Perpetrators & Comparative Confinement — Russian History

This is a companion to the Gulag reference. It addresses the question that Applebaum, Figes, and Solzhenitsyn all raise but none fully answers: who actually ran the camps, and why did they? It gathers the perpetrator-behavior literature, the Gulag-specific archival work, and — as a comparative test case — the scholarship on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

The comparison is offered to sharpen distinctions, not to flatten them. The scale and lethality of the two systems are not equivalent, and the essay says so plainly. It ends with the numbers side by side precisely so the differences cannot be blurred.

A. A caution before the psychology

The two experiments most often invoked here — Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) and Milgram's obedience studies (1961–63) — have both undergone severe reappraisal, and the SPE in particular no longer carries the evidentiary weight popularly assigned to it. Archival work has shown its guards were coached toward cruelty and its "spontaneous" behavior was often scripted.

The surviving insight. What the reappraisal undermines is strong situationism — the claim that structure alone converts anyone into a torturer. What survives is more modest and more useful: institutions distribute permission, most participants comply or drift, a consistent minority refuse at little real cost, and a further minority actively seek out the work. The three-part folk model — bad apples, a bad barrel, and a scattering of enthusiasts — is closer to the current scholarly picture than the pure "barrel" thesis it is usually invoked to support.

Key works

Thibault Le Texier, "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist (2019).
S. Alexander Haslam & Stephen Reicher, "Contesting the 'Nature' of Conformity," PLoS Biology (2012) — the "engaged followership" model.
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (2007) — the situationist case in full; read alongside the critiques, not instead of them.

B. Perpetrator behavior — the core literature

The foundational study is Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: middle-aged German policemen, explicitly offered the chance to opt out, who became mass shooters through conformity, careerism, deference, and drink — roughly 10–20% declined, while a minority killed with evident enthusiasm. Daniel Goldhagen read substantially the same evidence the opposite way, arguing for ideology and "eliminationist" culture over situation; the Browning–Goldhagen exchange is the discipline's central argument on this question. Later work (Waller, de Swaan) pushes back on the "anyone would do it" reading, stressing that perpetrators are disproportionately self-selected.

Key works

Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992).
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) — the opposing reading.
James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (2002).
Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (2015).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), corrected by Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014).
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (1986) — "doubling" as professional participation.

C. Perpetrators in the Soviet system

The essential book is Lynne Viola's Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial — NKVD interrogators and executioners prosecuted in 1938–39, when Stalin scapegoated his own machine; their case files are as close as the archives come to a direct answer. Wendy Goldman shows how ordinary Soviet citizens participated through denunciation, meetings, and workplace politics. And Golfo Alexopoulos argues that deaths flowed from the system's labor-extraction and rations logic — the barrel — rather than primarily from individual cruelty. Solzhenitsyn's line about "the line dividing good and evil" cutting through every human heart remains the most quoted moral formulation of exactly this problem — and a rejection of any clean apple/barrel split.

Key works

Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (2017).
Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin (2007); Inventing the Enemy (2011).
Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag (2017).
Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (2007) — Nazino, 1933.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (2004).

D. The comparative case — Japanese American incarceration, 1942–46

The comparison is drawn not to equate but to test. Scholarship increasingly rejects "internment" — a narrow legal term for enemy aliens, which most of these people were not, two-thirds being US citizens — in favor of "incarceration" or "confinement"; some scholars and many in the Japanese American community use "American concentration camps," while distinguishing firmly from extermination camps. The federal government's own 1982–83 commission found the cause was "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" — not military necessity.

Key works

Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (2009) — the best single, explicitly comparative volume.
Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial (rev. 2004) — the compact standard account.
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (1982–83).
Eric L. Muller, American Inquisition (2007) — the loyalty-questionnaire bureaucracy and the officials who ran it.
Andrea Pitzer, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017); the Densho Digital Repository (densho.org).

E. The comparison, stated plainly

The right Soviet analogue is not the camps but the special settlements. The lagerya held sentenced prisoners in a forced-labor economy. The spetsposeleniya held whole peoples removed by ethnic category, without charge, trial, or sentence, on a theory of collective guilt. Japanese American incarceration follows the second logic — and maps with some precision onto the Soviet deportation of Koreans from the Far East in 1937: in both, a Pacific-coast ethnic minority was preemptively removed inland as a presumed wartime security risk.

What was shared. Collective guilt by ancestry; no individual hearings; removal from a coastal frontier; property loss; barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards; remote and climatically hostile sites; and an official justification of military necessity that the documentary record does not support.

What was not. The scale and the lethality are not comparable, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise:

	United States · 1942–46	Soviet Union · 1929–53
Confined	~120,000, roughly two-thirds US citizens, in ten camps.	~18 million through the camps; ~2.7 million in special settlements by 1953.
Deaths	~1,862, overwhelmingly from illness and age.	Documented camp deaths of 1.5–1.8 million; deported nations commonly lost a fifth to a quarter in transit and the first exile years.
Administration	A civilian agency (the War Relocation Authority) that ran schools, newspapers, and elected councils.	The NKVD forced-labor economy, run on production and execution quotas.
Labor & rations	No forced-labor economy, no execution quotas, no starvation rations as policy.	Labor extraction and rations logic that consumed the people inside it.
Apology & redress	Formal apology and $20,000 per surviving detainee under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988; Korematsu repudiated by the Supreme Court in 2018.	No apology contemporaneous with the system; five deported nations partially rehabilitated from 1957, others excluded until the USSR's end.

Where the "barrel" thesis is testable. The most instructive evidence is the variation within the American system. Most camps were bleak but survivable; Tule Lake, redesignated as the segregation center for those who answered "no" on the loyalty questionnaire, deteriorated sharply — a stockade, martial law from November 1943, army control. Same nation, same year, same population: different institutional design, different outcomes. Individual violence occurred within a structure that did not require it — James Wakasa was shot dead by a sentry at Topaz in April 1943, and two men were killed in the Manzanar disturbance of December 1942.

The analytic yield. Structure sets the ceiling on how much harm is possible; ideology and selection determine how fully that ceiling is reached. The American barrel was bad, and produced real cruelty and lasting injury — but it was not built to consume the people inside it. The Soviet barrel was, and was staffed by a machine that rewarded those who filled quotas. Holding both facts at once is the point of the comparison.

Adapted from Russia & Siberia — A Reader's Companion, Part VII. Reads alongside The Gulag & the Exile System. Part of the Russian History guide.