Steven Barnes has written a welcome case study of Karlag, a gigantic complex of correctional-labor camps, colonies, and special settlements located in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. Karlag covered a land mass larger than many European states. It was supposed to introduce mechanized agriculture to a semi-arid steppe plagued by hostile winters. Karlag hosted infamous camps within its vast boundaries, such as Steplag and the notorious Alzhir camp for wives of “traitors” of the fatherland.
We now have excellent overviews of the Gulag by Anne Applebaum and Oleg Khlevnyuk. Barnes's Karlag closes the gap in case studies, of which there are few.
If we are to expand our knowledge of the Gulag, we must study individual camps. The central Gulag records lead us only so far. We never could have understood the Soviet enterprise through the records of Gosplan or of the industrial ministries, as Berliner's and Granick's managerial studies showed, and as did Kotkin's study of Magnitogorsk. Case studies of individual camps are “where the action is” in the literature, and we are fortunate now to have Barnes' study.
Case studies of camps require extensive research in local archives, which may be poorly organized or even closed. One or two case studies cannot suffice. Camps surely differed by geography, size, inmate population, and product. We must study a fairly large number before we can have confidence in our results.
Barnes bases his study of Karlag on camp archives and memoirs. His choice of Karlag is fortuitous because all forms of gulag life—special regime camps, corrective-labor camps and colonies, and special settlements—fell within its vast boundaries. Barnes follows Karlag from its founding to the late release of political prisoners after Khrushchev's secret speech.
As someone who has spent some time studying the Gulag, I will enumerate some of the key points I picked up from Barnes's account.
First, we should not evaluate the Gulag strictly in terms of economic performances. The Gulag was first and foremost a means of protecting the Soviet people from “class enemies,” who could infect their way of thinking. That the Gulag system employed almost a half million on the eve of Stalin's death already signals that it was a very expensive undertaking. In Karlag, a large proportion of prisoners were not guarded (unconvoyed), a practice dictated by its vast territory. Barnes argues that economic considerations played a secondary role in the creation of the Gulag. Camp managers, overwhelmed by the task of keeping inmates alive, did not lobby for more workers as many believe. They were hard pressed to handle the inmates already in their custody.
Second, the Stalinist regime took the task of re-educating prisoners seriously and, curiously, treated hardened criminals better than political prisoners. The common criminal represented the proletariat, and the political prisoners represented the enemies of socialism. Hardened criminals were among the first to be amnestied along with those convicted of petty crimes. The civilian population's first impression of Gulag inmates was one of lawlessness and barbarism. The political prisoners had to wait for Khrushchev's speech for their release. Barnes explains that each prisoner had his or her “characteristics,” which were used to grade prisoners by their “level of danger” and evaluated the possibility of “true redemption.”
Third, prisoners believed in the idea of redemption through exceptional work. Barnes cites any number of cases of extraordinary feats by inmates striving to redeem themselves through exceptional contributions to the building of socialism. The notion of redemption through exceptional labor was institutionalized in the early release program, which proved to be the most effective incentive system in Gulag history. Stalin identified its basic flaw: it released the best workers and left the least able behind.
Fourth, Barnes touches on the principal–agent struggle between the Gulag center and Karlag. The center forced Karlag to improve its production performance and reduce its inmate mortality, shifting blame to them while giving them no resources to correct the matter. Given the importance of the principal–agent conflict for the civilian economy, I would hope that future case studies can deal with this issue in more detail.
Fifth, Barnes differentiates the prewar and wartime (and postwar) Gulag. After 1939, nationalities of annexed or conquered territories replaced kulaks, former people, and marginals as the main population of the Gulag. Karlag camp life came to be dominated by national groups and harbored nationalist enmity toward the Soviet state. Barnes describes the desperate state of Karlag, as it emptied when the able-bodied went to the front, leaving behind older and sick inmates to starve on meager rations.
Sixth, Barnes follows the path of collapse of the Gulag after Stalin's death. I do not know of any other society that had to integrate such a large percentage of former “criminals” back into normal society. We must still clarify the role of former inmates in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system.
