From prison camp to mining town: The Gulag and its legacy in Vorkuta, 1938--1965

Located just above the Arctic Circle, Vorkuta is remembered as one of the most remote and deadliest parts of the Soviet Gulag. From the 1930s until the end of the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of prisoners worked there in coal mines, many serving twenty-five year sentences as the country's most dangerous prisoners. At the same time, Vorkuta was a growing Soviet industrial city, with a population of nearly 200,000 by 1965. With time, Vorkuta came to embody both the horrors of Stalinism and the Soviet Union's stunning achievements in settling the far north.; This dissertation examines the history of both camp and city from 1938-65. It explores a series of important questions about the nature of the Soviet system of forced labor and Soviet society over three decades. What was the relationship between Soviet prison camps and the communities in which they were embedded? How did prisoners and non-prisoners interact in various settings? How did social status and privilege operate in the overlapping worlds of camp and city? How did former prisoners readapt to civilian life after they were released from the camps? In posing such questions, this work seeks to redefine historians' understanding of the relationship between the Gulag and Soviet society under Stalin and Khrushchev.; This dissertation argues that the Gulag was not strictly separated from the rest of Soviet society. It shows that the borders between the camp complex and the city of Vorkuta were porous, often ill-defined, and continuously renegotiated. People, goods, and information constantly flowed back and forth across the seemingly impregnable border of the camp. This constitutes a profound challenge to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's metaphor of the Gulag as an archipelago. This dissertation also argues that despite discrimination against former prisoners, those who remained in Vorkuta had relatively good prospects for reentering civilian life. Social networks and informal economic practices often undermined official policies of discrimination and allowed ex-prisoners to reestablish themselves outside the camp.