Publications

The Rossi Fund has funded and facilitated the publication of Russian and English translations of Jacques, le Français: pour mémoire du Goulag,the product of a collaboration between Jacques Rossi and the writer Michèle Sarde, a complement to Rossi’s Gulag Handbook. The Russian translation, by Elena Baevskaya, was published in 2019 by NLO press as Zhak-frantsuz: v pamiatʹ o GULAGe. The English-language translation, by Kersti Colombant, was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press as Jacques the Frenchman: Memories of the Gulag. Both feature an introduction by historian Golfo Alexopolous, who also edited the English-language version.

Published in 2016 by Pittsburgh University Press and edited by Georgetown historian and Rossi Fund director Michael David-Fox, The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation and Comparison collects some of the most significant thinking on the nature Gulag apparatus to be published in recent decades. Historians demonstrated conclusively in the decades bracketing the new millennium that the “archipelago” model was in need of drastic modification, and the scholars anthologized here respond by grappling with questions of synthesis, interpretation, and comparison. Elaborating the many possible vantages of a comparative and integrative approach, Oleg Khlevniuk, Wilson Bell, Asif Siddiqi, Golfo Alexopolous, Dan Healey, and Emilia Koustova, treat the tangible interrelationships between the Gulag and the goals, practices, and various organs of the Soviet state as well as conceptual elements like the influence and expression of Soviet “biopolitics” and nationalities and labor policy.

Klaus Mülhahn, Sungmin Cho, Aidan Forth, and Deitrich Beyrau undertake comparative and transnational approaches, seeking to situate the Gulag within a global context of carceral camp systems, drawing on British, Chinese, German and North Korean examples. Daniel Beer and Judith Pallot seek to do the same, considering the Gulag’s roots within the legacy of the Imperial carceral regime.

Essays by David-Fox, Bettina Greiner, and Aglaya Glebova provide important historiographical and methodological context.

Drawing from work originally presented at Georgetown in 2013, this publication helps chart a course for the developing field of Gulag studies.

For a podcast of an international Book Launch Symposium at Georgetown’s  Mortara Center held 13 October 2017 with many of the authors of The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, Russian and East European Studies and Kritika Historical Studies, 2016), see https://youtu.be/uRj4Mh0pVIs.

With the support of the Jacques Rossi Fund, The Soviet Gulag a revised and updated edition is being translated into Russian by Academic Studies Press in its Contemporary Western Rusistika (Современная западная русистика) series. It is forthcoming under the title Феномен Гулага: свидетельства, интерпретации и сравнения [The Gulag Phenomenon: Evidence, Interpretation and Comparison].