A vivid account of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s infamous penal system, this book charts how Bolshevik visions of a humane alternative to Tsarist exile and Western penitentiaries became a chaotic and violent system of mass incarceration that bore a tragic human toll. As the first concise history in the English language, The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory provides an illuminating account of the Gulag from 1917, through to the end of the Soviet Union and the contested memory of the Gulag that persists today. Beginning with their conception, during the various penal experiments of the 1920s, their expansion, during the campaigns against perceived enemies of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and their decline in the years proceeding Stalin’s death, Jeffrey S. Hardy explores how many facets of Gulag life endured right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He addresses both the intentions of administrators and the experience of inmates, as well as covering the main scholarly debates surrounding these issues, Crucially, the book also examines the post-Soviet era. You discover how politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and Gulag survivors have debated how or even if to commemorate the victims of the Gulag. Hardy reveals that despite numerous monuments and museum displays emerging out of these discussions, the Gulag’s legacy remains hotly contested in Russia today

This interdisciplinary collection explores the complex ways motherhood is experienced by studying the concrete and imaginary spaces mothers inhabit. The authors examine locations for birth, negotiations of domesticity, institutional framings of the mother's world, and maternal metaphors in art and popular culture. Using conceptions of space as a common lens, these essays articulate the interplay between motherhood as a cultural construction and motherhood as a lived experience. The collection as a whole reveals how the spaces of motherhood are varied, changing, and politically charged.

This edited volume presents new research on Russian-Asian connections by historians, art historians, literary scholars, and linguists. Of particular interest are imagined communities, social networks, and the legacy of colonialism in this important arena of global exchanges within the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. Individual chapters investigate how Russians imagined Asia and its inhabitants, how these different populations interacted across political and cultural divides, and how people in Siberia, China, and other parts of Asia reacted to Russian imperialism, both in its formal and informal manifestations. A key strength of this volume is its interdisciplinary approach to the topic, challenging readers to synthesize multiple analytical lenses to better understand the multivalent connections binding Russia and Asia together.

This edited volume presents new research on Russian-Asian connections by historians, art historians, literary scholars, and linguists. Of particular interest are imagined communities, social networks, and the legacy of colonialism in this important arena of global exchanges within the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. Individual chapters investigate how Russians imagined Asia and its inhabitants, how these different populations interacted across political and cultural divides, and how people in Siberia, China, and other parts of Asia reacted to Russian imperialism, both in its formal and informal manifestations. A key strength of this volume is its interdisciplinary approach to the topic, challenging readers to synthesize multiple analytical lenses to better understand the multivalent connections binding Russia and Asia together.

A vivid account of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s infamous penal system, this book charts how Bolshevik visions of a humane alternative to Tsarist exile and Western penitentiaries became a chaotic and violent system of mass incarceration that bore a tragic human toll. As the first concise history in the English language, The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory provides an illuminating account of the Gulag from 1917, through to the end of the Soviet Union and the contested memory of the Gulag that persists today. Beginning with their conception, during the various penal experiments of the 1920s, their expansion, during the campaigns against perceived enemies of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and their decline in the years proceeding Stalin’s death, Jeffrey S. Hardy explores how many facets of Gulag life endured right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He addresses both the intentions of administrators and the experience of inmates, as well as covering the main scholarly debates surrounding these issues, Crucially, the book also examines the post-Soviet era. You discover how politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and Gulag survivors have debated how or even if to commemorate the victims of the Gulag. Hardy reveals that despite numerous monuments and museum displays emerging out of these discussions, the Gulag’s legacy remains hotly contested in Russia today

In The Gulag after Stalin, Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Reeducation proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan "The camp is not a resort" and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counterreform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.