| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, February 3, 2011 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
The Stalinist Gulag camps fostered research, but little is known about this aspect of life in places of confinement. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel The First Circle made one vehicle for research in the Gulag, the sharashka or research institute behind barbed wire famous. The novel portrays a research culture debased by Stalinism and distorted by informants and violence.
Archival evidence reveals a research culture beyond the sharashka in many Gulag outposts in remote regions of the Soviet Far North and East. The need to preserve prisoners’ “labour capacity” for economic purposes motivated medical research into curative waters, vitamin sources and disease patterns. In this paper I examine the institutional context of Gulag medicine and the ideas and people shaping this research, and then explore two major areas of investigation: pellagra (vitamin B² deficiency) treatment and “labour therapy.” The knowledge created by Gulag inmates and free physicians in clinics and laboratories seldom escaped the Gulag, but doing research became part of Gulag routines. Medical research in the Soviet camps significantly distinguished them from the Nazi analogues to which they are so often compared.
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