The Gulag after Stalin Jeffrey S . Hardy [ 2016 ]
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In “ The Gulag after Stalin ”, Jeffrey S . Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin ' s death . Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens . Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov , a Khrushchev appointee , this drive to change the Gulag into a " progressive " system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education , vocational training , leniency , sport , labor , cultural programs , and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective .
The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles . Reeducation proved difficult to quantify , a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state . The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms . And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals . In the late 1950s , they joined with a coalition of party officials , criminologists , procurators , newspaper reporters , and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “ The camp is not a resort ” and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates . By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system , the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s , and the ensuing counterreform movement . This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union .
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