Book Talk: “Gulag Town, Company Town Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta”
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Cosponsored by Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program
What was the relationship between the Gulag and Soviet society? What was the legacy of Stalin’s massive system of forced labor? This talk will explore answers to these questions using the case of Vorkuta, one of the Soviet Union’s most notorious prison camp complexes. Built in the 1930s and 1940s to house the USSR’s most dangerous criminals, the city would become a Soviet coal mining company town in the decades following Stalin’s death. Vorkuta’s story reveals new insights about the place of the Gulag in Soviet society and the system’s legacy in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
Speaker
Alan Barenberg, Author; Assistant Professor, Department of History, Texas Tech University
Moderator
Steven Barnes, Former Title VIII Research Scholar, Kennan Institute; Associate Professor, History and Art History, George Mason University
Wilson Center
Ronald Reagan Building and
International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania, Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
Phone: 202.691.4000
kennan@wilsoncenter.org
