Khrushchev's Gulag: The evolution of punishment in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, 1953--1964

The present dissertation explores the transformation of the Soviet penal system from 1953 to 1964. Whereas much has been written about the infamous Stalinist Gulag, few have addressed the question of how incarceration in the post-Stalin era was re-imagined and restructured. Beyond filling an obvious historiographical void, this dissertation speaks to important issues such as the nature of de-Stalinization, the dilemmas experienced by post-mass incarceration societies, and the challenges faced by the Soviet propaganda machine as it presented a more humane face to the outside world in the aftermath of Stalin's bloody reign.;The primary contention of this work is that the post-Stalin leadership and Nikita Khrushchev in particular engaged in a serious reforming effort bent on transforming the Soviet Gulag in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Mass incarceration and violence as governing principles were rejected, replaced by an emphasis on "socialist legality" and "socialist humaneness." Millions of inmates were released and sentences overall became much shorter. Moreover, a fairly robust oversight network was created to prevent the illegalities of the past to creep back into prisons and corrective-labor facilities of the Soviet Union. These reforms proved to be a durable legacy of the Khrushchev era.;The more qualitative aspects of post-Stalin penal reform, however, had a mixed result. Khrushchev condemned the economic orientation of the Stalinist Gulag, stressing re-education as the primary function of its corrective-labor camps and colonies. This commitment was apparently sincere, persisting until 1959, and it resulted in marked improvements to the living and working conditions of prisoners. Pressure on Gulag officials to meet production plan targets, however, did not diminish; moreover, re-education proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state, and it lacked strong institutional backing at the central decision-making level. In fact, a broad coalition of interests that rejected the amelioration of conditions for inmates coalesced in the late 1950s, resulting in the rollback of certain of the reforms of the mid-1950s. Thus, whereas the size and structure of the Gulag were permanently altered under Khrushchev, the orientation of penal operations underwent successive waves of reform and counter-reform.