Some years ago a Moscow taxi driver told me about his experience in a Gulag camp. At one point, the camp was mobilized to quickly build a bridge. Everyone worked together including political and non-political inmates, and neighborhood contract workers both free and unfree. Even the camp guards laid down their guns and worked alongside the prisoners they were guarding. The bridge, completed with the rapid but careless inefficiency of Soviet mobilizations, collapsed a few days after the first train crossed it.

I was reminded of this as I read Wilson Bell's excellent study of the Gulag system in western Siberia during World War II, where he writes that “prisoners at times worked alongside non-prisoners” (39). Everything, including apparent hierarchies, took second place to production targets.

One of the discussions occasioned by recent expanded access to archival materials on the Stalin-era Gulag involves definitions of free vs. unfree labor. We now know that there was a continuum of statuses ranging from hard camps to rural and urban labor colonies to exiled peasant “special settlements” to non-custodial sentences, fines, labor restrictions, or enforced residence permissions. Some have argued that the entire country was one big prison insofar as everyone faced some kind of legal restriction: under Stalin, everyone was punished. One Moscow based historian even uses Gulag incarceration as a simplified, if novel, organizing principle by dividing the entire Soviet population into Gulag and Non-Gulag.

There are other points of view. Were the Gulag camps designed to weaken and kill inmates, like the Nazi camps? Were they parts of a modern drive to isolate and “weed out” undesirable elements? Or was the motive strictly economic, a way to mobilize mass unfree labor in the cause of industrialization?

Although Bell touches on and evaluates various theories and arguments, his book is a close, source-based archival study of what happened in practice, on the ground. Bell is less interested in grand theorizing about the purpose of the Gulag. His focus is empirical and specifically about one regional Gulag system during wartime, and he is careful to limit his conclusions to that case. More importantly, he argues that what happened on the ground often had little to do with what Moscow intended or even ordered.

Those who work in Soviet archives will recognize Bell's description of a highly bureaucratic system with detailed rules and regulations but in which “informal practices such as black markets, data falsifications, and what has been called ‘an economy of favours’ flourished” (14). Even though in 1939 the Politburo ordered that all prisoners had to serve out their sentences with no early releases, local authorities recognized the need for positive incentives, defied Moscow and continued early releases. Similarly, “the practice of placing so-called counter-revolutionaries in key camp economic positions, and giving them considerable privileges, was common. . .and went against regulations” (55). Bell's meticulous research shows that Stalinism attempted to create a well-ordered rational system, but instead created one where everyone was breaking some type of rule or regulation.

Bell argues that camp administrators understood their task not as punishment, rehabilitation, weeding out or starving and killing, but rather as meeting military production targets. The Gulag was “not particularly about ideological purity or the isolation of unwanted individuals, but was focused on the total mobilization of all human and material resources for victory, no matter the cost in lives” (4). The Gulag's sacrifice of human health and life made a difference to the war effort, but “it is clear that resources could have been used more efficiently” (151).

Proving his case with a mass of statistics and examples, Bell disposes of several theories. Limited resources and production imperatives made the camps places of horrible mass death, but weakening or killing the desperately needed workforce was never a goal. Inmates were also not completely isolated; boundaries between them and society were porous. “There was room for considerable interaction and overlap between prisoners and non-prisoners” (69). The Gulag was not Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's archipelago, separated from the mainland of Soviet society.

Wilson Bell's fine book is a good example of careful empirical research. He went where his sources took him and lets readers make up their own minds rather than prosecuting an a priori theoretical case.