"The Gulag as a Worker-Discipline Device"

Can the 'efficiency wage' model help to explain the brutality of Stalin’s prison camps?:

Punishment without crime? The Gulag as a worker-discipline device, by Marcus Miller and Jennifer Smith, Vox EU: In the 1930s, when Western economies were laid low by mass unemployment, Stalin could claim to have found a cure: a command economy with ambitious five-year plans to promote rapid industrialisation. Deficient demand was not a problem, but what about supply? Stalin, who was planning for great increases in productivity, faced a problem: how was he to motivate workers with low levels of skill – including millions pouring in from the countryside who were entirely lacking in training or experience of the rigour and rhythms of life in a factory or on a construction site?

A commanding solution

The solution was to extend the command economy yet further, to encompass supply as well as demand. As Stalin warned the Party Congress in 1927 “Our plans are not prognoses, guess-plans, but instructions, which are compulsory”. If the labour discipline needed for creating a Socialist Utopia was not to be the threat of unemployment, what else could it be?

How the Gulag grew

Figure 1: Numbers in custody, USSR 1917-1953

For sure, the system of labour camps operated as a dreaded threat in Stalin’s time, but its shadowy outlines were not known with certainty. In an ‘an exercise in literary investigation’, Solzhenitsyn characterised it as the Gulag Archipelago. Now the archival data available, displayed in Figure 1, allow for a statistical account.

Using custodial figures over the Stalin era, 1928-1953 – and taking inflows and outflows (including releases plus escapes and deaths) to be constant proportions of the labour force L and the prison population P respectively – one finds:

where zero-one, step dummies are included to account for extra incarcerations during the Great Terror (1937-1938) and releases to the front-lines during World War II. These crude estimates imply that about half of one percent of the civilian labour force was incarcerated each year, and around one fifth of existing prisoners released (or died in custody) – with these flows averaging just under 400,000 per year. The implied equilibrium for the size of the Gulag during Stalin’s rule is about 2 million persons, i.e. almost three percent of the working population in labour camps.

Why work?

In a challenging paper, Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) argued that – despite imperfect monitoring – work incentives are preserved in Western economies because those caught shirking face the threat of unemployment and loss of income. The ‘No Shirking Condition’ they derive for wages constitutes the effective labour supply curve for the economy – with labour demand given by its marginal productivity. We apply the same broad logic to the Soviet system in CEPR DP 6621 – but with two significant alterations. First, in deriving the No Shirking Condition for labour supply, custodial sentences replace spells of unemployment-on-benefit as the ‘worker-discipline device’, so the supply price of labour falls not with the numbers of unemployed but with the population of the Gulag. Second, wages are set below the marginal productivity of labour as the dictator exercises monopsony power in the labour market to maximise investible funds.

What then are key features of Stalin’s system? It is a society where everyone works and substantial resources are generated either for investment or for military expenditure – whatever the dictator decides. The state commands a goodly share of national resources, but wages are pushed down to ‘efficiency’ levels – just high enough to prevent shirking. No-one is unemployed, but many are in labour camps.

Ironically, the outcome for labour is as if it faced a greedy capitalist who wanted to maximise profits and had the market power to do so. More than that, the state employer can also manipulate the living and working conditions for those not in civilian employment to further its own ends. To increase investment, for example, prison conditions can be made harsher – so as to lower the supply price of civilian labour and reduce consumption. Where this may lead is what Solzhenitsyn (1963) describes – from first-hand experience – in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Russian Roulette

Coercion as a discipline device may have helped Russia to industrialise at high speed – and to produce the arms needed to defeat Hitler. But, in the absence of legitimate successors, dictators are prone to paranoia; and the regime of punishment became a monster. The economic rationale for the Gulag does not encompass randomised terror for political ends: by raising the supply price of labour, it is economically counter-productive. So too is random application of coercive labour laws, exemplified by Stalin’s ‘five per cent rule’ for denunciation.[1] Stalin’s successors realised this, attenuating the excesses of coercion soon after he died.

Coercion versus capitalism: survival of the fittest?

It is tempting to look beyond Stalin’s years of power for clues as to why the command economy finally collapsed. How do the two systems – Western capitalism and Soviet coercion – compare in terms of incentive constraints for labour, criteria for wage determination, and demand management?

Figure 2: Efficiency wage equilibria: Russia and the West

Figure 2 provides an overview, with each system represented by two schedules: a downward-sloping marginal productivity of labour schedule, MPL; and an upward-sloping curve showing the effective supply price of labour (labelled NSC to denote the lowest wage consistent with the No Shirking Constraint). In the Russian case, shown in bold, this No Shirking Constraint is based on imprisonment: so those not in civilian employment are in the Gulag, in forced labour camps whose harsh conditions act as a threat to keep wages down for civilian workers). Wages are set so as to maximise the resources available to the state, which restricts civilian employment so wages fall below the marginal product of labour.

Also shown is the Western case, where those not in work are unemployed on benefit; i.e. unemployment is the labour-discipline device. There is a higher supply price of labour (shown by the dotted line NSC'), and higher labour productivity (MPL'): but equilibrium depends on whether or not there is demand deficiency.

Take first the 1930s with the West mired in the Great Depression – diagnosed as demand failure by John Maynard Keynes writing in 1936. With a demand constraint (shown by the dotted vertical line in the figure) limiting the quantity of output that can be sold, let labour market equilibrium be at D, with mass unemployment and wages depressed to the lowest incentive-compatible level.[2]

How does Stalin’s contemporaneous experiment in coercion compare with what Western capitalism had to offer? Due to the low level of capital per head in Russia at the beginning of industrialisation, the productivity of labour is below that in the West; and the compression of real wages is a sign of the effort to catch up with the West by rapid capital accumulation. Real wages are not high in either system, but massive investment in Russia carries promises of a brighter future. Compared with the West in Depression, higher employment in Russia is relatively attractive for those in jobs: but for those not in jobs, the Gulag replaces the unemployment queue.

Now let time move forward some fifty years – to 1984 say, when Shapiro and Stiglitz publish their paper. Let the competitive equilibrium they describe represent the West – after it has learnt the art of macroeconomic stabilisation. There is no demand failure, so employment rises until the supply price of labour shown as NSC' matches its marginal productivity (and output is maximised subject to the incentive constraint imposed by asymmetric information) at point B.[3] How does Stalin’s system compare now? Assume – as George Orwell had foretold – that Russia remains in equilibrium at C. What does the command economy offer now? Lower wages; lower output ; and higher coercion.

This comparison takes as given that labour productivity in the West continues to run ahead of that in Russia, despite fifty years of squeezing consumption to release resources for investment and growth in the command economy. But this is plausible if, as Skidelsky (1995) maintains, the resources so painfully extracted from the Russian people were not invested efficiently; and if the bureaucratic and centralised system based on fear failed to match the incentives in the West for innovation and continuous ‘technical progress’, as argued publicly by the Russian physicist Sakharov (1975) and his fellow dissidents.

The coercive system faces yet further challenges. Western spending on an ambitious and expensive arms race gives the Russian government added reason to compress wages – to pay for arms as well as investment. But the spreading doctrine of Human Rights makes repression less and less politically viable. The system is in danger of collapse – not from a shortage of demand, like the West in Depression, but from failure of supply, like an economic heart attack.

Conclusion

Skidelsky (1995) has argued that “the Stalinist command economy was not a technical solution to the economic problem of inadequate saving and investment: it was a device for maximising and perpetuating the power of the state”. It has been shown, however, that there is an economic rationale for a Gulag system as a labour-discipline device; and that there were economic incentives to make it harsh. Our analysis is broadly in line with the position taken by Gregory and Harrison (2005, p.740): “The effectiveness of the Politburo accumulation model rested on the dictator’s ability to create a gap between the civilian wage as a ‘fair’ return for effort, and low subsistence in the Gulag as the return to shirking, so that the difference between them was the intended punishment for shirking”.

This is the logic of coercion embodied in our efficiency wage analysis. But neither the frenzy of punishment in the late 1930s, nor subsequent randomness in the application of coercive labour laws, can be rationalised on economic grounds. By denying its people their Human Rights, yet failing to catch up with managed capitalism over the longer term, Stalin’s system condemned itself to extinction.

References

Gregory, Paul R and Mark Harrison (2005), “Allocation under dictatorship: research in Stalin’s archives”, Journal of Economic Literature, XLIII (September), 721-761.
Gregory, Paul, Philipp Schroder and Konstantin Sonin (2006), “Dictators, repression and the median citizen: an “eliminations model” of Stalin’s Terror (Data from the NKVD Archives)”, CEPR Working Paper No. 6014, December.
Keynes, John Maynard (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan.
Miller, Marcus and Jennifer Smith (2006) “Punishment without Crime? Imprisonment as a worker-discipline device”. CEPR Working Paper No. 6621 London: CEPR (December)
Sakharov, Andrei (1975), My country and the world, London: Collins and Harvill.
Shapiro, Carl and Joseph Stiglitz (1984), “Equilibrium unemployment as a worker discipline device”, American Economic Review, 74 (3), 433-444.
Skidelsky, Robert (1995), The Road from Serfdom, London: Penguin Books.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1963), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ralph Parker (trans.), Penguin Modern Classics.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1974), The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: an experiment in literary investigation, New York: Harper and Row.

Footnotes

1 ‘Your task is to check people at work and if something is not right, you must report it. Every member of the party, honest non-party members, citizen of the Soviet Union not only has the right but is obligated to report the deficiencies he sees. If they are right, maybe only 5 percent of the time, this is nevertheless bread’ (Gregory et al, 2006, p.18).
2 Profits are maximised subject to a demand constraint, as would be consistent with weak labour unions.
3 The use of the same MPL' curve is, of course, simply for convenience.

Comments

[Bruce Wilder]

I would be more impressed with the authors' political courage, if they took on 21st century crony capitalism, the Hollywoodization of CEO compensation, and 40-years stagnation in per-worker capital accumulation. In other words, instead of wasting their carbon footprint telling us that there might have been some rational purpose behind the cruel madness of a dictator dead more than fifty years and of the dynamics of a regime long gone, consider the dynamics of the current American regime and its life expectancy.

As globalization and corporate re-engineering have held down wages, while allowing CEO compensation to skyrocket, as lifetime corporate employment, good union jobs, and pensions have disappeared, what are the implications?

Tanta at Calculated Risk had an interesting meditation on a story out of Countrywide, an icon of the new American economy. Is it fraud or is it incompetency?

I tend to think the inability to pay an efficiency wage to honest Indians, when the Chief is a thief, might have something to do with it.

[Callahan]

One day, we shall rise up and tackle the challenge.

Maybe not in my lifetime as I'm a geeezer.

[Bruce Wilder]

While I am being a curmudgeon this morning, I should point out that unemployment is not the primary conditional constraint on employment at an "efficiency" wage in a capitalist economy: it is not a simple two-way exchange between a pool of employment in hierarchy and a pool of unemployment. There's also a pool of self-employment, without the imperfect supervision that requires an efficiency wage.

It may seem a minor point, but is not without its relevant implications. Communist regimes, historically, were bedeviled by the problem of how to organize and regulate family enterprises and self-employment, without undermining the whole structure of communist relationships.

[anon]

What really does this tell us that we would not have known without a model? This is cute, but is it more? I would be interested more if it were a good quantitative exercise: can the authors could isolate the number of people in the gulags due to insufficient 'effort' as opposed to (possibly made up) political charges, and relate it to productive outcomes?

[cm]

I'm disputing several things in the article -- first, that the Gulags and other penitentiaries were "shirker's prisons". As far as I know, people were not (generally) incarcerated for failure to perform or show up at work, disorderly conduct, drinking, etc., at least not for those things alone. They were a device for general crowd control, particularly suppressing dissent and deviation from the party line.

Second, the author seems to be obsessed with the idea that labor relations and economic constructs start and end with combating "shirking" and work ethic "deficiencies". It seems that's his hammer looking for nails.

[notsneaky]

So Bruce, not a big fan of this profession called "Historian"? I mean why write about stuff that happened 50 years ago?

[jefff]

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a fantastic book. It is also quite short. Definitely worth the time to buy and read.

It reminds me that I have meant to go pick up something else by Solzhenitsyn.

[Bruce Wilder]

notsneaky: "So Bruce, not a big fan of this profession called "Historian"? I mean why write about stuff that happened 50 years ago?"

I am a big fan of both history and competent economic analysis, which, I would think, readers of my comments would pick up on. Both history and economics could be much improved by the collaboration, which is economic history.

I am interested in how economics (meaning the thinking and evidence generated by the professional and academic discipline) makes its way into popular political discourse. Mostly, I am disappointed in the quality of political discourse. Although the necessarily simplified nature of popular political discussion makes some of that inevitable, I am troubled by how economists select and refine the simplifications they provide, and, being by nature (but not ideology) a progressive, I am disgusted with the often false claims to authority made by libertarian and pseudo-libertarian economists. And, I am also disgusted by my perception that more than a few academic economists shape their work to at least seem superficially supportive of right-wing ideology and business interests (I suppose, because that's where the money is).

I honestly do not think economics lends much support to libertarian ideology, and to claim otherwise, seems fundamentally dishonest, a distortion of both theory and evidence, which I am now in the habit of railing against in blog comments. (Almost certainly this is an injudicious waste of time on my part, but it has entertainment value.)

I trace some of the fault to a bias against empiricism, particularly among those trained in the theory of market-price (aka micro-economists), which leaves a large part of the profession with a method of analysis, but little experience or codified factual knowledge of the economy (especially outside of whatever narrow domain in which an individual may do serious research). (My own professional research was long ago, and mostly superficial by academic standards, but was in industrial organization and what you might call the economics of bureaucratic hierarchy; the former field died a well-deserved death academically in the late 1960's (before I entered it), and the latter, despite a lot of theorizing in the 1980's and since (which included the important Stiglitz work cited in the post), remains a body of only half-digested insight.

I will readily admit that the space of time between "then" in my life, and "now" greatly exceeds the half-life of whatever I once knew of either textbooks or the professional literature. So, my blog comments are an idle hobby. I still find certain topics in economics and history stimulating, but I will confess that I am aware that a large part of what they stimulate is the jealous scorn of an old curmudgeon.

I did not intend this comment to become a confessional. Way too much caffeine this morning, I guess.

Anyway, back to economic history. History is an interpretative discipline, whose central product is narrative. Grounding narrative in social science analysis is what distinguishes and justifies academic history as something other than a literary occupation. And, although, personally, I would rather eat stale prunes and broccoli than read academic history, I am grateful when a gifted writer uses the results of social science thinking and research to create an insightful narrative that goes beyond the personality-driven history-as-the-biographies-of-great-men, which is traditional.

History only happens one way, and the absence of degrees of freedom in the data can tempt an economist to just project his priors in a mad rush of counterfactuals, when doing history, resulting in a lot of irrelevant and anachronistic jargon (see North, Douglass). It is still possible to test and refine a hypothetical analysis, but you have to do so, in accord with a valid interpretative method -- basically by extending the explanation to account for more detail. You want the analysis to unpack in a narrative sequence that closely resembles as much as possible what actually happened.

My initial reaction to the post was a disgust at both the superficial gloss on history that it embodies, and the glib theme of commmunism-bad, capitalism-good, which I associate with shameless catering to corrupting business interests. Like another commenter, I would think one would have to do a bit more quantitative correspondence, before writing this up. But, economists have low standards for these things.

If I may digress for a moment, once again before the caffeine wears off, I find the Robert H. Frank Economic Naturalist sort of glib explanatory style a bit too cutesy and uncritical. People are always telling me I should like Frank because he's a liberul (sic), or something, but the lack of critical method pisses me off. (Yes, Professor Frank, drive-up ATMs have braille because the law, in its majesty, requires it, and whatever the cost-benefit of standardization may be, you don't know diddly about what it is, either factually or empirically. Good, I feel better.)

Even more, I am infuriated by economic historians, who cherry-pick obscure data, to support some superficial account supportive of right-wing libertarian prejudice -- the celebration of the 1866-1896 period of deflation as one of economic growth, unfairly slandered for economic hardship, is particularly annoying to me.

On second thought (regarding Stalin and efficiency wages), I can see that the authors of the article, which is the subject of the above post, might actually have some useful insight into how communism worked, but they need a somewhat more sophisticated version of Stiglitz to work it out. Hence, my second comment. If you recognize that the problem is not "shirking" per se, but, rather, the attractions of self-employment, then you might have an explanation, which would extend nicely.

Stalin, after all, started out "collectiving" the kulaks. That's where the Gulag starts. These were not "shirkers", they were independent petty entrepreneurs. Stalin was destroying the private economy that Lenin had used his discretion to leave in place. (In a weird sort of way, Stalin's collectivization was recreating in agriculture the same perverse institutional scheme that had prevailed under the Czars and feudalism, but I will leave that to the Russian historians to explore.) And, of course, at the other end of communism's life, it is Deng unleashing petty entrepreneurship, which begins the erosion of the socialist organization of the economy in China. If you are interested, there's lots of good stuff on petty entrepreneurship and the dollar economy in Cuba, and the Communists' ambivalence about it.

So, there you have it: much more than you wanted to know, notsneaky, but I figure laying out all of my "secret" agenda is in the spirit of notsneakiness.

[James Killus]

Well, just for fun, I looked up a few numbers.

The population of the USSR in the mid-30s was about 160 million, about half of the current US population.

The number of incarcerated prisoners in the U.S. is now somewhere north of 2.2 million (it was less than half a million in 1980). There are an additional 5 million convicts on parole or probation. Only about 80,000 of currently incarcerated inmates are employed in jobs contracted to the private sector; I cannot easily find a number for convict labor doing non-private work (the old "stamping license plates" thing).

The US currently has the highest incarceration rate of any nation on Earth; number two is Russia.

V.I. Kydor Kropotkin: Logic is on our side: this isn't a case of a world struggle between two divergent ideologies, of different economic systems. Every day your country becomes more socialistic and mine becomes more capitalistic. Pretty soon we will meet in the middle and join hands. - The President's Analyst

Some people thought that the "joining of hands" would include the best of both systems. We know better now.

[Fred]

Any economic analysis using the term utility must take into account the extreme disutility of ending up in something like a Nazi labor/extermination camp, which is what might have happened to many of the people of the United States if the Nazi's had conquered the world. In order to avoid such extreme disutility, it is necessary to have a powerful war machine, which implies a vibrant economy with everyone producing and consuming like rats on a treadmill, whether or not we want to live like this or not. Libertarians, in particular, seem to forget this.

To rephrase the problem: If we allow people total freedom (and assuming this freedom wasn't undermined by private mafias, another problem the libertarians never address), then people might choose to enjoy life, and we would become weak and subject to having our land stolen from us the way we stole it from the Indians. Thus extreme freedom is not acceptable. The government, an elected government I hope, must intervene to force the economy into high gear even if this reduces our short-run utility (because it prevents the extreme long-run disutility of losing a war). And one humane aspect to an economy in high gear is to guarantee everyone a job. But then we get the problem of shirking and, yes, something like the Gulag will be necessary to discourage the shirking. But it doesn't have to be a true Gulag. Just force people to show up for work (have the police drag them in if they won't come voluntarily), then sit them in a room by themselves with nothing to do for 8 hours, any amusements confiscated and the temperature reduced to 50 degree Fahrenheit or increased to 90 degrees. Lots of ways to make life difficult for the troublemakers without a full-blown Gulag and also without punitive unemployment.

[dilbert dogbert]

When, date, did that saying from behind the curtain: "They Pretend to Pay Us and We Pretend to Work" originate?
I vote for the Gulag being for political control pure and simple with a side benefit of gaining investment labor and discipline. Remember at the start the USSR had millions who were not with the program and actively resisting it. Without other millions who were willing to pull the trigger on command the enterprise would have died in its crib.

[Fred]

BTW, I don't know why this issue doesn't come up more often, but it wasn't central planning that was the problem with the Soviet Union, but rather lack of competition, starting with lack of competition with respect to politicians. Wherever the Soviet Union had competition, managed by central planners I might add, they did very well. For example, sports. As I understand, they also had competition in the military-industrial complex, similar to what we have. That is, multiple teams competing with one another to make the best design. Whichever team wins, gets a red ribbon to wear or whatever. Recall that the Soviets were hardly slackers in the space race, and backing their success was internal competition. Contrary to right-wing propaganda, most people will work hard and enthusiastically just for the sake of winning and puyblic recognition, without any economic incentives. If you don't believe me, just look at amateur sports, amateur chess and bridge players, amateur artists, amateur gardeners, hobbyists of all sorts, bloggers, etc.

[realpc]

Stalin wasn't insane or cruel. Like all communist leaders, he was trying vainly to make an insane idea work.

Socialists blame the Soviet Union's failure on Stalin's madness and cruelty, or on lack of cooperation from the US, or whatever excuse they can find. But the reason for the failure is simply that socialism is a bad idea.

Stalin wasn't the only communist leader who exterminated dissidents. They all did.

Socialism, when not balanced by capitalism, is worse than slavery. At least a slave economy can be successful. Citizens under socialism are not only slaves, they are slaving in a system that will inevitably fail.

[cm]

Fred: You have to consider that the military/aerospace industry and sports (sports industry?) were two areas, and perhaps the two areas, of primary and continued government interest, and they were receiving focus and resources at the expense of everything else (preferential resource allocation for "national defense", and ruining the health of a good number of young people whose "development" into top sports dead-ended before selection of the top X% and after exerting the body past its limits or failed drug experimentation).

Areas that receive secondary or lower consideration in any planning effort will usually underperform, especially when the feedback loops for correcting the underperformance are effectively suppressed (which brings us back to the topic).

[Fred]

The fact that the Soviet government focused on sports and the military/industrial complex at the expense of everything else is a consequence of lack of competition at the leadership level. They didn't have elections. But the idea that central planning can't work is just right-wing propaganda. Doesn't Walmart centrally PLAN where they are going to put their stores? The Soviet's were also handicapped by their ideological aversion to market mechanisms. Again, there is no inherent incompatibility between market mechanism and central planning. Walmart uses market mechanisms as part of its central planning. If Walmart were state-owned as opposed to privately owned (for example, if a a public employees pension fund bought all the Walmart stock), how would that change things? It wouldn't. I am not advocating nationalization of Walmart, incidentally, but it is important to understand the Soviet and other Communist failures had nothing to do with centralization or the use of the gulag rather than punitive unemployment as a way of discouraging shirking. The basic problem was the lack of free elections, which is to say lack of competition at the leadership level. Fix that basic problem and then the other problems go away.

[cm]

Fred: Competition alone is not a panacea either. Would you rather food/drug safety and the quality of healthcare and essential infrastructure were "enforced" by market competition instead of mandates and oversight?

The paradigm of competition is "you don't have to run faster than the bear, only faster than the other guy". I even had a management figure say that to my face.

[Gil]

A slavery system is better than Socialism because it's sustainable?! I'd think a slave would prefer a failing system so they could exit slavery. Then again that could be just me.

[Lol]

"the Soviet government focused on sports and the military/industrial complex at the expense of everything else"

Military/industrial complex was Stalin's focus -- I agree. But look who's talking! You know what "u" and "s" and "a" stand for? "Union Sovietique-l'Autre".

[reason]

Realpc...
(Sigh) Stalin wasn't cruel? Oh, come on Realpc your credibility isn't necesarrily your strong point, but almost every review I've read of Stalin identifies a sadistic streak in him.

[realpc]

Reason,

Was Pol Pot cruel or insane? His policies were just as horrific as Stalin's, but I have never heard him described as deranged or sadistic.

Socialism was and is well-intentioned, but it is unnatural and will not work in this universe. Leaders who try to implement some ideal form of socialism must resort to cruel policies.

[cm]

Lol: The difference between the "communist" Eastern bloc and the West in this regard is that the "communists" presumed to control every detailed aspect of the economy and of social life top-down, suppressing (or starving by resource denial) any independent initiative, whereas in the West independent initiative outside core interests has been left to run free within the confines of certain legal and policy frameworks.

The effect in the former case is "nothing happens here until I say so", which practically often translates into "nothing happens" (engendering a coping mechanism of black markets and illegal activities based on embezzlement of otherwise denied resources). One example is black markets in handyman services working with stolen material and "borrowed" equipment, and barter/black markets in stolen material that was simply unavailable for purchase officially, as they government effectively declared itself the only player in town, but didn't supply the required level of resources.

That's grossly simplified and not the whole truth, but an important aspect of it.

[Ludwik Kowalski]

Those who know very little about Stalinism might learn a lot from my short and easy-to-read 2008 book entitled "Heaven on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under the Stalinist Regime." The book (ISBN 978-1-60047-232-9) can be ordered online, for example, at

www.amazon.com

or from a large bookstore, like Barnes&Noble or Borders. Excerpts are at:

http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/excerpts.html

Please share this URL with those who might be interested. Thank you for your help.

In my opinion gulag laborers, like my father, who died in Kolyma, at the age of 36 were slaves.