Dr Dan Healey (History, University of Swansea)
Physicians, Disease and the Research Culture of Stalin's Gulag 1930-1960
The Stalinist Gulag harboured centres for research, but little is known
about this aspect of the vast network of places of confinement that
stretched across the Soviet Union. The principle vehicle for Gulag
research, the sharashka or research institute behind barbed wire, was
made famous in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel The First Circle.
Solzhenitsyn’s novel advances a picture of a research culture that is
debased in its research objectives by Stalinism and distorted in its
practices by informants and the ever-present threat of violence.
As part of a larger project on the history of medicine in the Gulag, I
have assembled a significant body of archival evidence that reveals the
existence of a research culture beyond the sharashka in many Gulag
outposts. Much of this research had a medical focus, and was motivated
by the determination of some physicians (prisoners and the “freely
hired”), and camp administrators, to improve the health of camp inmates
and the population servicing the camps. Research also sought to open up
resources in previously unexplored regions to exploitation (for
example, to use radioactive mineral waters for therapeutic purposes)
and to enable European Russians to adapt to arctic conditions (by,
e.g., finding locally sourced supplies of essential vitamins). Whether
in expeditions funded by the central Gulag authorities, in individually
conducted studies of patient-cohorts presenting specific diseases, or
in formally constituted “institutes” (such as in Noril’sk), medical
research in the Gulag offers a historical case study of the
construction of research cultures in forbidding and extreme
circumstances.
This proposal will investigate the phenomenon of Gulag medical research
to explore some of the themes interrogated by CRASSH’s “Future
University” programme. The ways in which knowledge was structured by
the Gulag as commissioning bureaucracy, and the degree to which a
research brief might “escape” from its sponsor’s control will be
explored. The investigation will examine the migration of ideas,
investigators, and research subjects around the camp system, and the
circulation of scientific knowledge inside the Gulag via conferences,
journal subscriptions and professional development courses. By
examining the ethics of medical research in this extreme context the
project will weigh the degree to which comparisons with Nazi science
and medicine are appropriate and illuminating. The contemporary
relevance of Gulag research for the founding of research cultures in
the new settlements of the camp system – some are now sizeable
university towns – will also be evaluated.
The outcome of this investigation will be an article about the Gulag’s
research culture, which will form part of my book-length project
exploring the history of medical care in the Stalinist forced-labour
camp system.
