The Gulag After Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953-1964

Jeffrey S. Hardy *11 discusses how the Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin’s death in The Gulag After Stalin (Cornell University Press). Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious attempt to transform the Gulag into a more humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens, and he recounts the opposition the reformers faced from the Soviet public.