Hoover research fellow Paul Gregory delivered a keynote address at an international conference on the “History of Stalinism: Forced Labor in the USSR” held in Moscow during October 28–29. The conference, sponsored by the Russian Archival Service, the Memorial Society, and the Yeltsin Foundation, brought together researchers from Russia, Italy, France, and the United States. Professor Gregory spoke on “The Gulag: From Statistics to Tragedy” in which he presented results of his research in the Hoover Institution’s Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State Microfilm Collection, including new findings on the size and scope of the Gulag system and on the characteristics of Gulag inmates. In his presentation, Gregory, noting that some 30 million Russian adults went through the broadly defined Gulag, wondered how a society could bear the burden of almost a quarter of the population having been affected by the Gulag system.
