Search Results

If mafia groups are present in a market, they must be organized in some form. Two questions have generated a heated and long-running debate among scholars of the mafias: first, are criminal groups organized in a hierarchical and military fashion or, on the contrary, are they loose networks of individuals, getting together to perform a specific task; second, are these groups territorially or functionally organized? Chapter 6 addresses these two questions with reference to the city of Perm, which is in the Gulag Archipelago in the Ural region of Russia. It pieces together some elements in the history of Perm’s criminality at the time of the transition from the Soviet economic and political system to the market economy, discussing the legacy of the Gulag (in the shape of the criminal fraternity of the vory-v-zakone – thieves-with-a-code-of-honour – that flourished in the Soviet labour camps between the 1920s and the 1950s, and re-emerged in the 1970s) in relation to the contemporary criminal situation, the post-Soviet criminal groups that emerged in the city, and inter-group relations and conflicts. Lastly, it analyses the organizational arrangements (structure, size, and internal division of labour) of the mafia groups in Perm, and compares them with other gangs and mafias (principally the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra).

A second problem group consisted of former prisoners of war (POWs). Their handicap was political rather than physical. The Stalinist regime was extremely suspicious of anybody who had been under enemy control, in particular soldiers who had, as the official euphemism called it, ‘given themselves into captivity’. POWs were screened by the secret police in so‐called ‘filtration camps' (where they had to perform forced labour) before being released back into the army or home, if they had not been arrested and deported to Siberian exile or the Gulag during the process. Once outside of the barbed wire, these veterans remained on the watch‐lists of the security apparatus, and were frequently arrested again in the last years of Stalin's rule. Only in the 1950s did they receive a somewhat silent rehabilitation, while official recognition of their wartime and postwar suffering had to wait until the 1980s.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the role played by the Gulag in the Soviet polity. It provides a close study of the camps and exiles in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan along with a general reconsideration of the scope, meaning, and function of the Gulag in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. Focusing on Karaganda offers a number of benefits to an examination of the history of the Gulag. First, a concentrated look at a single locality allows for a study of the massive phenomenon of the Gulag without giving up the chronological breadth that is important to understanding shifts in its operations through the period (approximately 1930–57) when it was at its height. Second, exploring the Gulag at the local level reveals the operation of the system at the very point of contact between Soviet authority and its detained subjects. The chapter then describes the sources upon which the book is based, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter offers a general reconsideration of the Gulag's origins and the role it played in Stalin's Soviet Union, and an extended look at the variety of institutions that made up this penal universe. The Gulag was simultaneously, and for Soviet authorities unproblematically, a site of both violence and reform—death and redemption. From a prisoner's first day in the Gulag, they were confronted by a social space permeated by Soviet-style socialism. Bands played; posters announced the duty to remake oneself; collective life dominated both barracks and labor; and people died in unspeakably brutal conditions—all in the name of engineering a total human transformation. In some measure, the authorities succeeded. Prisoners learned to negotiate that social space, and in so doing learned to live on Soviet terms.

This chapter looks at the Gulag and the Karaganda camps in the foundational era—the 1930s—and the practices of the camp system as they were shaped in that important decade. The Gulag's practices had largely been established by the end of the 1930s. Practices had been set up and even codified in a detailed set of regulations in 1939 for constructing and running Gulag institutions. They defined the line between survival and death in the Gulag system, tying prisoner survival to measures of reeducation. A prisoner culture and society also emerged as each prisoner sought to negotiate these practices in an effort to survive.

This chapter offers a conceptualization of the identities of Gulag inmates as foisted on them by Soviet authorities and as understood by the prisoners themselves. Identity in the Gulag operated primarily along two axes: who the prisoner was prior to their arrival in the Gulag, and who the prisoner had become while in the Gulag. When a prisoner arrived in the Gulag, they stepped right into a matrix of identity in which they held a specific place defined by the type of crime committed, or their gender, class, or national identity. Nonetheless, the prisoner was not completely precluded from improving their position in the eyes of Soviet authorities.

This chapter focuses on the Gulag during the Armageddon of the Great Patriotic War. It shows how the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag shifted in accord with the demands of total war. The war was an era of mass release on an unprecedented scale side by side with the highest mortality rates in the history of the Gulag system. After four years of brutal, exhausting warfare and a disastrous initial stage, the Soviet Union emerged from its Armageddon victorious. The early postwar period offered no indication that the Gulag would cease to be a mass social phenomenon within fifteen years. Rather, the Gulag remained a pillar in the reestablishment of the Soviet system, following the Red Army into liberated territories, so that every liberated district received its own corrective labor colony. By 1944, the camp and colony population began to grow again.

This chapter takes the Gulag into the postwar era when authorities used the institution in an attempt to reassert social control. At the same time, arrivals from the newly annexed western territories and former Red Army soldiers dramatically altered the social world of the Gulag prisoner. New prisoner populations of war veterans, nationalist guerrillas, and peoples with significant life experience outside the Soviet Union provided a potentially combustible mix. The isolation and concentration of many of these prisoners in a small number of special camps raised even further the potential explosiveness of the population. The Gulag was a political institution, though, and it was only the death of the system's founder that would set off the explosions.

This chapter focuses on the period after Stalin's death. It looks at the explosive uprisings in the Gulag with a particular focus on the forty-day revolt at the Kengir division of Steplag. It also examines the new leadership's policy that largely emptied the camp and exile systems of all those charged with either petty or political offenses. Before Stalin's death, no level of economic loss or amount of systemic crisis could cause a serious reevaluation of the need for this mass social institution. Yet his death almost immediately ushered in a radical change in the size of the system. The Gulag's decline was marked by fits and starts, resulted in a paroxysm of mass disobedience throughout the system, and finally the system's almost total collapse.

This concluding chapter summarizes the preceding discussions, covering the Gulag's emergence as a mass social phenomenon in the 1920s to its collapse by the end of the 1950s. The system took a terrible toll on Soviet society, with victims numbering into the millions, and even those who survived often crushed by the experience. After Stalin, the Soviet state decisively moved away from the use of mass terror as a normal, permanent feature of the political system. However, it also engaged in numerous incidents of violence and political repression in its final thirty-five years, from the bloody suppression of uprisings within its borders and the countries of the Warsaw Pact, to the use of labor camps and psychoprisons to devastate the small but vocal human rights dissident movements of the Brezhnev years. Nonetheless, the Gulag never reemerged as the mammoth complex of its heyday.

Stalin and his coterie's pursuit of their own goals left large swathes of their country in dire poverty. As became apparent from the mounting flow of complaints to the center, some sectors of the economy, most notably agriculture and the labor camp system were — after years of relentless exploitation — on the verge of crisis. This chapter examines the leadership's response to these signs of crisis. It focuses on these two policy areas that presented particular problems to the leadership in the late Stalin era and that would subsequently lie at the heart of the new course followed by the post-Stalin leadership.

This chapter discusses the role of the Gulag medical-sanitation department. Their task was not necessarily to keep prisoners healthy, but to maximize exploitation and minimize “labor losses.” The Gulag routinely reported health data under the heading “illness and lost labor.” Inmate health was only relevant as it impacted production. The Stalinist leadership established quotas on illnesses and deaths, and would not tolerate large numbers of non-working prisoners. The Stalinist leadership called this “labor therapy,” and believed in work as the key to convalescence. Although sickness, emaciation, and disability were widespread, Gulag officials concealed their existence. In the Gulag, illness was widespread, yet it remained largely untreated, concealed, and even criminalized.

This chapter illustrates the challenges faced by the Gulag medical-sanitation department. The principal task of this department was to maximize the number of working prisoners. Yet health care workers operated in a highly constrained environment and were forced to serve the system of physical exploitation. The Stalinist leadership established quotas and target figures on the numbers of prisoners that had to perform the basic work (osnovnaia rabota) of the camp, be it construction, mining, or forestry. There were also quotas restricting the number of inmates who were sick, hospitalized, in recovery or convalescent camps, invalids and nonworking, and even quotas on mortality. Doctors who undermined the camp's mandated quotas often faced punishment. And although the department was tasked with a great deal, it possessed little power within the camp hierarchy. Hence Gulag health care workers, even the well-intentioned, came to be associated with mass violence.

This chapter explores how military and political leaders used the production of desire in two plutonium producing towns, Richland, Washington (USA) and Chelyabinsk-40 (USSR) to insure a stable work force and security. Because both towns produced a strategic and dangerous commodity, they were set up as “utopian” zones of consumer privilege. Though these communities contained an element of exclusivity, political leaders pointed to them as proof of systemic success, or universal affluence. As Brown argues, these towns were in many senses precursors to other Cold War privileged zones of consumption—like segregated white suburbs in the US or larger Soviet cities restricted to registered residents. Here pockets of affluence were created and maintained at the expense of poverty-stricken American inner-cities or Soviet rural countryside. These oases of plenty became important mirages, bolstering illusions of systemic success on both sides of the Iron Curtain. More importantly they bred docility, a desire to enter and remain the exclusive zones, a failure to question authority lest one be tossed from the Garden of Eden. These plutonium cities, then, were model cities where populations exchanged political voice and social responsibility for consumer satisfaction. In the end, these sites of consumer bliss brought peace and prosperity but also nuclear catastrophes and gross social inequities.