C ynthia A. R uder . Building Stalinism

The Gulag, the notorious Soviet forced labor camp system, comprised thousands of locales in every part of the Soviet Union. Each Gulag camp had its own particularities according to its prisoner population, geography, climate, economic function, and so forth. Scholars of the Gulag have often sought out certain locales to typify or symbolize the whole system. Whether the frigid gold-bearing Kolyma, the too-shallow-to-be-useful White Sea Canal, the pointless and abandoned “Dead Road” railroad, or the dying and still costly far-north arctic city of Vorkuta, these locales are chosen as symbolic of the Gulag for their geographic remoteness, climatic extremes, and/or economic irrationality. Yet in Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space, Cynthia Ruder recenters our conceptions of the Gulag on Moscow and its environs, reminding us that the Gulag was anything but peripheral in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Completed by prisoners of Dmitlag, the largest forced...

Operating system · Space (punctuation) · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies