Immediately following the Russian Civil War, new Soviet authorities sought to resolve a series of conflicts involving the nomadic communities living along the north and eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. To the north, beyond the Ural River, nomads competed with Russian farmers for pasturage. Further south, around the Garabogazkol Lagoon, nomads from different tribes were engaged in a cycle of violence and recrimination. Communist party members, working alongside local elites, interpreted all these conflicts as disagreements between nations and proffered solutions congruent with this analysis. Peace agreements were written and signed, borders drawn, and national territorial jurisdictions extended and defended. In both areas conflict was not resolved and nomadic hardship was in fact exacerbated. The Caspian Disputes and their incomplete resolution contain lessons on the Soviet state's treatment of two minorities: non‐Russian nationalities and nomads. For the former, we see the limited utility of a European conception of nationalism applied to Soviet Central Asia. For the latter, we see what influenced and complicated the relationship between nomad and state before the collectivization campaign endowed that relationship with a brutal simplicity. This represents a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of how Soviet power treated nomads from its very inception.

The 1930s saw a dramatic escalation in the size and scope of the Soviet Union's system of penal labour camps, the Gulag. Through analyses of memoir and other sources, the experiences of the Gulag's prisoners at this time have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly investigation. Yet the guards who watched over these prisoners have received considerably less attention.Newspapers printed for the VOKhR guards in the mid-1930s offer some information on their readers' every day duties and their status, both inside the Gulag and as citizens of the USSR. Publications taken from one particularly large camp responsible for the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway (BAMlag) depict guards as self-disciplined, industrious soldiers engaged in a war for economic and social development. But the specific dynamics and changing circumstances of the Soviet penal system at this time created an unusual contrast between newspapers printed for the guards and those printed for the prisoners of BAMlag. While the criticism levelled at prisoners by their own newspaper was often mitigated by a rehabilitative discourse, the guards were judged as full members of Soviet society, often harshly. However, the precise implications of this were rendered ambiguous by the indeterminate position of the Gulag itself at this point in Soviet history.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract