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The Soviet Gulag

History and Memory
Hardy, Jeffrey S.
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 144 blz., paperback, 2024, ISBN 9781350128187

'In this compact introduction to a sprawling topic, Jeffrey S. Hardy gives readers a valuable summary of current scholarship on the Soviet forced-labour camp system, and explains how Russians remember it today. Its reflective and deep knowledge about this tragic feature of the Soviet system will inform a wide readership about the Gulag and its consequences' - Dan Healey, Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford, UK

A vivid account of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's infamous penalty 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 its conception, during the various penal experiments of the 1920s, its expansion, during the campaigns against perceived enemies of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and its decline in the years proceeding Stalin's death, Jeffrey S. Hardy explores how many facets of Gulag life endured until (and beyond) 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, this book also examines how politicians, non-governmental organizations and Gulag survivors have debated how, or even if, to commemorate the victims of the Gulag in the decades since 1991. Hardy reveals that despite numerous monuments and museum displays emerging out of these discussions, the Gulag's legacy remains hotly contested in Russia today.

Jeffrey S. Hardy is Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University, USA. He is the author of The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Krushchev's Soviet Union, 1953-1964 (2016).
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