╡15╟ Chapter I. The History of the GULAG: From Myth-Making Towards Analysis and Back Literature and the Sources Th e fi rst descriptions of the GULAG appeared in the Soviet press at the beginning of the 1930s. Th ese articles were part of the propaganda campaign to praise the industrial success of the Soviet state, collective labor as a process, through which the USSR modernized itself, and to demonstrate the success of perekovka, («reforg- ing»), a program of creating a new, «Soviet» man through forced labor and ideolog- ical conditioning [109; 110]. Th e fi rst signifi cant work on the camps in the USSR, devoted to the construction of the White-Sea Baltic Canal, was written at the be- ginning of the 1930s in fulfi llment of an order by the OGPU (the Soviet Secret State Police) and the Communist party [46]. Th e authors of this collective work represented the literary elite of the Soviet Union at that time and included such famous Soviet writers as Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Zoschenko, and Viktor Shklovsky. Th e work, composed by a literary kolkhoz, fo- cused on the labor camp in Karelia, portrayed imprisonment as human, redemp- tive, and curative. Th e characteristic feature of the GULAG stories, presented there, was Manichaean plot, where «struggle between forces of good and evil» was taking place with an optimistic end, (as in all other Socialist Realism texts), informed by the idea of «reforging», implying qualitative change of man into productive and worthy member of a society, taken from Marx's political philosophy. Th ese ac- counts still serve as a historical source for historians and linguists in discussions on the GULAG [97]. From the end of the 1930s any references to the GULAG in the public sphere disap- peared. Th is silence was broken in the 1950s, when due to the circulation of the secretly typed texts, banned in the Soviet Union (Samizdat) the memoirs of the ex-prisoners of the GULAG were introduced to the Soviet public. Th e GULAG Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn [100; 101] along with other published well-known literary memoirs by «prominent» political prisoners, such as Evgenia Ginzburg [42], Varlam Shalamov [116], still serves as the literary canon of writing on the GULAG, providing a «standard» vision and understanding of the phenomenon of the Soviet forced labor camps. Many memoirists explicitly stated their belonging to the tradition, started by Solzhenitsyn. Oft en, even when the lat- er accounts did not share his view of the camps, they started a retrospective dialog with this author. Initially historians of the GULAG in Russia conceived of it as an inherent part of the history of the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime. So the fi rst academic works on the GULAG at the beginning of the 1990s studied it within the context of the NKVD repressive operations, targeted at defi nite groups of the «enemies of the people». Th ese operations included the «dekulakization» campaign of the begin- ╢16╞ ning of the 1930s, the complex repressions of the years 1937—1938 («Th e Great Terror»), and «national operations» of the deportations of entire peoples in order to eliminate the danger from the potential «fi ft h column» in the borderland regions of the USSR [121; 24; 17; 88; 153; 132; 139; 144; 91]. Soon the fi rst publications appeared on the basis of the archival material on the number of the GULAG inmates in diff erent periods which generated lively discus- sions [70; 53; 53; 140; 144]. Further, such studies have explored the connection be- tween the escalation in political repressions and persecutions that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937—1939, changes in the situation inside the camp system, and the number of the persecuted inmates of the GULAG. Later on scholarly attention has been directed towards publications of the documentary collections related to the activity of the central GULAG and the NKVD apparatuses [19] and the com- plex study of the regional camps [21; 73; 78; 119; 28]. Upon the opening of the archives in the fi rst half of the 1990s, new archival docu- ments became available on the special settlements of the GULAG [54. P. 205].* De- spite their diversity, these works can be divided into two principal groups on the basis of the thematic and chronological principles of their research methods. Th e system of the special settlements of the 1930s is oft en studied in the interrelation with the history of the Russian peasantry, especially with the collectivization cam- paign, subsequent «dekulakization» campaign and the re-settlement of the «ku- laks». In a veiled form, the historiography of the «kulak exile» started from the 1960s [98; 57], whereas the end of the 1980s and the 1990s witnessed an infl ux of historical studies on this topic [58; 99; 117; 118; 67; 84; 54; 19]. Th e system of the special settlements of the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1950s has traditionally been viewed within the context of the «ethno-political deportations» [82; 32; 33; 34; 35; 87; 41; 115; 108; 91; 29] or a «Peasant Gulag» [38; 54]. In the 2000s changes in the political climate in Russia resulted in the publica- tion of works that tend to justify the existence of the GULAG, and depict it as an ordinary and even necessary state institution [30]. Similarly to Russian academic studies, Western literature on the camps has also evolved from emphasizing purely repressive function of the GULAG towards the exploration of its economic and social aspects [156; 125; 155; 134; 123; 133; 131]. Many works focused on the spontaneity in functioning of the state apparatus, on the contradictions and frictions between the central and regional authorities, and among the local party offi cials, Soviet repressive apparatus and the common peo- ple. Nowhere else did these contradictions manifested themselves so poignantly as in the GULAG system, and nowhere else did they infl uenced to such an extent human destinies. Development and operations of specifi c camps, and the cen- * In October 1940 the GULAG system of special settlements consisted of 1645 settle- ments and was controlled by 160 regional and 741 district administrations. Settlements housed 258448 families (the overall number of special settlers amounting for 959472 per- sons). By 1 January 1953 the number of the special settlers amounted to 2753356. ╡17╟ ter-periphery dynamics of the GULAG are also well-researched subjects in West- ern historiography [150; 124; 154; 134]. Th e approach of studying the GULAG as a repressive tool of the regime is still the most popular among Russian and Western scholars. It has created a possibility of exploring the connection between the repressive and corrective-labour policies of the Soviet state and between the changes in the numbers and social composition of the GULAG prisoners. Th us, one can trace the ways the NKVD repressive opera- tions infl uenced the situation within the camps and fi nd explanations of the pro- cesses going on there through the prism of the decision making process in the So- viet ruling circles. Th is approach still generates a biased vision of the subject. Many aspects of the GULAG system can not be understood or explained exclusively in the context of the repressive policy. Some historians fail to make a distinction between the concept of «the GULAG» as a penitentiary institution and as a political phenomenon, an em- bodiment of the repressive essence of the regime (an understanding resulting from ex-prisoners' memoirs). More oft en those historians who study the repressive policy in the USSR fall prey to this mistake. Th ey endow the term «GULAG» with a broad- ly descriptive and collective meaning [56]. Th is fallacy frequently leads to false con- clusions. For example, it blurs the fact that the GULAG was not a direct mechanism of political repression, but one of the structural subsections of the NKVD, while the planning and implementation of the repressive operations (arrests, deportations and persecutions) were carried out by other departments of the NKVD. Among studies of the «Great Terror» as such in Soviet Union there are three posi- tions that need correction. First of all, according to the conventional view, recently expressed by Oleg Khlevniyk, the state terror as a method of resolving the prob- lems specifi c to certain periods, during the years 1937 and 1938 was used to replace the old political elite with a new generation of Stalinist careerists and also to purge the country of a potential fi ft h column in case of war. In other words it aimed at the elimination of those suspected of disloyalty and treason [144. P. 330]. Many region- al books of memory, however, that have been published in the recent years, confi rm Alexander Solzhenitsyn's argument that the majority of the victims of the Great Terror were ordinary people accused of political crimes. Secondly, a popular issue of the interconnection between political repressions in the country at the end of the 1930s and the course of the increase of its economic plans has generated certain stereotypes. Some historians of the GULAG, such as Edvard Bacon, claimed that a constant need for workers became especially acute in the second half of the thirties and this factor was one of the main motives behind the purges of the «Great Terror». Th e necessity to fi ll the camps with the labor force in order to fulfi ll the NKVD output production plans encouraged local NKVD offi ces to determine the number of the people to be arrested, executed and sent to the labor camps [125.