Steven Barnes, 17 Feb

For this session, we will consider “Working in Alzhir,” a chapter from Steve Barnes’s book-in-progress, Gulag Wives: Women, Family, and Survival in Stalin’s Terror. The chapter explores how a group of women prisoners planned, constructed, and operated a large garment factory in a newly-formed Gulag camp division located outside of Akmolinsk (today called Astana), Kazakhstan.

Steven A. Barnes is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. His first book, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, published by Princeton University Press in 2011, was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association and the Baker-Burton Award from the European Section of the Southern Historical Association for best first book in European history. It attempts a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag in Soviet society through a local history of Gulag institutions in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. His current project, Gulag Wives: Women, Family, and Survival in Stalin’s Terror, offers a more focused study of a single Karlag camp subdivision that housed so-called “wives of traitors to the motherland,” women arrested merely for the fact that their husbands had become victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. He was the project historian for the online Gulag history web exhibit found at Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives and is the founder and a co-blogger at the Russian History Blog.