Gulag Tourism: Khrushchev's "Show" Prisons in the Cold War Context, 1954-59

After Stalin's death, his heirs engaged in a substantive transformation of the Gulag that dramatically lowered the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union while placing heavy emphasis on re-education rather than economic extraction. Meanwhile, however, the release and repatriation of foreigners from the Gulag in the 1950s resulted in a wave of bad publicity for the Soviet penal system, and by extension the Soviet system as a whole, just as it was beginning to reform. To counter negative press reports abroad, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the mid- to late-1950s led dozens of foreign delegations on tours of working penal institutions, especially Moscow's notorious Butyrka Prison and a corrective-labor colony in the Moscow suburb of Kriukovo. The tours were closely managed, but they represented a sharp break from the 193753 era when virtually all discussion of Soviet imprisonment was kept secret. This paper, drawing on a variety of archival and published sources, analyzes in detail the tours themselves and the subsequent accounts published in the West as the Soviet Union attempted to demonstrate to the world, using the Gulag itself as evidence, the superiority of its social system. It argues that the institutions visited were not Potemkin villages and it was precisely this tangible genuineness that helps explain the favorable reports produced by visitors. Ultimately, however, these accounts could not overcome the Cold War narrative of the Gulag as both a system of slavery and a synecdoche for a larger system of slavery, the Soviet Union itself.