Varlam Shalamov spent fourteen years in the camps of Kolyma, in the far north-east of Siberia, between 1937 and 1951. From that time he brought back neither a moral lesson nor a call to resistance. He brought back a more uncomfortable conviction. The Soviet camp system was not a historical accident or a distortion of the revolutionary project, but its most coherent expression. The Kolyma Tales are not a denunciation in the usual sense. They are the clinical record of a machinery designed to operate without hatred, without exception and without end. In 2026, with Memorial International liquidated by the Russian state, with Stalin recovered as a symbol of national greatness in the polls, and with logics of mass detention active across three continents, reading Shalamov is not an exercise in memory. It is an act of political analysis.
The Camp Was Not an Exception
There are books that console. The Kolyma Tales do not belong to that category. Shalamov chose to write without lyricism or narrative redemption, not from inability but from conviction. To embellish what happened in Kolyma would have been the second death of those who did not return. What follows is not a reading of the work but an examination of the mechanisms that produced it, and of the contemporary structures those mechanisms describe with involuntary precision.
The implicit thesis in most narratives about the Gulag is that the camp system represented an anomaly in the trajectory of the Soviet project — a deviation attributable to Stalin’s paranoia, wartime conditions or the brutality of lower-ranking officials. Shalamov dismantles that thesis without stating it. He does so through accumulation, through the very monotony of the details he records: the work quotas assigned from Moscow, the internal hierarchies among prisoners, the procedures for declaring a man unfit for work, the rules for reducing the ration when production did not reach its target. Nothing in that system required personal hatred. It required regularity.
The Gulag was not the failure of Soviet socialism but its logical extension towards bodies considered expendable. Between 1930 and 1953, according to the NKVD archives studied by Memorial before its dissolution, nearly 18 million people passed through the camp system. More than 1.5 million died in them according to official records, a figure that historians systematically consider an underestimate.
What Shalamov’s prose conveys most effectively is not individual facts but the architecture of the system. Orders came from above, quotas had to be met, procedures followed. There were prisoner hierarchies with small privileges functioning as mechanisms of horizontal control, with the common criminal above the political prisoner and the brigadier above the rank-and-file worker. Nobody needed to be a fanatic for the machine to run. The machine did not need to be hysterical. It needed to be regular.
Hannah Arendt described totalitarianism as a system that converts crimes into administrative procedures. Shalamov writes from inside that procedure, from the position of the material being processed, not the philosopher. What one sees from there is not the ideology but the cold, the ration, the weight of the shovel, the rhythm of the shift. The system did not present itself to those who suffered under it as an ideological construction. It presented itself as physical reality.
The Soviet camp system processed nearly 18 million people between 1930 and 1953, according to NKVD archives studied by Memorial. Varlam Shalamov was detained in Kolyma between 1937 and 1951. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered the liquidation of Memorial International, the principal organisation dedicated to documenting the crimes of the Soviet period.
The Body as First Territory
That physical reality is, for Shalamov, the first territory of power. Most narratives about concentration camps, whether Soviet, Nazi or of any other origin, construct a narrative of inner resistance — that of the spirit that does not bend, the dignity that persists beneath degradation. Shalamov rejects that narrative with a coldness that at first seems cruelty and later reveals itself as honesty.
When a man has endured temperatures of forty degrees below zero for weeks, with a ration insufficient to maintain body heat, his feet in a condition doctors would classify as third-degree frostbite, that man does not philosophise. He tries not to die during the next shift. Totalitarianism, Shalamov observes without naming it as such, also governs through matter — through the ration, through forced labour, through stolen sleep, through the temperature of the barracks. Control of the body precedes control of the mind. It is not a secondary instrument of power. It is the first.
This understanding has consequences that Shalamov draws without mercy. The camp does not reveal souls, it breaks them. The idea that extreme suffering purifies or ennobles belongs to a literary and religious tradition that Kolyma refuted with statistics. What the camp produced in the majority of cases was hunger, fear, baseness, moral atrophy. Solidarity did not disappear through individual malevolence but because the material conditions made it impossible to sustain. Shalamov describes that process without condemning those who yielded. The condemnation, implicit and constant, is aimed at the system that designed those conditions.
Dehumanisation, in the Kolyma Tales, does not begin with hatred. It begins with administered scarcity. It begins when the state decides how many calories a body receives according to its productivity, and when that decision is codified in procedures that nobody needs to question in order to apply. The pair of gloves that appears in one of the tales as an object of absolute desire is not an anecdotal detail. It is the scale at which power operates when it has direct access to the body.
The Machinery Needs No Hatred
Systems of domination that have reached a certain level of institutional maturity share a characteristic that makes them difficult to combat. They do not require the will to harm in the majority of their operators. The Soviet camp did not rest on a chain of sadists. It rested on a chain of officials meeting quotas, doctors certifying work capacity, accountants recording production and warehouse managers distributing rations. Each operated within a framework of legitimate procedures. The aggregate result was the systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands of people.
Banality is not innocence. It is the mechanism by which responsibility becomes invisible. When horror becomes routine, it ceases to be perceived as horror. The guards who had spent years working in Kolyma did not wake up intending to commit a crime. They woke up intending to complete their shift. This distinction, which in moral terms may seem minor, is in political terms decisive, because it means that systems of this type do not collapse because their operators decide to stop being bad. They collapse, if they collapse, because someone from outside destroys the structure that makes the routine possible.
Shalamov also describes the internal hierarchy of the camp as a device designed by the system itself. Common criminal prisoners received different treatment from political ones; brigadiers — prisoners charged with supervising work gangs — had material incentives to demand output from their peers. The camp did not need external guards to keep itself under control. The architecture of privileges produced denunciation without anyone having to request it.
The regularity of horror, Shalamov implicitly insists, is what makes it more dangerous than sporadic horror. A pogrom is visible, nameable, condemnable. A policy of production quotas that leads to the death of those who fail to meet them is administration. The difference between the two forms of violence lies not in the result but in the language with which it is described and in the possibility of attributing individual responsibility.
According to the Levada Centre, Stalin’s approval among the Russian population reached 56% in 2021 and continued to rise in subsequent years. In parallel, the Russian government liquidated Memorial International on 28 December 2021 and the Memorial Human Rights Centre on 29 December of the same year. Both organisations had documented the crimes of the Soviet period and their consequences for more than three decades.
The Model, Today
The Trump administration relaunched immigration detention operations on an industrial scale in 2025, with instructions to expand detention capacity to a hundred thousand beds, according to the international press. The facilities are not presented as camps but as processing centres, migration flow management units. Administrative language fulfils the same function as in NKVD reports: making the procedure visible while concealing the result. In El Salvador, the CECOT has concentrated more than forty thousand prisoners since 2023 under conditions that Amnesty International has documented as cruel and inhuman treatment; Bukele presents it as an exportable model and several Latin American governments have sent delegations to visit it.
The quietest process is happening in Russia. Since the liquidation of Memorial, the archives that organisation gathered for more than thirty years on the camp system are being dispersed or classified. The official discourse returned to presenting the Stalinist period as an era of national greatness, with understandable errors given the context of war and external threat. Shalamov proves, in that framework, to be an author impossible to assimilate. His texts do not admit the narrative of historical necessity. There is in them no argument that justifies the insufficient ration, the administered cold, the shift that kills.
What the Kolyma Tales make visible needs no ideology to replicate itself. The model has travelled, and it did so without a passport. What varies between the NKVD, ICE and CECOT is not the operational principles but the vocabulary with which they are presented to the public — the language that transforms detention into processing, extermination into management, brutality into procedure. What remains, with a constancy Shalamov would have recognised without surprise, is the architecture.
Conclusion
The Kolyma Tales do not ask to be read as literature. They ask to be read as an instrument of recognition. Shalamov did not build a denunciation or a brief or a call to conscience. He built a precision tool for identifying a specific type of violence: the kind that becomes invisible by having converted itself into procedure, the kind that kills without anyone having wanted to kill, the kind that dehumanises without anyone declaring themselves a dehumaniser.
Measuring a civilisation by the treatment it reserves for weak bodies, for lives without power, for men without voice, is not a sentimental assertion. It is an operational criterion. In 2026, the systems operating according to the logic Shalamov described are neither exceptions nor aberrations. They are policies. They have budgets, officials, legal frameworks that legitimate them and sufficient electoral support to present themselves as solutions. The coldness with which Shalamov wrote about Kolyma was not a literary style. It was the only adequate response to what he was describing. It still is…
G.S.
Sources
- Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Tales. Penguin Modern Classics, 2018
- Memorial International. GULAG camp system database, 1918–1960. Memorial.ru, consulted through January 2022
- Levada Centre. Historical figures approval poll. Levada.ru, April 2021
- Amnesty International. Reports on El Salvador and mass detention. Amnesty.org, 2022–2024
- Human Rights Watch. Reports on El Salvador. HRW.org, 2022–2024
- Reuters and The New York Times. Coverage of immigration detention expansion under the Trump administration. January–February 2025
- Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. Doubleday, 2003
