review on Oleg Khlevnik’s “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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