Recent Writing on Stalin's Gulag : An Overview

Abstract

This is a survey of the most important publications, in Russia and the West, on the Soviet penal system under Stalin, since certain archival data became available to scholars from 1988 onwards. Various data on death sentences and the size of the convict population, compiled by the security authorities since 1953, and the lacunae in them, are assessed. The system was inherently arbitrary, unjust and cruel. The Gulag was an essential buttress of the totalitarian order, designed « to destroy people on a mass scale », not merely a device to boost output on the cheap. Finally the question is raised whether these crimes can be atoned for morally or dealt with judicially, and the writings of ex-Soviet and Western « revisionist » historians are appraised.