He's more than 5,800 miles from Red Square, but Steven Barnes couldn't get much closer to the raw material of Soviet history. A PhD student working on a dissertation in Russian studies, Barnes is sifting through the newest batch of microfilm to arrive from the Moscow archives. Each frame tells a story. "There's no one thing I'm searching for," he says, deftly loading another reel onto a microfilm reader. "But there are a lot of little surprises along the way."
Barnes's research focuses on a place in northern Kazakhstan called Karlag, which was one of the largest prison camps in the vast detention system known as the gulag. By studying this camp's inner workings from the 1930s to the 1950s, Barnes, 28, hopes to gain new insight into the way Soviet authorities used imprisonment and political education as a tool of mass social control.
Lately he's been spending four days a week here in the hushed reading room of the Hoover Institution. And he's almost alone. Since the archives opened in 1994, about 60 scholars have come to pore over the records. Although they are open to the public, the existence of the collection is not widely known.
Barnes pulls up a letter written in 1942 by Lavrenti Beria, chief of Stalin's enormous security network from 1938 to 1953. The letter -- an account of prisoners captured and killed after an armed uprising -- was intended as a warning to camp superintendents around the Soviet Union. "What's interesting about this is the hardening of the regime against the inmates," Barnes says. "Most of the prisoners left in the camps at this point in the war were political prisoners. Many of the common criminals had been let out to join the army."
The documents Barnes examines run from the tragic to the absurd. There's the handwritten table of camp death rates (from 1941-44, some 822,000 prisoners died, a rate of about 18 percent per year). A few reels later, he stumbles on a brochure trumpeting the "redemption" of prisoners who became model Soviet citizens. He has discovered that the social life in the camp mirrored the outside world. There were theatrical performances, ethnic dances and camp newspapers -- all carefully documented and now available on microfilm.
Next year Barnes is headed to Kazakhstan, where he'll delve into local records about the camp. But he'll skip the Soviet archives in Moscow. "If I need one of those documents," he says, "I can just come down here."
