On December 9, 2005, the editors and publisher of the seven-volume The History of Stalin's Gulag were awarded the 2005 Silver Medal for Human Rights by Vladimir Lukin, plenipotentiary for human rights in the Russian Federation.
The publication of The History of Stalin's Gulag was hailed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a decisive and momentous step in the systematic shedding of light on communist repression.
In remarks presented in Moscow at the launching of the seven-volume documentary series on October 30, 2005, Lukin declared: "If there was something this year that was an achievement in Russian culture, history, or generally in Russian civilization, it is these seven volumes. With their publication, further discussion as to what constituted the Bolshevik regime is no longer necessary."
The History of Stalin's Gulag was published by the Russian Political Encyclopedia Publishing House in cooperation with the Federal Archival Agency of the Russian Federation and the Hoover Institution. The editorial board, consisting of eminent Russian and American scholars, includes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Osip Chubar'ian, Iurii Afanasiev, Robert Conquest, Terence Emmons, and Paul Gregory, to name just a few.
Documents included in The History of Stalin's Gulag were obtained by the Hoover Archives as microfilm copies in the 1990s, along with other documents from Soviet archives; they attracted scholars from all over the world to the Hoover Archives.
In 2002 a group of scholars, directed by Professor Paul Gregory, began a research project based on that microfilm collection in an effort to gain a basic understanding of the way the Soviet economic, political, and social system worked. The project's research fields have been designed around the strengths of the Hoover Institution's archival holdings in areas such as forced labor, party regulation, and audit.
