The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters

- My name is Timothy Snyder and I am here to welcome you to the first in a series of lectures organized as part of a Franke seminar here at Yale University. The seminar is led by Professor Jason Stanley and me. Its title is "Mass Imprisonment in the Soviet Union and the United States." We teach this like a normal Yale class, but we have the privilege and pleasure of being able to invite people we've learned from and people we admire and people whose work we read in class to also give public lectures. . So I will introduce you and the students in the class are present, as well as others of you who have joined, and thank you for that.

I'm going to briefly introduce you to Anne Applebaum. On the one hand, she is

know

n as the author of a series of extremely important and praised books on the history of communism. More recently there is a story of the famine in Ukraine, "Red Famine", which has brought academic debate and its own interpretation to a very accessible form. I learned a lot from that book. A book about the post-war takeovers, actually a slightly revisionist account of the post-war communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, appeared a few years ago under the title "Iron Curtain". And then, at the beginning of the century, between 2003 and 2004, Ana wrote the book for which she won a great prize and which we read in class and which will be part of her subject today.

It's called "Gulag: A History." It is clearly the most accessible account of the Gulag, providing not only documentation but also themes and interpretation. However, Anne is also the author of a book that, in a sense, stays with me. It's called "Between East and West." And those of you who are students and are thinking about how you are going to spend the rest of your lives, the book is a kind of meditation among many other things on that. But in that book there is this type of foresight, the book is already a couple of decades old, in fact, a kind of advance warning that there are things between Poland and Russia, that these countries exist, this Belarus, this Ukraine, and that some day they will matter.

And there are many other things in the book. There is an interesting reference to anti-Semitism and the future of the Jewish question in Eastern Europe. Anne has written a lot and from different angles. In an era in which we are increasingly specialized, Anne has done two things that are unusual. Writing about the communist world, she has also been a leading journalist on Europe and the United States, capturing many of the biggest stories, for example, from the Trump administration early on. And finally, it works not only in the United States and not only in Europe, although that is already a lot, but from many different international angles.

And in this sense she is something rare today, too rare, for her to be an intellectual. We are very pleased to have Anne presenting these lectures and she is helping to get our course started. Once again, the conference theme is "The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters." Anne, the word is yours. -Tim, thank you very much. I really enjoy these long presentations. (Tim laughs) You also wear a lot of different hats, as does Jason, and I had a chance to look at your course syllabus and it's very interesting. Sorry, I'm not going to take it myself.

You're really combining a lot of different things. Tonight I'm going to talk a lot about something that to Americans in this context may sound a little different or strange, and it's not simply the history of the Gulag but the legacy and memory of the Gulag. How does it still matter or not in current Russian politics? And in fact, as I thought about speaking this afternoon, I realized that I am speaking to a generation that may not

know

that the Gulag for many decades was a barely known and barely understood topic. It was a vast system of camps hidden in distant parts of the Soviet Union.

Most Americans and most Europeans knew very little about it. Well, I'll talk about that a little more. And it only came out in full, you know, we really started to understand

what

it was and exactly how big it was after the Soviet archives started opening up in the 1990s. And I was very lucky to be able to work in the Union Soviet in the 1990s, that is a completely different topic that if some of you want to discuss later, I will be happy to talk about it, and my book was based in some cases on close-ups and documents that no one had seen or that no one had seen outside of Russia for a long time.

And it was really in the process of doing that, in the process of reviewing these documents, that we began to really understand

what

the Gulag was. And so, although the legacy of Stalin's crimes and the Gulag itself will be the final topic of my talk, I will begin with a brief overview of what we know now, so what have we learned about the camps since the disintegration of the regime? Soviet Union. You know, what we know now that we didn't know 30 years ago. Obviously, in writing my history of the Gulag I did not claim to have discovered a completely new topic that had never been touched upon before.

Some of you will know Solzhenitsyn's famous book "The Gulag Archipelago", which was a kind of oral history of the camp system that he published in the West as part of a samizdat, which means that it was never published in the Soviet Union, but it was Was published. outside the USSR in the 1970s. Although it was a document based on his own experiences and the experiences of other people, he had no archives, in fact, he largely understood the outline of the story. He had no archives, but he did understand the basic outlines of the history of the Gulag from its first incarnation on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea and how it spread to the Far North from there and then throughout the country.

But as a bit of an asterisk, in the years I spent researching my book I came to the conclusion that archives really do make a difference in how we understand Soviet history, and that's why I was able to work in archives in Moscow, in Karelia. I had access to documents from archives of St. Petersburg, Perm, Vorkuta, Kolyma, Novosibirsk. At one point they handed me a part of the archive from a small camp called Kedrovy Shor in the far north and asked me politely if I wanted to buy it, which I did and it is now in the Hoover Institute.

What I had at my disposal was often quite ordinary. It was, for example, the daily archive of the Gulag administration, with inspectors' reports, financial accounts and letters from the camp directors to Moscow. But it is true that reading these types of documents clearly highlighted the full scope of the system and its importance for the Soviet economy. So, for example, these documents allowed me to be much more precise than had been possible in the past, and thanks to the archives we were able to know that there were at least 476 different field systems in the Soviet era, each composed of hundreds or even thousands of individual camps or (murmurs).

So the camps were, there was a central camp and then there was a kind of (murmurs), and this was particularly true of the forest camps. So there would be a camp and then there would be small forest camps along a road, usually. And sometimes they stretched across thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra. We also now know that the vast majority of the people in them, prisoners, were peasants and workers and not the intellectuals who later wrote the famous memoirs and books. There were some too, but they were smaller. We also know that, with a few exceptions, the camps were not built explicitly to kill people.

Stalin preferred to use firing squads to carry out his mass executions. He killed people en masse, but not in fields. However, they were sometimes very lethal. Thus, almost a quarter of the Gulag prisoners died during the war years, for example between 1941 and 1945. They were also very fluid. So the prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being liberated into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted from prisoners to guards, which sometimes happened. There were also frequent amnesties for the old and infirm, for pregnant women, and for anyone no longer useful to the forestry system of work.

But these releases were invariably followed by new waves of arrests, so it was a fluid system, it was not static, people's sentences could change, lengthen or be greatly shortened even while they were there. It was not a system based on the rule of law. People were not sentenced by real courts, they did not have real sentences. I mean, sometimes they had these kind of kangaroo courts, they were called troikas. But the population of the camps actually changed according to the labor needs of the Soviet Union. But as a result of this, between 1929, which is when they first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, which is the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million people passed through them.

In addition, another six or seven million people were deported not to camps but to villages of exile. And in total that means that the number of people with some experience of imprisonment or imprisonment in Stalin's Soviet Union could have reached 25 million, which at the time was about 15% of the population. We also know where these fields were, that is, everywhere. And so, although some of you who know Solzhenitsyn and know Soviet literature may be familiar with the image of the prisoner in the blizzard digging coal with a pickaxe, there were camps in the center of Moscow where prisoners built apartment blocks or They designed airplanes, there were camps in Krasnoyarsk, where prisoners ran nuclear power plants, there were fishing camps on the Pacific coast.

I once had the opportunity to see the Gulag photo albums, they were albums made by the Gulag administrators and included photographs of prisoners with their camels in Central Asia. And so, from Akhtubinsk to Yakutsk there was really not a single major population in the Soviet Union that did not have its own camp or local camps and not a single industry that did not employ prisoners. Thus, over the years, prisoners built roads and railways, power plants and chemical factories, made weapons, furniture and even children's toys. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s, which was in fact the decade in which the camps reached their peak, in many places it would have been very difficult to go about daily activities and not run into prisoners, so it is no longer possible, they argue. , as some once did, that the fields were known only to a small proportion of the population.

We also better understand the chronology of the fields. We have known for a long time that Lenin built the first ones in 1918, that is, at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, so the fields go absolutely back to the beginning. And originally they were a kind of ad hoc emergency measure to contain the enemies of the people, which was a designation that meant enemies of the revolution, people we don't like, and could be applied to almost anyone. Again, this is not a system governed by the rule of law. And, of course, they were designed to prevent counterrevolution.

Sometimes they also aimed to reeducate the bourgeoisie, the opponents of the Bolsheviks. We have also known for a long time that Stalin and his successors, I mean, excuse me, that Lenin and his immediate successors expanded the camps to the Solovetsky Islands. It's a group of islands at the northern end of the White Sea, in the northern part of Russia, in the 1920s. And that original expansion was, again, initially for the political opponents of the Bolsheviks who were often other socialists, that is That is, social democrats or social revolutionaries, people whom the Bolsheviks considered ideologically threatening, and were initially placed in this group of camps in On the northern islands there was a monastery, although initially this was a relatively small operation.

But the archives also help us understand why Stalin decided to expand them in 1929. So that year Stalin launched the five-year plan. It was an extraordinarily costly attempt, in both human lives and natural resources, to force a 20% annual increase in the Soviet Union's industrial production and to raise funds for agriculture. This was Stalin's attempt to move the Soviet Union forward more quickly, to modernize it more quickly. And one of the side effects of the plan was millions of arrests as farmers were forced off their land (perhaps you'll talk about that later in the course) and imprisoned if they refused.

It also caused a huge labor shortage. Suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself in need of coal, gas and minerals, most of which could only be found in the far north of the country. After a series of debates that used almost exclusively economic language. I again had the opportunity to read how the leaders of the Soviet Union, this was after Lenin's death, now is when Stalin is a leader, as they discussed how to expand the camps. There are records of the conversations that the Politburo had inAt that time, the leaders of the Soviet Union, and what is striking is that economic language is used almost exclusively.

Then the decision is made that we need the prisoners to extract the minerals. And, of course, to the secret police in charge of carrying out the construction of the camps this made a lot of sense. This is how Alexei Loginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps, which were north of the Arctic Circle, justified the use of prisoner labor in a 1992 interview, many years later. He said: "If we had sent civilians, we would have had to build houses first" for them to live in. "And how could civilians live there? "With prisoners it's easy. "All you need is a barracks, a stove with a fireplace, "and they survive." That's why in Gulag documents prisoners are often referred to as (foreign language speaking), contingency.

From the pointFrom the point From the point of view of the Soviet leaders and camp commanders, they were an ingredient of production. They were like pieces of coal or bars of steel. The enemies of the people did not need to live like civilians in normal houses. They could put them in barracks, It didn't really matter what happened to them, if there wasn't enough food for them it wasn't a tragedy, they were cheap and expendable. They weren't human, they were enemies, they could be used in this way, which was very useful for a country that wanted to modernize very much. quickly.

That does not mean that the camps, in addition to their economic function, which as I say were always described that way, did not also have the objective of terrorizing and subduing the population. Certainly, the prison regimes in the camps carefully dictated by Moscow were very overtly designed to humiliate and dehumanize prisoners. So they took away the prisoners' belts, buttons, garters and plastic objects. They were again described as enemies. They were prohibited from using the word comrades, which was only for people, you know, for fully paid citizens of the state. And again, those kinds of measures contributed to their dehumanization in the eyes of the guards and bureaucrats, who therefore found it much easier not to treat them as fellow citizens or even as human beings.

And, in fact, it turned out to be a pretty powerful ideological combination. Thus, the contempt for the humanity of the prisoners, on the one hand, was combined with the overwhelming need to fulfill the plan. And nowhere is this clearer than in camp inspection reports. These were periodically filed by local prosecutors and carefully filed in Moscow, which is where I found them. When I started reading them, I was at first quite surprised by their directness and the peculiar kind of indignation they express. Thus, for example, describing conditions at Vorkutlag, a railway construction camp in Tatarstan, in July 1942 an inspector complained that "the entire population of the camp, including free workers," lives on flour. "The only food for the prisoners is so-called bread 'baked with flour and water, without meat or fat.'" And as a result, the inspector continued indignantly, there was a high rate of disease, particularly scurvy, and it is not surprising that the camp did not meet their production standards.

So this outrage, "you are mistreating these prisoners," stopped seeming surprising to me after I had read several dozen similar reports, each of which used more or less the same type of language and each of which ended with more or less the same ritual conclusion. You know, conditions need to be improved so that the prisoners work harder and so that production standards are met. But very little was actually done. So, While it might have been expected that living conditions in the Gulag were poor during the war, as they were throughout the Soviet Union; a nationwide inspection, for example, of 23 large camps in 1948 concluded, among other things, that 75% of the prisoners in Norillag, in Norilsk, did not have warm boots, that the number of prisoners unfit for hard labor in Karelia, that is, who were too weak, had recently tripled, that mortality rates were still being, in quotes, "too high" in half a dozen fields, meaning it is too high to allow efficient production.

Without a doubt, the expansion of the camps distorted the Soviet economy. With so much cheap labor available, the Soviet economy took much longer than it should have taken to mechanize. This is, of course, the irony of Stalin's modernizing drive. The problems were solved by asking for more workers. Famously, the White Sea Canal, one of the first Gulag projects, was built with pickaxes even at a time when more sophisticated equipment was available. With so many poorly trained people working under coercion, the construction was also not of the highest quality. According to one version, work or productivity among free workers in the forestry industry was almost three times greater than that of prisoners working in forestry fields.

But the camps also distorted the way people in the lands of the former Soviet Union thought about the economy. This is a bit of a distraction, but it is an interesting point that I can illustrate by describing a trip I took a few years ago, quite a few years ago, to the city of Vorkuta in the Arctic Circle. The history of Vorkuta begins in 1931, when a group of settlers first arrived in the region by boat through the northern canals. Although even the tsars knew of the region's enormous coal reserves, no one had managed to figure out exactly how to extract coal from underground, given the true horror of life in a place where temperatures regularly drop to -30 or -40 in the winter. , where the sun doesn't shine for six months of the year, and where in the summer, which is when I was there, the mosquitoes travel in these huge dark clouds.

But Stalin found a way to do it by making use of another type of vast reserve. The 23 original settlers of Vorkuta were prisoners and the leaders of that founding expedition were secret police, and over the next two and a half decades, a million more prisoners passed through Vorkuta, one of the two or three most notorious centers of the Gulag. With the help of the prisoners, the Soviet authorities built shops, swimming pools and schools. But the cost of heating these shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of the year turned out to be astronomical, far more than the value of the coal itself.

The city's infrastructure, built on this ever-changing permafrost, required great efforts to maintain. Instead, the miners could have come in two- or three-week shifts as they do in Alaska or Canada. There was no need to build this city there. However, the city of Vorkuta continued to function during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and many thousands of people still live there today. The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta is unnecessary, the city is unnecessary. Why build kindergartens and a university on the tundra? Why build a puppet theater? In Vorkuta there were three. But in Vorkuta it was really difficult to ask such questions even after the collapse of the USSR, and I have a particularly strong memory of a day I spent there with a retired geologist.

They called her Genia. And together we walked through the city, went to the prisoners' cemeteries, toured the ruins of the Geological Institute, once a solid structure with a column, a Stalinist portico and a red star on the pediment. Genia's Polish parents had been arrested and deported there in the 1940s and she knew that history, of course, and she knew the history of the city very well. And yet she lashed out at the people she called greedy bureaucrats who had closed the institute and who were closing those parts of the city that were simply not economical to maintain.

If your whole life has been associated with a place, it is really difficult to admit that that place should never have existed or that it will not exist in the future. Even if that place is widely famous for its atrocity and stupidity, even if it is notoriously disgusting, it's really hard to admit that it shouldn't have been built at all. But if Genia, who was the daughter of the victims, could not understand the strange economic situation of her city and the role she played in history, who can? And this question brings me to the next part of this talk where I would like to ask why the Gulag, which historians now know so much about, since I wrote my books there have been many others, there is a fantastic amount of research. which is widely available, and whose economic impact we understand much better and whose psychological impact we understand as well, why is it rarely debated and discussed by modern Russians?

And in this I will talk about the Gulag in a broader sense. Why is the Gulag rarely talked about? Why are Stalin's crimes rarely talked about? Why is it so missing from modern Russian debate? I mean, one of the things that always surprises contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to Stalin's victims. There are some scattered memorials, but there is actually no national monument or place of mourning. And, in fact, the absence of monuments is a true reflection of the absence of public debate. I must say that this was not always the case. So there was extensive debate about Soviet repression in the 1980s.

This is the end of the Soviet period during the reign of Mikhail Gorbachev. And, in fact, these discussions played an important role, perhaps key, perhaps absolutely central, in the delegitimization of the Soviet regime. So once, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, all of these issues were kept, they were very secret, they weren't talked about as long as the Soviet Union existed, and in this avalanche of glasnost, this moment when suddenly all kinds of of things It was possible to talk about it in the 1980s, one of the first things that happened is that people started talking about the camp system and the crimes of the camp system, the crimes of the Stalin era.

And then people began to wonder if this system that we are still a part of created all these horrors, why should we continue to support it? And as I said, these were really important discussions at the time, but this debate, the bitter debate at the time about justice for victims, is now completely over and really left no political institutions in its wake. And so, although much was made of it in the late 1980s, the Russian government never examined or prosecuted the perpetrators of torture or mass murder, not even those who were still alive or identifiable. There were no truth commissions, there was no natural debate of the kind implemented in South Africa that could have allowed victims to tell their stories in an official public sphere, in a public place.

There was certainly no compensation for the victims. On one level, the reasons for this are not difficult to understand. Even in 1990-91, the Stalinist era was already behind us. The last Stalinist camps closed after Stalin's death in the 1950s. A smaller camp system existed only for political prisoners that lasted until the end of the Soviet Union and has now been revived under Putin's rule. But the era of mass incarceration had long ended, and a lot had happened since it ended. Post-Soviet Russia was not the same as post-Soviet Germany, where memories of the worst atrocities were still very much in people's minds.

Memories of the camps are also confusing in Russia due to the presence of so many other atrocities, other things to remember. You know, war, famine, collectivization, mass murder. Why should camp survivors receive any kind of status or privileged treatment? I think in some ways the problem is made even more confusing by the link that was made in some people's minds between that discussion about the past that took place in the 1980s, which I mentioned, and the collapse of the economy in the 1990s. So people said, people used to say this to me in Russia: "What was the point of talking about all that?

It didn't get us anywhere." There is also a kind of pride issue. Like Genia, many people experienced the collapse. of the Soviet Union as a kind of personal blow. It altered their identity, their world no longer made sense after they disappeared. Who were they, what was their nationality? But also maybe the old system was bad. I felt it, but at the same time least we were powerful and important, and now that we're not, we don't really want to hear that it was bad. Still, I think the most important explanation for the lack of debate, and here I'm going to I'd be interested to know how you're going to compare this to the The most important explanation for the lack of debate is not really the fears and anxieties of ordinary Russians, but rather it really has to do with the nature of the country's new ruling class.

So Vladimir Putin, who is the president of Russia, is a former KGB officer who has described himself using the word Chekist, which is a word that Lenin used forpolitical police Putin has also famously described the disintegration of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, probably greater than the First or Second World War. So, under his leadership, Soviet flags have returned to anniversary parades, the Soviet national anthem has been revived, Soviet symbolism of all kinds has returned. And the reason for this is quite clear. Putin is trying to create an alternative version of post-Soviet history, one that supports his claim to rule the country.

So in his version of the past, 1991, which is the year the Soviet Union dissolved, was not a moment of liberation. It was the beginning of the economic collapse. The hardships and depravities of the 1990s were not the result of decades of communist neglect and widespread theft, but of Western-style democracy. Communism was stable and secure, post-communism was a disaster. The Soviet Union was great. Russia, at least until Putin took power, was a failure. The more people believe that version of history, the less likely they will be to want a system that is more genuinely democratic and that offers people real opportunities to advance, that is not a kleptocracy controlled from above.

The more nostalgia, or on the contrary, the more nostalgia for the Soviet era, the safer Putin and his ex-KGB kind of clique will be about him. So, in other words, not discussing the past, dwelling on the past, regretting the past, or focusing on the past is part of this reorientation of history toward the political needs of current rulers. But it has also had consequences for the formation of Russian civil society and for the development of the rule of law. It helps explain, for example, why Russians are not as bothered as they should be by certain types of censorship or the new tactic of naming any independent journalist as an enemy of the state.

Now they are called foreign agents but it is the same idea. Why is it that when the FSB, which is the modern incarnation of the KGB, is given free rein to open mail or tap phones or enter private residences without a warrant, why are there no more objections to it? The feeling that it was necessary to break with the old system, that the lack of rule of law requires profound change, never really occurred. I think there's a kind of deeper meaning too. To put it bluntly, if all the scoundrels of the old regime went unpunished, there was no justice in the new system, so good did not triumph after 1991.

And this may sound a bit apocalyptic, but it is not politically irrelevant. Thus, after 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the secret police, the leaders of the old system, kept their apartments, their country houses, their large pensions, and their victims, the former prisoners, remained poor and marginal. And so it seems to most Russians now that the more they collaborated in the past, the wiser they were. If you were a winner then, you are a winner now. And by analogy, the more you cheat, lie, and stay within the system in the present, the wiser you are now too.

That there is no benefit of justice. There is nothing to be gained by seeking reparation for past crimes. Personally, what bothers me most about Russia's lack of interest in this part of its past is the way it has deprived young people of some of their heroes. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin should be as well known in Russia as, for example, in Germany, as the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. In the incredibly rich body of Russian survivor literature he used to write, these are stories of people whose humanity triumphed over horrible conditions, and there are amazing stories of friendship and bravery.

These should be better read, better known, and cited more frequently. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of in Russia's Soviet past, apart from imperial and military triumphs. After all, this is the country that invented the modern human rights movement, and yet I don't think most Russians think about it or remember it. Instead, that part of Russia's past remains very closed, almost like a kind of unopened Pandora's box. It is on the lookout for the next generation. But do we, in the United States or in Europe, remember that the Soviet past, which is part of Soviet history, is part of world history?

Do we remember it better? One of the reasons I wrote my book about the Gulag, which was one of my inspirations in the late 1990s, was because I really encountered this topic when I lived in Eastern Europe. I remember that the first person I met who had been a prisoner of the Gulag was in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a man who explained to me how many people could be put in the back of a truck because he remembered how it was done in the 1940s, when he and his family were deported. But this subject was not taught in my school, even though I studied Russian history at Yale.

It wasn't a topic of great interest, it wasn't an important part of any curriculum, we didn't have a course like the one Professors Snyder and Stanley teach today. When I was a child, the Gulag was not part of popular culture, nor were the Nazi camps. You have an image in your mind of what a Nazi camp is like, but not a Gulag camp. But it wasn't really part of the standard 20th century stories, it just wasn't a topic you ran into. And I spent a lot of time thinking about why that was so too, and I felt once again that it was possible to explain this absence of popular sentiment about the tragedy of European communism.

There were also some logical explanations. Again, the passage of time was part of it. Communist regimes also became less reprehensible over time. No one was very afraid of General Jaruzelski, who was Poland's last communist dictator. No one was as afraid of the late Soviet leaders, not even Brezhnev and Andropov, as they were of Stalin, even though both were responsible for great destruction. But also, as I said, the files were closed. Access to the campsites was prohibited. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims as they had in Germany at the end of World War II.

And in turn, the absence of images meant that the topic in our image-driven culture didn't really exist either. To this day it is very difficult to make documentaries about the Gulag because there are simply no photographs, no images. But ideology also shaped the way we understood Soviet and Eastern European history while that system existed. And this is an interesting point that, once again, you will find that it could have more echoes in the course that you are taking. In Europe and the United States one can trace the ups and downs of knowledge of the Soviet Union.

So, at different times people knew more or less about it, at different times the story appeared more or less in the popular press. In other words, the politics of the West, that is, the politics of Europe, the politics of the United States, actually affected the way we understood Soviet politics. So, for example, in the 1920s a lot was known in the Western capitals, in Berlin, in London, in Washington, about Lenin's bloody revolution. And that was because the first victims, as I already mentioned, of the revolution were the socialists. And the Western socialists. Thus, once again, in all the important capitals it was known that their brothers, their comrades, had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and the first who really protested loud and strong against the crimes committed by the revolution were those on the left.

However, in the 1930s, when Americans and Western Europeans became more interested in learning how socialism could be applied at home, it was a time of economic crisis in the West and people were looking for other solutions, the tone changed and then The Americans and European writers go to the USSR and try to take advantage of them to learn lessons that they could bring back. Famously, part of what later became Franklin Roosevelt's kitchen cabinet went to the Soviet Union to see if there was anything they could learn. The New York Times at the time hired a correspondent, Walter Duranty, who praised the five-year plan and argued, against much evidence, that it was a massive success.

He also argued that collectivization was not a disaster and whitewashed famine stories, especially in Ukraine, even though he knew they were true, and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so because that's what people wanted to hear. There was a time when people no longer wanted to know why the revolution was bad, they wanted to know what was succeeding or what they thought was succeeding. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a part, I would say it is not even the Western left, I would say that traditional Western politicians struggled to explain and sometimes excuse the camps, because the stories were leaking, and the terror that the created precisely because they wanted to test some aspects of the Soviet experiment at home.

So our politics shaped our understanding of the Soviet Union. And this became even more complicated during World War II, when Stalin was our ally. Thus, in 1944, American Vice President Henry Wallace went to Kolyma, which is one of the most famous camps, during a trip through the USSR, which, according to him, reminded him of the Wild West. There is a famous quote that says: "Soviet Asia reminds me a lot of my homeland." According to a report Kolyma's boss later wrote for Beria, who was then the head of the Soviet Secret Services, Wallace asked to see the prisoners, so he knew where he was, he knew he was seeing a mass incarceration site, but They kept him away from them.

He was not the only one who did not want to know this truth, this aspect of the Soviet system. Obviously, at that time Roosevelt and Churchill met periodically with Stalin. They took pictures with him, they saw him as an ally in their war against Hitler, so they just weren't interested in bringing this topic up. All of this is part of what contributed to our firm conviction that World War II was a holy and just war. And even today very few people want that conviction to be shattered. So we remember D-Day, we remember the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, we remember the children who greeted the American soldiers with cheers in the streets, and we do not remember that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded into Eastern Europe.

This, this is the topic of my book that Tim mentioned, about the expansion of the Soviet system in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. We do not remember that those camps were expanded just when the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. So no one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. It is true that during the Cold War our awareness of Soviet atrocities increased again. Again, this reflected American politics and political needs more than anything that was happening in the USSR. In the 1960s they regressed again. Even in the 1980s, when I was at Yale, there were still American academics describing the advantages of East German healthcare or Polish peace initiatives.

They would try to boost the values ​​of these systems. And at the time when I was a student in academia, Soviet historians writing about the camps were generally divided into two groups. Those who wrote about the camps as criminal and called them kind of right-wing, and those who downplayed them, not because they were actually pro-Soviet but because they opposed the United States' role in the Cold War or perhaps Ronald Reagan. In other words, one's attitude toward the Soviet Union and its camps was very often determined by one's own politics, and I say this neutrally. I'm not saying one side was good or bad.

That his vision of the USSR was determined by his vision of the United States and the Cold War. And in reality, until the end of the Cold War, our opinions of the Soviet Union and its repressive system always had more to do with American politics and American ideological struggles than with the Soviet Union itself. I mean, it's a lesson that we see things through the lens of our own time and we found it difficult to talk about this topic neutrally while the Soviet Union still existed. I should add that there are those who maintain that this is still true.

I actually don't think so. I think it is now possible, as Tim Snyder and many others do, to write about Soviet history in a way that does not reflect your views on the United States, the Cold War, or Reagan. Because the Soviet Union no longer exists and because it is part of history, it can be written about neutrally, and one of the reasons there are so many good Soviet studies in recent years is because the ideology disappeared. , the fighting has disappeared and we can now begin to see the system for what it was. So, as I said, since the collapse of the UnionSoviet in 1991, many things have changed.

The Second World War now definitely belongs to an older generation. The Cold War is over. The international alliances and divisions it produced have been changed forever. The Western left and the Western right, if those terms can be used, are now competing on different issues. And so it is finally possible to stop looking at the history of the Soviet Union through the narrow lens of Western politics. And I end by saying that not only is it possible, I think it is necessary, I am very happy that there is another generation of students who investigate this history, who are interested in it.

Because at the end of the day, in an important sense, the Gulag is also part of our history. Why, after all, do we fight the Cold War? Was it because some crazy right-wing politicians in cahoots with the military industrial complex and the CIA made up the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans to accept it? Or was something more important happening? I'm not sure we still remember what it was that mobilized us, what kept us together, what kept Western civilization together for so long and what the useful part of that history was and what we achieved by doing it.

But, of course, it is also true that the history of the Gulag belongs in a much broader sense to the history of humanity. Each of the mass tragedies of the 20th century was unique. The Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanjing massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Revolution, the Bosnian wars. Each of these events had different historical and philosophical origins. They all arose in circumstances that will never be repeated. But it is our ability to degrade and destroy and once again dehumanize our fellow human beings, this is something that can and will be repeated over and over again.

It is our ability to transform our neighbors or fellow citizens into enemies. Our reinvention of our victims as inferior or evil beings worthy only of imprisonment, expulsion, forced labor, or sometimes death. These things are repeated over and over again. And the more we are able to understand how different societies have achieved this, how they have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens into objects, the more we know about the specific circumstances of each episode of mass murder or mass dehumanization, the more we will understand the nature of human nature itself. I wrote my book about the Gulag not so that it wouldn't happen again, which is what the cliché goes.

Because it will happen again and has happened again. And I think we need to know why and every story, every memory, every document is a piece of the puzzle. If we don't have them, one day we will wake up and realize that we don't know who we are. So thank you very much. I look forward to your questions. It has been a pleasure speaking once again with the residents of Yale and New Haven. - Ana, thank you very much. That was wonderful and fantastic and now we are going to have a lively discussion. I realize that in my introduction I made at least two mistakes.

Number one was me. I forgot to tell our audience that they are supposed to ask questions. So this is a webinar and if everyone looks at the bottom of the screen, center right, there's a thing called Questions and Answers where I think if you type in your question, I'll be able to see it and then I'll be. As moderator, I can pass it on to Anne Applebaum. Oh my gosh, yeah, that raising your hand thing isn't going to work. So I see some of you are raising your hands. It would be great if you guys used the Q&A feature instead like one of you just did.

Okay, great, we're off to a good start. My second mistake is that I forgot to mention that Anne graduated from Yale, but luckily she rescued me by mentioning it six times during the talk. - Twice. - Oh, sorry, okay, twice. She rescued me by mentioning it during the talk. That's one more reason why we are happy to have you back and hope to have you back again. I'm going to buy a little time as the questions pile up, and maybe Professor Stanley will want to do the same and join us, just giving you a couple of general questions to think about, and you can choose whether any of them suit you. draws attention. so interesting.

They have to do with topics that have already begun to emerge in the class and to which you have also given names. I was in kyiv this weekend and I was in kyiv to talk about this strange kind of open letter that Vladimir Putin wrote about Ukraine and its history, and this may seem very far from what we are working on in this class and it may be the influence of this class in me to read it this way. So Mr. Putin wrote this long letter, as some of you may know, basically making a historical case that the Ukrainian nation does not exist and concluding that, as a result, it is up to Russia to decide whether Ukraine is sovereign or not.

And as I was reading this, I mean, I read it and they asked me to make a public criticism of it and that's why I was in kyiv and I said several things, but there is one thing that is on my mind and that What I didn't say was that when I read this particular form of history, that's the right word, I was surprised by how much it reminded me of white supremacy. That what Mr. Putin was doing was basically saying, he was telling other people what his story was and telling them that they didn't really have a say in it and that he had the final say on what had happened.

And in a very broad sense, I think starting to teach this class has helped me make connections, because I wouldn't have thought about it if it hadn't been for this class. But if you read the letter, I'm going to recommend students read this letter because it's a striking example of such a one-sided story where one person doesn't see a problem with saying, "You were happy, everything was fine, nothing happened. " But this brings me to a topic that is in the book and in his other work but that didn't come up as much at the conference, so maybe I'll just ask him about it, and that is the topic of ethnicity and nationality.

It is very surprising, as you know, that at certain times, especially around collectivization and then at the end of the Second World War, and also during the period of political prisoners in the 1970s, Ukrainians are hugely overrepresented in the fields. So I wonder if you would, and then you mentioned your friend Genia, who is Polish and whose parents probably named her Genka, and Poles were also very overrepresented. They were a small minority, but they were hugely overrepresented in the camps and in the gunfights. I wonder how you think about this at the end of your research.

If it is an economic issue, if it is superficially economic but it is also about punishment, why do we explain in this system that is supposed to be internationalist, how do we explain that certain types of people end up being punished in such an obvious way? Numbers greater than others? - Thanks, that's a great question because one of the old clichés about the Soviet Union used to be that, well, the Nazis killed people for racial reasons and the Soviet Union killed people for class reasons. And one of the other impacts, one of the other things you get from reading Soviet archives, which I and many other people have done since 1990, is the extent to which that is not true becomes clear.

So what the Soviet Union did was, what Stalin's Soviet Union did, was identify potential enemies, you know, who might be our opposition? Who could be in opposition to the State? And there were different qualities that could make someone an enemy, and one of those qualities was whether you were a former Russian aristocrat or whether you were a former military officer, etc. But another quality that made you a potential enemy was belonging to a potentially enemy ethnic group. And actually the so-called Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 begins, and again we know, this is now documented, it begins with the purge of the Poles.

And so throughout the Soviet Union there are not millions and millions, but there are many Polish citizens because of the way the borders have moved throughout history, because part of what was once Poland then became Russia and so on, there are a number of ethnically Polish people. citizens lived in the USSR in the 1930s, even then. And there is a purge of them, they are arrested en masse. Anyone with a Polish surname can be arrested. And then there is a similar effect that affects Ukrainians a little later. Ukraine is a little different. It's bigger, there's actually Ukraine, you know, a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union.

But Ukrainians, as you know and as you have written and I have also written, are attacked in another way. They were deprived of food in the early 1930s and deliberately left to starve because that eliminates the problem of Ukraine, which Stalin perceives Ukraine as a problem because the Ukrainians have not fully accepted the Soviet ideology. So what we see is that ethnicity becomes one of the, and it's not that Poles were arrested in 1937 or Ukrainians were killed in 1933, it's not that anyone has really examined whether these people are pro or anti-Soviet. or what your political opinions are.

They are attacked because nationality and ethnicity have become a kind of symbolic marker. They're used as, oh, you were this, therefore you're probably an enemy. Your nationality is a kind of identifying quality. And when we look to eliminate all the enemies or clean the system to make sure that only our people are inside it, one of the markers that is used is that. And throughout the Soviet Union, as you know, there are different phases, there are different times when different ethnic groups are attacked. And in fact, at the end of his life, Stalin began to attack the Jews.

It is the same as the plot of the so-called doctors started a widespread investigation of the Jews in the system and many Jews were fired and this was even echoed in some of the satellite states, in the Czech Republic. Actually, it was not called the Czech Republic then, but Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia there was also a purge of Jews that was an echo of the Soviet version. Thus, different ethnic groups could be isolated, molested and eliminated as a way of satisfying this anxiety that the system had about itself. I mean, I really think Putin is worried about Ukraine, and I don't mean that in a Freudian psychological sense.

I mean he's anxious for a reason. Because Ukraine poses a challenge to Russia today, and it is the same kind of challenge that Ukraine posed to Stalin. That is, it is a country that is closely ethnically related to Russia, but does not accept Russia's ruling ideology. He wants to be different. In the case of modern Ukraine, he wants a more democratic and less kleptocratic political system. In the 1930s, Ukraine wanted some of its own national status and language. And the reaction of the totalitarian, the autocrat, the authoritarian is to eliminate, as you say, eliminate the history or eliminate the reality of these opposing nations.

And it's a character trait that you can, Putinism is not Stalinism, they are not the same at all, but there are these echoes from the past to the present where anyone who is seen as outside our group, anyone who The people who offer An alternative view of the world must be eliminated or denied agency or removed from their history because they are a threat to the mainstream. So in that sense, it's a really important issue throughout the Soviet Union, it's not something that I think was understood enough. We believe in their language about internationalism and so on and class struggle, and while the Soviet Union existed it was much harder to see exactly how racist it was. - So, Jason, do you want to come in?

We have a lot of questions now, so we're fine, but if you want to get in first, do so. - Yes, I'm just going to say that one of the questions of our seminar is, how do prison systems become overcrowded? What are the elements, the core elements that result in the kind of enormous prison systems that you see now in the United States, in the Soviet Union, and whether ethnicity, directed at an ethnic group, is necessary for that mass structure , or at least? always involved. - So, certainly an element of dehumanization is needed. In other words, it has to be done, in the Soviet Union it is not just ethnic.

It can be ethnic and often was, but it was not just ethnic. But you need to have identified some group as less worthy, or they are not real citizens, or they are not equal to the rest of us, or they somehow deserve to be locked up en masse, they are not part of the same, they do not have the same status, the same citizenship as us. And that can be ethnic or racial, and many times it has been, but it is not just that. So, as I said, the moment of massive expansion in the Soviet Union is also this moment of collectivization.

For those who don't know, that is the time when peasants were forced to leave their private farms and enter these collective farms, and many resisted, they did not want to do this, they did not want to give their cow to the collective and they were worried about dying. of hunger, which, in fact, happened. They were right to worry. And so there was a massive arrest of peasants. They were kulaks. Anyone who resisted was given a name.special. They were supposed to be rich peasants, but in reality anyone who resisted collectivization was made a kulak and could be arrested.

And along with this campaign to arrest them was a massive propaganda effort to dehumanize the kulaks. The kulaks prevent the revolution. The kulaks oppose the rest of us. There were caricatures of the evil kulak with a long beard, evil eyes and scary faces that you would find in the Soviet press. And they would be associated with the White Guards and the aristocrats and whatever, Satan and the devil, almost anything. They were turned into enemies. And that was both, and that allowed the guards to accept the fact that they were there and it also allowed the rest of the population to accept these mass arrests.

So, obviously, if you're surrounded by evil people looking to overthrow the state and ruin your revolution and they're the ones stopping us from achieving full communism and, I don't know, manna, honey, milk and Honey for everyone, these are the people who get in the way, of course you're willing to eliminate them. And there's an echo of this, I mean, I spent a little bit of time while writing the Gulag book and I did a little bit similar in the Ukraine book, I spent a lot of time watching how the guards talked about the prisoners, what's the way What did they say about them?

I mentioned it in the speech, but I'll just emphasize it. They are seen as pieces of coal. They have no humanity. When people are outraged because they are sacrificing, it is not because there are hungry people but because how do they expect us to meet production quotas with these hungry people? They are too weak to work. In other words, the system successfully removes them. They are not citizens, they are not like us, they deserve to be in this prison. And that can be ethnic or racial, but it doesn't have to be; It can also be political.

In fact, you can politicize any group and turn it into an enemy group. It is not even necessary for there to be ethnic and racial differences. - Well, if that's okay, I'll go ahead and read some of these thoughtful questions that we have. With the convention, by the way, for everyone watching, I'm not going to give the names of the people asking the questions, so I'll just give the question. So one question is, and I'll also skip the part where you say how great a conference it is. I'll skip that part, go straight to the question. "I was very surprised", this is a question, "I was very surprised that a larger part of Russian society "does not talk about the Gulags" given the great impact the system had had on the lives "of many from the Stalin era . "My question is about public and social memory." I was curious about the differences "between Russians who had experiences of imprisonment" and those who did not. "Could you tell us more about your conversations with them?" meaning people who had been incarcerated. "How did they remember the Gulag differently?" Did the perception and language "of those who had been imprisoned" challenge the broader amnesia or denial "in broader Russian society" or was there a similar cognitive dissonance? " - It's a more complicated question to answer.

Answer now that, frankly, it was 30 years ago, 25 years ago, when I was working on the book. The generation of people I interviewed no longer exists, so this is not a living question of the same way. It was a few decades ago because most of the Gulag survivors are no longer with us. It's been quite a while. I mean, it's an issue that is complicated by politics because, as I said, as long as the Gulag existed, everyone knew about its existence. It was a secret and not a secret, a bit like the famine in Ukraine was a secret but not a secret.

So you couldn't not know it. Everyone lived in communities where there were prisoners. If we talk about the arrest 10 or 15% of the population, so everyone has a cousin, a friend or a relative, everyone knew that someone had been arrested. So the lack of... And it raises an interesting question about what is knowledge and when do people know? things and what we understand by public memory, because everyone knew it and yet it was not allowed to be discussed or could not be discussed. to discuss it. And so the way the conversations about the Gulag worked was that in small, very private circles people talked about it.

And so a famous circle developed around Eugenia Ginzburg, who was a famous survivor of the Gulag in Moscow and was a kind of proto-dissident before there were dissidents, and she gathered around her a lot of people who came and talked about it. , and her friends and family would know and could talk about it freely, and her children would know and I have met some of her children, and the people in her immediate circle would know. And then there would be other people in other circles who would never talk about it again. They would return home and never speak.

So in reality, the real distinction was not between people who were there and people who were not there. The real distinction was between people who, because of the politics and culture of their particular community, could talk about it and those who couldn't. So when you interviewed people, you got very different reactions. In the 1990s I interviewed one or two people who were still too scared to talk about it. They didn't want to say anything, very quiet, nervous when talking to me. "What are you going to do with this information if I tell you? 'Why do you have a tape recorder?'" So even then there were people who were afraid and then there were people who you asked a question and they talked for hours.

In fact, sometimes that was a problem, as anyone who's done oral history knows. You had to refocus on what you really needed them to talk about. So the difference was that there were sectors of society where it was okay to talk about these things. privately and then there were other sectors where it wasn't. And why that was so, it could have to do with fear, it could have to do with status, the greater the more status you had in the Soviet system, the less likely you were to you would like to discuss these things. It could have to do with personalities.

So the memory really depended on where you were and something like that persists today. So you can still go to Moscow and you will be able to meet people who know a lot about Russian history and will talk at length about it . There are great Russian historians who write in Russian. It's not that research hasn't been done on this topic. In fact, all the best historians are Russian. The really good ones. I think you're reading Oleg Volkov. The ones who really know the most are the Russians. There are a couple of Russian institutions and some publishing houses.

My book about the Gulag was published in Russia, a very, very small amount, I think about 500 copies or something like that, but it was translated. So there is a kind of community of people who talk about it, it is not totally illegal. But what is not there is not part of the public discussion or debate. I suppose, depending on the teacher, it might occasionally appear in the school curriculum. But there is no memorial, there is no annual celebration like Holocaust Day or Holodomor Day in Ukraine. There is no... There is no... It is not part of the national narrative.

Putin rewrote the national narrative to focus not on the Gulag, not on Stalin, not on dissent, not on the human rights movement, but on 1945, which was the year of greatest Soviet domination of Europe and victory in the war. . And now every year there is an annual parade that imitates the victory parade they had in 1945. And so, somehow, this story is left out of the picture. And so, again, it's not illegal, it's not impossible, it's just not present in public culture, and public culture is heavily controlled by the state. So there is no culture of independent universities that can argue with public culture.

There are independent magazines and newspapers, but they are increasingly oppressed and marginalized; many of them are now based outside Russia. Journalists have difficulty making themselves heard. And in fact, there is a famous case right now. There is a historian of the Gulag, he was a sort of amateur historian and archaeologist from Karelia, whom I met while working on the book and whose family I have been in contact with, who is now under arrest. And he is being held on some false pretenses related to alleged child pornography. It is a completely false case. But the real reason he is arrested is because he is a public historian who spoke about these issues and was closely associated with them and with Petrozavodsk, which is the city where he comes from.

That's right, people who talk too loudly about these things can get into trouble. Some people continue to talk about it in private circles. But it's not part of what Putin wants people to think about when they think about Russian history. - So this question, this epistemic question, as you said, what it really means to know about something, and how knowledge comes about and how it might have a political effect is something that is on the minds of, I think, a number of students. . You indirectly referred to the chronicle of current events in Russia and the attempt of, you know, Russians, Ukrainians and others to write down the simplest but rich details of what they could learn about... - There is a lot about the chronicle of current events in the book. - Yes Yes.

This is a topic that will come up throughout the class. I have a question about it, so I'll read it to you. "You said that the Gulag is rarely talked about these days," but that when it was talked about, "the conversation delegitimized the Soviet regime." Now we're going to slowly move into some comparative questions because this student is wondering how this works. "In the United States we have had repeated social conversations "about mass incarceration," especially in the last year. "Do you think this public debate "has delegitimized institutions like prisons genuinely" or superficially, and if the latter, "what is missing?" ?" in the public dialogue?" - which I don't know if I'm competent to answer because I haven't spent much time thinking about this question in the United States.

But it's certainly true that the conversation about mass incarceration, I mean, for example, the The criminal justice law passed during Clinton's presidency, which is now held responsible for the mass arrests, was long considered by a fairly wide range of people to be a good piece of legislation. It was something Clinton himself would have been upset about. credit at the time it was passed. And a lot of white and black people had a lot of support. In retrospect, it's now widely criticized and now seen as the source of these unjust arrests or unjust prison sentences. And even things like marijuana laws, and similarly, I think they are now viewed retrospectively as overtly harsh and ridiculously punitive, given that Americans drink so much anyway.

So one thing that that conversation means: I wouldn't say it has delegitimized the political system, but it has certainly delegitimized the assumptions that led to this process. So do we really need these laws? Was this the right way to do it? Certainly, and maybe Jason can speak to this more eloquently than I can, certainly the conversation about police reform and police brutality has increased, I think, and it's probably also been energized by this question of whether there are too many people in prison. Have too many people been locked up? So the conversation, the fact that this is part of the public conversation, starts to affect the way people view police, the way people view the criminal justice system, the way people you see these laws, laws about, whatever, three strikes and you're out, the various laws that led to longer and longer prison sentences.

So, yes, I think the public conversation along those lines delegitimized that part of the criminal justice system. But it's not my area of ​​expertise, so I'd like to hear Jason talk about it. - I mean, to be fair, there are few people who are able to talk about both things at the same time, and that is one of the reasons why we are doing this exploratory course. The point is not that Jason and I know everything about both systems and lay it out there. The point is that we have these two really interesting phenomena and we'll juxtapose them and learn as we go...

It's like comparing the Holocaust and the Gulag. They are not the same. But it's interesting to talk about them together. - Yes, some people have even written books in which they are together. - I don't know anyone, but it's possible that some people do. - There's probably someone out there somewhere. So, I'm going to, there's an important substantive question here that goes back to Russia and then maybe we'll do a little more comparison. Was there continuity between punishment and imprisonment in Tsarist Russia before 1917 through the development of mass imprisonment in the Gulag in the following decades?

And another student also asks this question: was there continuity between the Gulag and post-Soviet Russia? - Good. So the answer is more or less yes and more or less yes. The tsarist system was actually, in retrospect, relatively mild. If you look at the number of political prisoners, it is a few hundred or a few thousand. I think at the beginning of the revolution there were a few thousand political prisoners, which is very low compared to the millions who were imprisoned by Stalin. ANDThe system was very flexible. In fact, he was so famous that Stalin escaped, I think, three times from Russian exile places, which is kind of funny if you think about it.

And one of them, you know, it was so easy to escape from the Russian prisons that he decided that when he was finally in charge he would make sure that it wouldn't be so easy to escape from them again. There were substantial differences in scale, but there were some things, so the idea of ​​​​sending prisoners to the Far North and the Far East was a tsarist idea. The idea that prisoners should somehow be used to exploit these coal or gold mines in the distant tundra was also a tsarist idea. Then the tsars also had the idea that prisoners could be used for these things that were very difficult to achieve using normal people.

And this was something that the Bolsheviks picked up, it was an element of continuity. Furthermore, the other element of continuity was the idea that prisoners could be sent to settle in empty places. That there was all this empty space in the Soviet Union and that somehow we need to fill it and that no one wants to go there because there are too many mosquitoes and too cold, so we can send prisoners there to do it. And that idea is continuous at all times. And some of the places, I mean, some of the places of exile in the Russian Tsarist era and in the Soviet era, are the same.

And so there's a kind of continuity in thinking about this. The idea that prisoners could be used to mine coal in the Far North did not occur to Stalin. That was an older idea. And then I would say that there is a similarity not between prisons but between systems in which the lack of rule of law, the fact that the ruler could decide what the law was and what the sentence was at a given moment and that that could change Depending on political circumstances, this is continuous between Tsarist Russia and Stalin's Russia. Therefore, there is no independent judicial system, no independent way of making laws or overseeing prison sentences.

Suddenly the tsar decides that this group of people, in the case of the Decembrist uprising, this group of people deserve especially harsh sentences, and he could decide that they would receive them. And that is a similarity with the Soviet system, and then that is an element of continuity that we have today. In the Soviet Union, he would say that in the 90s and early 2000s, it was fair to say that the Gulag system was over; there was no system of political prisons in Russia. Now that's starting to happen again. There are starting to be people who are sentenced for purely political crimes and are interned, you know, there are still prison camps, and very often they are in the same place as the Soviet camps.

I was once in a prison in Arkhangelsk, of all places. This, again, is roughly the early 2000s, I'd say. I was in prison, it was a modern Russian prison. This was not a political prison, they were just criminal prisoners. And it was the same building that had been used during the Soviet period and it was the same building that had been used during the Tsarist period. Very often the places and the buildings are the same and of course that also means that institutionally the behavior of the guards, the customs, how people are treated, there is a kind of constant institutional memory, and that is true in the present.

If you read Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman who was in prison for many years, if you read his memoirs, he talks about how the guards treated him in a way that will be very familiar to anyone who has read the history of the Gulag. . So, although the numbers are not so good, although they are accumulating again, slowly, the number of purely political prisoners is not so large. The prisons themselves, the systems by which they are managed and organized, the language and nature of the guards, the conditions are striking, there are striking similarities and echoes to the present.

So it's almost as if you can change the policy but you don't necessarily change the jailers. The jailers still, when someone goes to work in the jail, they go to work for an older person who used to work in the jail. And if there hasn't been a big prison revolution, or prison reform, I mean, I'm sorry, there hasn't been in Russia, there wasn't after the 1990s, then why would they change? The system remains the same as it was invented many years ago. It has been altered, people no longer starve and they no longer die working, but the system as it was in the 80s and the system as it is now are not noticeably different, which is not surprising. given that the chain of people, the chain of, you know, the training and experience of the guards is very similar. - Can I ask you a quick question, Tim?

So last week we discussed in class Foucault's "Discipline and Punish," and Foucault has this discussion about illegality where he says it's important to create this zone of illegality so that the revolutionary people who, the class that could rebel against the system, be thrown into prison as criminals. They are delegitimized as political prisoners. So when they try to rebel, you say, "They're just common criminals." Obviously, that's an issue in the United States. To what extent is that an issue? A huge and really important topic in both Stalin's Russia and modern Russia. In Stalin's Russia there were so many laws and so many ways to break them that it was very difficult not to break any laws.

But even in modern Russia there is a great line, there is a book by Chrystia Freeland, who is now a Canadian politician but used to be a journalist, she wrote a very good book about Russia, it was about the privatization era of the 90s, and she had In a line where she talks about Western advisors who work in Russia and who constantly advise the Russians, they say, "Well, you have all these contradictory laws where, "you know, the people who do business in this, already You know, "they are always breaking the law because the laws are not clear." And she said, "We keep harping on this. "This is a big problem for you, "why don't you fix this problem?" And then suddenly they finally realize that it's on purpose.

The laws are unclear for a reason. Because everyone is a criminal. So anyone can be arrested at any time if the state doesn't want them to be, if they don't like their business or they're not paying enough money to the mafia boss or whatever they're doing, I've always violated something because the Laws are poorly written and seem to be written that way on purpose. And so, yes, absolutely, the unclear laws, the poorly written laws, the creation of criminalizations. In Stalin's Soviet Union there is a time when it is criminalized, the theft of grain becomes, this is in a time of great famine, a category of behavior so broadly defined that you could be arrested for collecting it, if someone carries a grain bail and you collect the leftovers and put them in your pocket, that can be a crime of theft from the Soviet state and you can go to prison for five years.

All of these systems have that phenomenon that many ordinary activities are criminalized or the laws are so poorly written that you are always forced to break one of them, so yes. - Or the structures are such that a law must be broken. - You have to break a law to do business in Russia. You simply cannot do business without breaking a law. - Yes, I think an interesting difference between the United States and Russia, people can correct me, is that in Russia middle class people who run small businesses are constantly afraid of being arrested because they will be, it is very likely that they will be. - If someone doesn't like them or wants to do business with them, yes. - Yes, and in America, at least if you are a white, middle-class businessman, this is not something you are thinking about.

The laws may be contradictory, but that doesn't particularly worry you. So you can have the same group of friends in Cincinnati as you do in Perm or whatever and they will have very different fears of the police coming for them. - Yes, no, I would say, in the United States there are several resources. You can get lawyers. But you're right, ordinary businessmen simply for not doing their job are not afraid of being arrested. - Yes, okay. So who is afraid of that arbitrariness? It's obviously one of the things we're thinking about. You have been very generous, I will ask you two questions together about the US knowing that this is not what you really want to talk about, but also because you have kindly volunteered to participate in the class on mass incarceration in the US .and the Soviet Union and then one more question about Russia and then we'll thank you again.

So it's a general question: How have your studies of the Gulag impacted your understanding of mass incarceration in America? And then there's a more specific question of social and economic history: If we link labor control and race, do you see commonalities between the Gulag camps and the penitentiaries of the American South that were specifically plantations? Angola, Louisiana, Parchman Farm, Mississippi, and the Texas prison plantation system, for example. - So the first question, I don't know if my study of the Gulag has impacted my understanding of mass incarceration in America. Certainly a study of the Gulag, and more generally a study of the Soviet Union, has impacted my understanding of how propaganda is used, for example, in the United States and Europe and, really, everywhere in the world.

And it's made me hyperallergic and aware of certain types of tactics and techniques that, you know, again, I don't want to say that Stalinism is the same as everything we have in the modern world, but there are themes. I mean, it was while I was writing my book about Ukraine, about the Ukrainian famine, that I realized that, Tim and Jason, you've probably had this experience too, you get to the end of the book and suddenly you realize what it's about. of. And this is what happened to me when I wrote the book about Ukraine. I got to the end of the book and suddenly realized that it is about dehumanization and hate speech, which was not how I started to think about the book, but of course, why was it possible to starve Ukrainians?

It was because they were publicly vilified in this way. So I would say that my study of the Soviet Union has helped me think about propaganda and how it is used, rather than giving me specific knowledge about the American prison system. I would say it like this. God, it's America, I mean, the use of forced labor... There's a lot of debate in the world of Gulag studies about whether the Gulag counts as a slave system or not or if it's something different, and that's often It's a kind of semantic argument about how these things are alike and how they are different.

But I would say that the use of forced labor and slavery have some common characteristics. Again, this has to be accompanied by the feeling that the people doing forced labor do not belong to the group like us. They have some characteristic, it may be political as it was in Russia, it may be ethnic as it was in Russia, or it may be racial as it was in the United States. They have to be qualified in some way as not deserving of having free will and the ability to choose what kind of work they do. And so you can say that that was the same thing.

And the creation of special categories of people who do not deserve citizenship and the protection of the rule of law. I mean, the huge difference is that in the United States there is rule of law protection for some people, which does not exist in Russia at all. And so it's not exactly the same type of problem. But yeah, I think you can make that comparison when you look, you read carefully, this is in my book, if you're reading part of the book, if you read the chapter about the guards, you read the justifications that the guards make to themselves. .

Why is it okay to mistreat prisoners? That's somewhere, I'm afraid I can't tell you what page or chapter number it is anymore. How do the guards tell themselves, what do they tell themselves about the prisoners? And then you might have an interesting basis for comparison with slave owners. What are they telling themselves? How do they justify it to themselves? That would be an interesting place to look at what language is used. - Okay, thank you, thank you for putting in the effort in our direction. Now I'm going to ask you a gentle question about Soviet historiography.

This is from another student. If the reason for the Gulag was fundamentally economic, was the stated reason for the imprisonment of being an enemy of the people simply a cover for the economic imperative? - The truth is that no, maybe I didn't explain myself that well. The stated reason was economic and when they talked about themselves, when Stalin and Yezhov or whoever in the politburo talked to each other, they talked about the Gulag in economic terms. But that wasn't really his only reason. It was also a form of terror. And that's why it had these dual functions.

But I found it interesting the way they talked about it for the reason I just answered, which is to justify to themselves, to explain what they were doing. Remember, these are peoplewho say in public: "We are internationalists, "we believe in the brotherhood of all peoples, "we are building the perfect society, "we believe in peace and brotherhood." They had to explain why this state that was mainly about creating good for humanity, why did they have to arrest millions of people? And the reason they gave themselves was often economic when they talked to each other. But that doesn't mean it was the only function of the Gulag.

I mean, how Did it function in Soviet society? And this can be obtained not only from the memoirs of prisoners, but also from other memoirs and literature. It functioned in Soviet society as a form of terror, so people were afraid of it. If I do something wrong, I'll end up there. If I step out of line, my daughter will be arrested. So it worked like something in the back of people's heads that kept people in line, so I actually had a number of different functions. And the reasons for the arrest, I mean, again, there's a famous one, Anna Akhmatova, a famous famous poet, who used to say when someone was arrested or someone was arrested and people were trying to justify it: "Oh, well, so-and-so, we knew that they would arrest him "because he said The danger of anonymous and unaccountable bureaucracies is that people could So you were jealous of your neighbor's apartment and you wanted to get one of those rooms for yourself, this is how housing worked in the Soviet Union, you could report your neighbors and say: "I heard them say something bad about Stalin. "People denounced other people because they were in love with their wives and wanted to do it...

So the arrest system was also used and manipulated by ordinary people to take advantage of it. So why were you arrested? There could be a reason for it, you could be from the wrong ethnic group or be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or it could be quite arbitrary and random. - Alright. We have not answered all the questions, but I have overcome most of the question topics. You have been very patient with us and we are grateful for that, as well as for being approachable, eloquent, and extremely helpful to us at the beginning of our class conference.

Anne, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you very much for your work and thank you for helping us get started. - Thanks to both of you and thanks to the students. It sounds like a fascinating class and I'm sorry I can't attend.