The GULAG Press, containing "news" bulletins, posters, literary journals, albums and booklets, has been neglected by historians of the GULAG camp system until now. This has been caused, to a large extent, by the simple fact that GULAG Press publications have never been completely preserved. The Nauchnaia biblioteka Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Scientific Library of the State Archive of the Russian Federation) in Moscow has the most comprehensive collection.
The collection contains all the types of publications from the GULAG Press. Some of them are quite unique, in that only a few copies were ever issued. For years this collection was not processed, and did not enter the scholarly circulation since it was assigned to the 'secret' documents category with restricted access.
This complete collection is now available on microfiche from IDCPublishers.
At the high point of Stalinist terror, the GULAG was a system of thousands of camps and clusters of camps located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North. The soviet economy was dependent on forced labour to a large degree. Prisoners worked in the mines, dug canals and lumbered the forested North.
Publishing within penitentiary institutions has a long tradition in Russia. The idea behind it was that editorial participation of the inmates would stimulate their re-education. During the twenties the internally published prison journal was quite a familiar phenomenon in young Soviet Russia. The journals circulated outside the prisons as well. Paid subscriptions and commercial advertisements were eagerly accepted. The foundation of the GULAG Press towards 1930 made an abrupt end to this liberal approach. From that time onward, all publications within penitentiary institutions came under strict centralized supervision, the aim of re-education was subverted to that of increased labour productivity, and an explicit ban was put on circulation outside the camps.
Although all publications served primarily as propaganda instruments aimed at inciting the inmates to work ever harder, this does not imply that all that is printed in the GULAG Press is unreliable or false as a consequence. In applying traditional, professional source criticism, it is possible to differentiate, in many cases, between propaganda and reliable information.
- The Gulag Press, 1920-1937 : guide to the microform collection - IISG call number: BIB R 174
- The Gulag Press, 1920-1937 : the microform collection - IISH call number: Microfiche 5807