ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with questions of comparative study relative to the issue of the singularity of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Scholars and others have, for various reasons, been likening Auschwitz and the Gulag since the 1940s, and the comparison has become “canonical” since its powerful employment by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951. Both Auschwitz and the Gulag perpetrated monstrous acts of inhumanity and it is the recognition of this fact that leads to the intuitive assertions regarding their commonality. The Gulag can be identified as the endpoint of a spectrum of Soviet labor exploitation rather than as a discontinuous and radical alternative to the “normal” Stalinist social order. In the Soviet universe of camps, “Apart from ‘politicals’ who were invariably sentenced to a minimum spell of ten years, nearly always extended, the other detainees spent an average of five to six years in a camp, if they survived that long.”.
