The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps

Please join Professor Dan Healey for a discussion with Professor Polly Jones about his book "The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps", which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024. 

Of the 18 million people that passed through the gates of the Gulag between 1930 and 1953, at least 2.5 million never emerged. The camps have become a byword for injustice, suffering and mass mortality, and it seems paradoxical that any medical care was available there. But the Gulag was not simply a penitentiary system – it was a means to drive industrialisation through slave labour and to colonise the remotest regions of the USSR. For the purpose of productivity rather than wellbeing, healthcare was in fact ubiquitous. 

By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics, many more per capita than in the civilian medical services. 40 percent of medical staff were themselves prisoners, and faced extremes of repression, supply shortages and isolation.  Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases and “saved” a proportion of their patients, as well as teaching apprentices and conducting research. 

The Gulag doctors’ professional discipline was diametrically opposed to the demands of the camp commandants, medical bureaucrats, and the very essence of the Gulag system. Prisoners were exploited to work harder for better rations in the shocking conditions, often in the most desolate outposts of the Soviet Union, and those who did not reach their quotas succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation and illness.

In the process of writing his groundbreaking book, Healey visited museums in the furthest corners of Russia where local history intertwines with one of the most brutal episodes of the past. He accessed archives collected by Memorial Society, met curators and activists, and read testimonies of Gulag survivors and the biographies of medical professionals. Since he started his research, the Memorial Society has been closed down, and literature about Stalinist Terror and the Gulag are being removed from the Russian school reading lists. In this climate, Healey’s book – which is not just scholarship, but asks a whole set of fundamental questions about humanity, complicity and life – is even more profound.

Timecodes

0:00 Start of live stream
0:23 Introduction of Dan Healey and Polly Jones
2:16 Polly introduces “The Gulag Doctors”
3:13 The roots of Dan’s interests in researching Gulag medicine
6:32 Exploring Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov’s narratives of Gulag medicine
13:51 The puzzle of Gulag medicine: state archives vs personal experiences
16:47 Gulag cities and local history museums: Magadan, Ukhta, Pechora
19:04 A book of life stories, not an institutional history
20:34 How did Gulag healthcare evolve and who worked there?
26:34 “I Chose Kolyma”: why did graduate doctors go to the Gulag?
34:35 Tensions between doctors and the authorities: forced labour, quotas and the paradox of Gulag healthcare
41:17 Hospitals in the Gulag
42:32 Professional solidarity and mentoring between prisoner doctors and free doctors
45:39 The two kinds of power in the Gulag medical service
47:00 How accurate is the victim/perpetrator binary?
49:44 The Gulag morgue
53:45 What kind of research could take place in the Gulag?
54:55 Malingering and mental health in the Gulag

Audience Q&A

58:59 What was medical care like for the Gulag guards?
1:00:58 Were the Gulags regarded in any way as research laboratories?
1:05:08 What was reproductive, antenatal and childcare like in the Gulag?
1:07:48 How did the Gulag doctors feel about their experiences?
1:12:20 What was the NKVD’s attitude towards the Gulag doctors?
1:14:28 What was the extent of medical ‘tufta’, aka faked diagnoses and symptoms?
1:16:32 How did writing “The Gulag Doctors” change Dan’s understanding of Soviet history?
1:19:29 How has history and memory shaped the identity of Gulag towns in Russia today?
1:22:47 Gulag memory today: access to archives and local historians, attitude of the regime
1:25:59 Have any of the Gulag archives been digitised?
1:27:27 Closing remarks

Buy “The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps” by Dan Healey: https://shop.pushkinhouse.org/product...

A donation of any size is welcome and will make a difference.
Donate: https://www.pushkinhouse.org/support-...

Join our community of supporters and help us thrive today and in the future.
Become a friend of Pushkin House: https://www.pushkinhouse.org/support-...

Website: https://www.pushkinhouse.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PushkinHouse...
Instagram:   / pushkinhouselondon  
Twitter: https://x.com/pushkin_house?lang=en-GB

#pushkinhouse
Pushkin House Trust Registered Charity 313111