Mapping the landscapes of the Stalinist mass repressions

In this article, we focus on the ways in which a variety of different carceral techniques used to punish and exploit people’s labour during the Stalin period (1927—1953) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) created a distinctive landscape of repression. Using the tools of historical geographic information science (GIS) to map the material landscape, we foreground space in the discussion of the USSR’s exceptional history of repression. The ‘carceral conditions’ frame allows us to deconstruct boundaries erected over more than half a century of writing the history of the USSR that have maintained artificial distinctions between the victims and impacts of different punishment modalities. In the article, we follow the example of the Stanford Holocaust Geographies Project in combining quantitative and textual data with the spatial analytical tools of geovisualisation to reveal the patterns of events as the Stalinist repressive apparatus extended its reach across Soviet space. In fixing the geolocation of carceral institutions and layering the resultant pattern with different types of qualitative and quantitative information in the same visual space, we hope to counter some of the myths and generalizations that exist in the literature about the geography of Soviet gulag. We use the case study of Perm’ region in the Urals to highlight the spatiality of the production of the material landscape of repression in one region. Our aim is to position the USSR in the now substantial geographical literature discussing the twentieth century history of crimes against humanity and genocide and to suggest to historians that the geovisualisation of data can add a new dimension their studies of the Stalin period.