Zhanna Popova’s Coerced Labour is an important contribution to the study of the origins of the Stalinist Gulag. The book is an attempt, as she notes, to address the question, “What made the Gulag possible?” (194). She thus begins her study by looking at changes in penal practices, debates, and the use of exile in the late-tsarist period, taking seriously the idea that the Gulag’s origins can be partially located in the pre-Soviet and revolutionary periods.

Popova does not examine the Gulag itself in much detail. The last chapter of the book is on the 1930s and focuses on the special settlements rather than on the Gulag’s camps. Popova argues persuasively that exile, prisons, and forced labor should be seen as interrelated in the Russian and Soviet contexts, yet the emphasis on the settlements for the 1930s is somewhat surprising, given the book’s title. The epilogue then gives an overview of the Gulag’s Stalin-era history. Most of the book is on the decades before Stalin’s rise to power.

While she ultimately views the Stalin-era Gulag as a significant break from past practices, what emerges from her research is a system that developed in an ad hoc manner, and retained influences going back to the tsarist era, World War I, and the Russian Civil War. As she writes in her epilogue, “while the Stalin-era transformations of the system as a whole marked a clear break with earlier policies, continuities with the imperial legacy remained discernible” (193). Indeed, there is some tension in her break/continuity discussion. She writes that “Soviet authorities built, in very practical terms, upon the imperial heritage of repression” (10). While this is especially true of the 1920s, perhaps the break is not always so clear.

Popova rightly points out that recent scholarship has mostly ignored the question of the Gulag’s origins and certainly has not rigorously examined pre-revolutionary precedents as relevant to those origins. As such, the book is an important contribution. She is also attentive to criminology, law, history and politics, and is one of only a few scholars to treat exile, forced displacements, and penal policy together, for both the late-imperial and early Soviet periods. The book is thus a multifaceted examination of a heterogeneous, evolving set of institutions.

While much of the discussion concerns high-level policy, Popova also examines on-the-ground operations, using cases in western Siberia as a frequent reference. For instance, she looks closely at Tyumin and Tobolsk in the late-imperial period. Western Siberian examples are touch points at various points in the book, although they appear mostly in the chapter on the period from 1914–23, in which she argues that western Siberia “played a key role in the penal architecture of the Russian empire” (99). For the Soviet period, there is brief discussion of Siblag (a Stalin-era camp in the region), a more developed elaboration of 1930s exile in the area, and a comparative section (“Ruptures and continuities in the deportations to Western Siberia,” 176–82). Popova thus highlights the need to balance a study of central policies and ideas with local operations.

Although Popova focuses on the Russian and Soviet contexts, she notes key west European influences on Russian penal policy and discussions. For example, she highlights the importance of French penal practices and theories on the thinking of Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi, head of the St. Petersburg prison in the late 1860s and later director of the empire’s Main Prison Administration (51), and the reliance on west European examples for attempts to reform the infamous Katorga exile system in the early twentieth century (82–83). At other times, more comparison might have been useful. For example, when discussing the special settlements, Popova notes that Soviet authorities had a “narrow and exploitative” (179) view of colonization (in this case, forced colonization), seeing it as a way to extract natural resources in underpopulated areas. Without defending the Soviet practice, one could argue that all colonization is by nature exploitative, and a more developed comparison might have highlighted how Popova views this Stalin-era institution differently from other European colonial examples.

The strength of the book is its emphasis on the ad hoc development of Soviet repressive institutions, in which many seemingly new precedents carried with them practices and ideas from the late imperial period or the period of war, revolution, and civil war. Popova’s understanding of the Gulag as linked to myriad penal, exile, and forced labor practices in the late-imperial and earl-Soviet periods also underscores the need to understand the complexity of the Stalinist camp system, situated within the broader Russian and Soviet contexts. Readers interested in repressive institutions and the continuities and breaks of the revolutionary era will benefit from Popova’s multifaceted, well researched, and thought-provoking approach.