Alan Barenberg: Gulag Town, Company Town. Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014. XVI, 331 S., 1 Kte., Abb., Tab.. = The Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War. ISBN: 978-0-300-17944-6

Alan Barenberg: Gulag Town, Company Town. Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014. XVI, 331 S., 1 Kte., Abb., Tab.. = The Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War. ISBN: 978-0-300-17944-6.

The labor camp system that came to full maturity in the Stalin era is drawing increasing attention from scholars. Historians from several countries have done much to embellish and provide nuance to the initial interpretation Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered in his three-volume study first published more than forty years ago. Some works have focused on particular networks of camps, such as those in Kolyma, while others have devoted themselves to particular episodes, such as the wholesale downsizing of the system under Nikita Khrushchev. What is revealed again and again is that, like so much throughout Russia’s history (as Nikolai Gogol was among the first to remind us), the GULag was not quite what it appeared to be at first glance. That is to say, the system cannot accurately be described simplistically. Rather it was filled with complexities.

Alan Barenberg’s history of Vorkuta during its formative years fits fully into the interpretive view that the world of the labor camps must be appreciated for its complexities. The newly-discovered coalfields on the lower watershed of the Pechora river that came to be known as Vorkuta were mined initially by prison labor, with the first camps established in 1931. The complex’s importance as a source of energy was underlined a decade later as much of the Soviet Union’s coal-producing capacity fell under German occupation. Vorkuta assumed particular importance as the major provider of coal for besieged Leningrad. At the height of this crisis, as Barenberg relates, the camp’s management appealed to Moscow for and was granted status as a city, so that from 1943 Vorkuta was both a prison camp complex and a new Soviet town. Mikhail Mitrofanovich Mal’tsev ran both with an iron hand, although upon closer examination both were characterized by a fairly sophisticated system of patronage-clientage.

The dual status of labor camp and city complicated issues of management of both resources and people but also created interstitial possibilities for eking out an existence for prisoners and ex-prisoners as well as their families, who in many cases came to Vorkuta to live even while one of their members remained a convict.

Vorkuta was not just any camp. Located above the Arctic Circle in the tundra zone, it was also the site of two of the best-known rebellions by prisoners in the history of the GULag, one in the early stages of the Great Patriotic War (which started on June 22, 1941, not June 21, as per pp. 43 and 45) and the other several months after Stalin’s death in 1953. While Barenberg pays each rebellion its due, their treatment by no means dominates the book.

During the war years the camp complex experienced its highest death rates, to a great extent because of endemic shortage of foodstuffs experienced by most of the country. Furthermore, the harshness of the local climate made it almost impossible to supplement the official supply system with locally-produced food. Death rates declined with post-war recovery, especially after 1947.

After the war the ethnic composition of the camp changed dramatically with a sharp increase in the number of prisoners from western parts of the USSR, notably the Baltic states and western Ukraine. Eastern Europeans, especially Poles, and a smattering of Chinese and Korean prisoners added to the ethnic mix. Throughout the Stalin era the camp complex experienced considerable turnover as many prisoners were released even as fresh ones replaced them. In Appendix A, Barenberg provides tabular information on the demographics of the prisoner population covering most of the 1940s and 1950s. Tables also document the shifts in the distribution of crimes of which prisoners were convicted from the late 1930s through the 1950s.

If “Gulag town” is more descriptive of the first half of the book, “company town” applies appropriately to the second. Stalin’s death serves as divider. Barenberg discusses the reforms introduced at this time by which administrative responsibility was divided among as many as three ministries. Since 1938 a single entity had been responsible for both industrial production and camp management. Associated with the name of Lavrentii Beriia, the reforms only complicated matters for those living and working in Vorkuta. Those reforms, rather than the amnesties of 1953 (from which most Vorkuta prisoners were exempted by the nature of the crimes of which they had been convicted), bore greatest responsibility for the prisoner strikes of the summer of 1953. The sharp reduction in the size of the labor camp and the increase in the amount of free labor in the city shifted the balance. If the company town was made up significantly of released prisoners, it also drew from the aggressive policy to encourage in-migration of free, wage labor. Ironically, the former prisoners were preferred as workers not only because of their greater expertise but also because they were less likely to leave abruptly.

Vorkuta thrived as a city as long as veins of coal held out, the population rising to just over 200.000 in the late 1960s. Provisioning a city that far north remained difficult. Introduction of reinforced precast concrete structures instead of scarce wood eased one problem. When coal seams began to be worked out in the 1980s, however, the city began a slow decline. The Gorbachev and Yeltsin years saw efforts to memorialize the suffering of the Gulag inmates. Monuments were erected, mote notably in memory of Polish and Latvian prisoners. There is even a small museum.

What is most impressive about Barenberg’s study is the compelling evidence that even in the camps the conditions of life could be negotiated to an extent. Some prisoners could build a life for themselves partly outside the perimeter. As he concludes, the case of Vorkuta reveals “the degree to which the Gulag was entwined with Soviet society and Soviet history” (p. 250).

George E. Munro, Richmond, Virginia