Forced Labour and the Need for Motivation: Wages and Bonuses in the Stalinist Camp System

Leonid Borodkin and Simon Ertz
Additional contact information
Simon Ertz: Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2006, USA

Comparative Economic Studies, 2005, vol. 47, issue 2, 418-436

Abstract: Our findings in this paper challenge some stereotypes of the exploitation of forced labour in the Soviet Union during Stalinism, just as Abram Bergson's 1944 study on the structure of Soviet wages challenged the stereotypes of that time. We find that even in the Stalinist camp system, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined overt coercion with motivation through material incentives, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on the latter. By the time the camp system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, one major distinction between forced and free labour had been blurred: prisoners were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson. Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 418–436. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100102

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/journal/v47/n2/pdf/8100102a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/journal/v47/n2/full/8100102a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:compes:v:47:y:2005:i:2:p:418-436

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/41294/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Comparative Economic Studies is currently edited by Nauro Campos

More articles in Comparative Economic Studies from Palgrave Macmillan, Association for Comparative Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().