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On Guard at BAMlag: Representations of Guards in the 1930s Gulag Press
In: The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewThe 1930s saw a dramatic escalation in the size and scope of the Soviet Union’s system of penal labour camps, the Gulag. Through analyses of memoir and other sources, the experiences of the Gulag’s prisoners at this time have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly investigation. Yet the guards who watched over these prisoners have received considerably less attention.
Newspapers printed for the VOKhR guards in the mid-1930s offer some information on their readers’ everyday duties and their status, both inside the Gulag and as citizens of the USSR. Publications taken from one particularly large camp responsible for the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway (BAMlag) depict guards as self-disciplined, industrious soldiers engaged in a war for economic and social development. But the specific dynamics and changing circumstances of the Soviet penal system at this time created an unusual contrast between newspapers printed for the guards and those printed for the prisoners of BAMlag. While the criticism levelled at prisoners by their own newspaper was often mitigated by a rehabilitative discourse, the guards were judged as full members of Soviet society, often harshly. However, the precise implications of this were rendered ambiguous by the indeterminate position of the Gulag itself at this point in Soviet history.
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2
Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 48, 51.
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3
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Penguin: London, 2004), pp. 244–45.
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8
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivisation to the Great Terror (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 108.
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13
Applebaum, Gulag, p. 245. Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, trans. and ed. Deborah Kaple (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38.
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18
Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20.
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21
Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin Era Autobiographical Texts’, Russian Review 60 (Jul., 2003): 341.
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32
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘Production Collectives and Communes and the “Imperatives” of Soviet Industrialization, 1929–1931’, Slavic Review 45 (Spring, 1986): 80.
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47
David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity 1917–1941 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 45.
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50
Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 9–10.
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56
Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution; Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 342–43.
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79
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75.
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95
Igal Halfin, ‘Looking into the Oppositionists’ Souls: Inquisition Communist Style’, Russian Review 60 (July, 2001): 317.
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102
Lev Razgon, ‘Jailers’, in Gulag Voices, An Anthology, ed. Anne Applebaum (London: Yale University Press, 2011), 146.
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106
Greg Carleton, ‘Genre in Socialist Realism’, Slavic Review 53, no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 994. Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 10.
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117
L. I. Borodkin, ‘Trud v Gulage: Mezhdu prinuzhdeniem i stimulirovaniem’, in GULAG: Ėkonomika prinuditel’nogo trud, eds. L. I. Borodkin, P. Gregory, O. V. Khlevni͡uk. (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2005), 129.
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On Guard at BAMlag: Representations of Guards in the 1930s Gulag Press
In: The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewThe 1930s saw a dramatic escalation in the size and scope of the Soviet Union’s system of penal labour camps, the Gulag. Through analyses of memoir and other sources, the experiences of the Gulag’s prisoners at this time have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly investigation. Yet the guards who watched over these prisoners have received considerably less attention.
Newspapers printed for the VOKhR guards in the mid-1930s offer some information on their readers’ everyday duties and their status, both inside the Gulag and as citizens of the USSR. Publications taken from one particularly large camp responsible for the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway (BAMlag) depict guards as self-disciplined, industrious soldiers engaged in a war for economic and social development. But the specific dynamics and changing circumstances of the Soviet penal system at this time created an unusual contrast between newspapers printed for the guards and those printed for the prisoners of BAMlag. While the criticism levelled at prisoners by their own newspaper was often mitigated by a rehabilitative discourse, the guards were judged as full members of Soviet society, often harshly. However, the precise implications of this were rendered ambiguous by the indeterminate position of the Gulag itself at this point in Soviet history.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 429 | 88 | 1 |
| Full Text Views | 258 | 5 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 47 | 10 | 3 |