Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag

325 Pages·2017·2.107 MB·English

by  Golfo Alexopoulos

The Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes
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ILLNESS AND
INHUMANITY
IN STALIN’S
GULAG
GOLFO ALEXOPOULOS
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, California
New Haven and London
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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton
McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2017 by Yale University and the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr.
University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or
promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. offi ce) or
[email protected] (U.K. offi ce).
Set in Sabon type by Newgen North America.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951586
ISBN 978–0-300–17941-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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To Thomas, Athena, and Sophia with love
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Archives and Language xi
Map of Locations of Forced Labor Camps and Colonies during
the Stalin Years xii
Introduction: Exploiting “Human Raw Material” 1
1. Food: “Whoever Does Not Work, Shall Not Eat” 19
2. Prisoners: “The Contingent” 44
3. Health: “Physical Labor Capability” 62
4. Illness and Mortality: “Lost Labor Days” 85
5. Invalids: “Inferior Workforce” 109
6. Releases: “Unloading the Ballast” 133
7. Power: “We Are Not Doctors but Delousers” 160
8. Selection: “The More (and Less) Valuable Human Element” 183
9. Exploitation: “Labor Utilization” 208
Epilogue: Deaths and Deceptions 232
Notes 249
Index 301
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Acknowledgments
Most of the archival research for this book took place in 2007–2008,
when I was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National
Fellow and the William C. Bark National Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution. During that memorable year in Palo Alto, I worked with the
microfi lm collection of Soviet state and party archives at the Hoover
Institution Library and Archives, spending most of my time on Gulag
records. The remarkable collection made this book possible. I would
like to thank especially Paul Gregory for his support of the project, as
well as Eric Wakin and the Hoover Institution Library and Archives
directors. Over the years, I have benefi ted greatly from conversations
with a brilliant group of scholars at the Hoover Institution’s Workshop
on Authoritarian Regimes, especially Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk,
Mark Kramer, Anne Applebaum, Norman Naimark, and Amir Weiner,
as well as Jörg Baberowski, Evgenia Belova, Leonid Borodkin, John
Dunlop, Michael Ellman, Simon Ertz, Catherine Gousseff, James Hein-
zen, Emily Johnson, Katherine Jolluck, Deborah Kaple, Stephen Kotkin,
Valery Lazarev, Andrei Markevich, David Sadder, Robert Service, and
David Shearer. I am very grateful to Carol Leadenham, Lora Soroka,
David Jacobs, and Linda Bernard of the Hoover Institution Library
and Archives, who facilitated my research in innumerable ways. This
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