Zhanna Popova’s Coerced Labour, Forced Displacement, and the Soviet Gulag, 1880s–1930s poses an ambitious and long-overdue question: what conditions made the Gulag possible? While the question – foundational for understanding the trajectory of the Soviet penal system – harks back to the creation of the Gulag in April 1930 and even earlier, the scholarship has been decidedly impressionistic in this regard. The reasons for the lack of a definitive answer are manifold. First, there was a long Cold War aversion to comparing the Gulag to anything else except Nazi concentration camps, a reflex that effectively stifled the inquiry at its source. Second is the lack of experts able to engage substantively with both imperial and Soviet prisons – specialists in each field abound, but they rarely talk to one another. Third is the formidable challenge itself, since answering it credibly demands command of at least three distinct fields – late imperial punishment, Soviet penal history, and the global history of coercive labour and confinement.
Popova is well-versed in these historiographies. Her bibliography includes an impressive range of cutting-edge, multilingual scholarship – Clare Anderson, Christian De Vito, and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart for recent innovations in global history; Sarah Badcock, Ben Phillips, and others on the empire; and classic interventions by Alan Barenberg, Oleg Khlevniuk, Lynne Viola, Steve Barnes, Jeff Hardy, Wilson Bell, and others on the Gulag. She also undertook substantial archival research in both central and regional repositories, drawing on materials from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St Petersburg, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, and a rich group of Western Siberian archives, including the State Archive of the Novosibirsk Region (GANO), the State Archive of the Tyumen Region (GATO), and the State Archive in Tobolsk (GBUTO).
Popova structures the book as a chronological build-up to the Gulag. Chapter One examines the persistence of exile and halting prison-reform efforts in the late nineteenth century, shaped by Siberian colonization and stalled judicial modernization. Chapter Two traces how social unrest and World War I pressures pushed the empire toward more centralized, exploitative uses of convict labour. Chapter Three juxtaposes WWI POW camps with the improvised revolutionary camps in Western Siberia, treating this brief moment as the real take-off point for mass internment. Chapter Four turns to the 1920s, when political-police camps were only one of several competing penal experiments, many later abandoned. Chapter Five follows the collectivization-era system of special settlements for deported peasants, showing how these settlements fused with forced-labour camps and blurred the line between free and unfree labour across the early Soviet landscape. These chapters are coherent and concise.
The central thesis of the book can be summarized as follows. The Gulag was not a sudden Soviet invention but the cumulative hybrid of long-standing imperial practices, wartime improvisations, and early Bolshevik experiments that gradually fused over several decades. Popova demonstrates that exile, population removal, and compulsory labour had been central instruments of Russian governance since the nineteenth century, serving not only punitive purposes but also colonization, resource extraction, and the management of “unruly” or semi-mobile populations. These traditions then intertwined with the enormous prisoner-of-war camp system of World War I, the improvised Civil War concentration sites, and the security police’s political camps of the 1920s, creating a dense repertoire of coercive techniques well before Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. By tracing these overlapping trajectories – especially in Western Siberia – she highlights the role of regional practice, administrative improvisation, and geographic constraints, which, in her reading, mattered just as much as ideology. Ultimately, the Gulag emerged when collectivization-era deportations and special settlements were combined with forced-labour camps, consolidating diverse antecedents into a single, sprawling repressive system.
Following the recent “Soviet modernity turn”, Popova’s key argument rests on a sensible premise: the Gulag did not appear in a vacuum. In this, she makes a move against Cold War exceptionalism that has long plagued the field of penal history, where any attempt to compare the Gulag to anything else putatively implied implicit or explicit exculpation. This hostility to comparison stifled the comparative and transnational history of the Gulag; hence Popova’s intervention is much needed. For the conceptual ambition behind this project alone, the monograph deserves to be highly commended.
In pursuing this line of argument, Popova engages with a substantial body of important recent scholarship that seeks to identify the antecedents and precursors of Soviet terror in late imperial governance or the trans-imperial Western “archive of statecraft” – above all the works of David Hoffmann, Daniel Beer, Peter Holquist, and Eric Lohr. This literature suggests that the USSR adopted and repurposed a repertoire of “colonial” and “modern” techniques – internment, mass deportations, population sorting – already visible in Western imperial states. From this vantage point, the Gulag appears less as an isolated anomaly and more as a local variant within a broader, global pattern of Euro-modern state-building and coercive social engineering.
Much of this newer literature emerged as an understandable reaction against the exceptionalist taboos of the pre-1991 totalitarian school and, in its effort to de-exceptionalize the Soviet penal system, sometimes overstates its case. Whereas traditionalist scholarship insisted on the system’s incomparability and radical dissimilarity from Western prisons – thereby stifling comparison as a form of trivialization – this newer wave tends to emphasize putative similarities, “family resemblances”, or shared roots. While comparisons beyond the usual suspects (e.g., the Nazi camps) are, in principle, welcome and overdue, without hard evidence of practices or ideas transfer – and resting mainly on “structural similarities” – there is a risk of underestimating the Gulag’s highly idiosyncratic features or positing continuities where none are empirically verifiable.
A recurring difficulty in Popova’s otherwise stimulating analysis is that several chapters would benefit from clearer differentiation between analogy (which requires no evidence of transmission), influence (which requires empirical demonstration of borrowing), and causation (which demands something close to a smoking gun). At moments, the narrative conveys a greater sense of continuity than the documentation fully supports. A more explicit definition of what, in her framework, counts as a “similarity”, a “continuity”, or a “rupture” – whether institutional, conceptual, or merely visual – would sharpen the analytical stakes and help distinguish superficial resemblance from genuine genealogical transmission. In some cases, Popova is on firm empirical ground – indeed, the vast majority of late imperial prisons were repurposed by the Soviets, so material infrastructure, at least in part, was directly inherited. Certain doctrinal concepts, such as the Stalinist revival of katorga, also represent persuasive cases of continuity. However, not all claims appear equally supported.
Chapter Three, framed as “Blueprints for the Gulag?”, encourages the reader to see genealogical links between World War I POW camps or “revolutionary concentration camps” and later Soviet institutions, even though the chapter itself stresses that these earlier formations were improvised wartime responses rather than deliberate models adopted by the OGPU. Popova's use of an “ideal type” of camp – “regular lines of barracks surrounded by barbed wire” – may also give visual resemblance more explanatory weight than it can bear. The global comparative frame in the same chapter applies the term “concentration camp” to institutions with radically different aims, scale, and lineages – from the Boer War and German colonial internment to World War I POW camps – potentially flattening formations that her own sources show were shaped by highly specific local conditions. The Gulag, for example, had little to do with Civil War-era camps or any extra-judicial “state of exception”. It replaced a very unjust but nonetheless penal system (albeit with a large administrative-extra-legal component) and served different purposes; it was, in several respects, closer to transportation to Australia or New Caledonia than to POW camps or colonial internment sites.
Claims of imperial-to-Soviet influence would also benefit from further evidence of institutional transmission – for instance, by tracing the biographies of officials in the imperial Main Prison Administration who might have carried institutional memory across the 1917 divide. Global influences could likewise be demonstrated if, say, Matvei Berman, the Gulag’s first director, or other secret-police officials involved in shaping the early system had read or circulated material about colonial camps. Demonstrable continuity of personnel or concepts would make arguments about “continuity” more robust; without such empirical anchoring, high-level resemblance risks sliding into post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning (“later, therefore because of it”).
Another limitation – shared with much of the “modernity” and continuity literature – is the relative under-examination of scale. The book traces institutional lineages and conceptual affinities with care, but it is less clear on why the Soviet Gulag became so enormous – why it incarcerated and caused premature death on orders of magnitude far beyond anything in late imperial Russia. Many modern empires used statistics, colonization, resource extraction, mass POW labour in World War I, technocratic social engineering, and brutal penal systems, but almost none produced an analogue of the Gulag, with its tens of millions of prisoners and millions of deaths between 1930 and 1953. Other causal factors behind this dramatic escalation in state coercion may need to be sought beyond a generic “version of modernity”.
Of course, tracing ruptures and continuities is inherently difficult, especially across such heterogeneous institutional landscapes. One additional complication arises from the conceptual framework inherited from the “modernity” literature: if everything from welfare to genocide and concentration camps is traced to “modernity”, the term becomes so elastic that it explains everything and nothing, and any divergence is easily reabsorbed as merely another “variant” of the same Euro-modern formation.
To her credit, Popova is, for the most part, remarkably successful in navigating this challenge, avoiding the more deterministic or teleological excesses of that literature even as she works within some of its parameters. The above reservations should therefore be read not as diminishing the significance of her contribution but as suggestions for further sharpening an already ambitious analytical framework. They do not detract from the meticulously researched and judicious scholarship on display throughout the book, which deserves to be read – and read closely – by all scholars of penality and carceral history.
