ebooks Stalemate: U.S. Marines from Bunker Hill to the Hook (Marines in the Korean War Commemorative Series) by Bernard C. Nalty in History

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In The Gulag after Stalin; Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov; a Khrushchev appointee; this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education; vocational training; leniency; sport; labor; cultural programs; and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Reeducation proved difficult to quantify; a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s; they joined with a coalition of party officials; criminologists; procurators; newspaper reporters; and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system; the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s; and the ensuing counterreform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.