Keywords

• The essay analyzes the genesis of the Gulag
• placing it at the crossroads of various historical threads: the long spans of Russian history
• characterized &ndash
• starting from the westernising break imposed upon the turbulent nation by Peter the Great &ndash
• by a special brand of authoritarian or repressive modernization based on forced labour and repression
• which was at the origin of the separation between modernity and freedom
• the extended
• though somewhat less lengthy
• duration of European modernism and its crisis
• laid brutally bare by World War I
• the short spell of Bolshevik revolution
• with its particular political culture shaped profoundly by the war
• and lastly
• the brief flare of socio-political crisis brought on by a fast-paced national shift towards industrialization in the latter half of the 1920s
• a prelude to the rise of the Stalin's dictatorship