The Gulag

Barenberg's The Gulag: A very short introduction is masterful in its concise, engaging distillation of the research that has shaped the field of Gulag studies in recent years. He conjures up a bleak landscape inhabited primarily by peasants convicted of petty crimes, locked in a daily quest to find food. Above all else Gulag else his book stresses hybridity, not only in terms of the multiple ambitions behind the creation of the Gulag (terror, punishment, labour exploitation, "reforging"), but also in the absence of a centralized authority, which meant that conditions depended greatly on the local administrators.

Auteur
Alan Barenberg is Buena Vista Foundation Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University. His publications include Rethinking the Gulag: Sources, Approaches, Identities (co-edited with Emily D. Johnson) and Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta.

Texte du rabat

A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century. It combined a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime. More than 25 million people passed through the Gulag from its creation in 1930 to its dismantling in the 1950s.

By presenting both the everyday experiences of ordinary prisoners and the overall political and economic background of the system, The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction offers a succinct and comprehensive study of the Gulag and its legacy in the former USSR.