Gulag’s Shadow Economy: Prisoner Society and Networking inside the Stalinist Labor Camps

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Hardly any first-hand account regarding the harsh realities of the Soviet Gulag misses to mention the existence of a very well developed illicit trade within the camps; a hidden economy so well established that it encompassed informal networks of communication between the prison world and the outside world centered around black market deals, smuggling practices, corruption and barter. This represented the backbone of what could be called “Gulag’s shadow economy”. The fact that the existence of such a hidden trade was even possible considering the restrictive nature of the Soviet Gulag is astonishing and raises a variety of questions. How did the shadow economy come to be in the first place? Was it an outcome of the specific characteristics of Stalinist terror and labor camp policy or could its origins be traced back to the Tsarist katorga? Was this shadow economy simply a way of obtaining scarce goods in a harsh environment or could it be regarded more as a copying mechanism and as a way of determining hierarchy, power relations and survival chances within the prison society? These are the questions this project will be exploring in depth in an attempt to break free from the predominant discourse in Gulag studies, which views the terrors of the Soviet camps mainly through the prism of socialist ideology and Stalin’s dictatorship.