Books by St Antony's Fellows

The Damascus Events is a project that has been 35 years in gestation.  I first came across the material that inspired the book as a doctoral student in 1989, two years before I completed my PhD and took up my Oxford post.  On that fateful day in the National Archives in Washington, DC, I rescued from oblivion over a decade’s worth of reports from the first US vice-consul to Damascus.

Entirely hand-written, in Arabic, in antique notebooks, the Archivists had no way of identifying the records which had gathered dust since they were first repatriated from Damascus sometime in the first half of the twentieth century.  The reports began in 1859, just one year prior to a devastating massacre in the Christian quarters of Damascus, and continued for over a decade afterwards, documenting the city’s reconstruction.

The vice-consul was a brilliant intellectual named Mikhayil Mishaqa who is recognized as one of the leading lights of the Arabic literary renaissance.  It was the greatest archival discovery of my career.  Over the intervening years I have added to the Mishaqa material through archival research in Britain, France, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, but kept putting the project aside to write other books – The Arabs in 2009, The Fall of the Ottomans in 2015.  It was thus very gratifying to finally sit down and write the Damascus book all these years later.  It is, no doubt, a different book from what I would have written twenty years ago.  In that sense, I am glad I waited.

Professor Eugene Rogan

Stalin’s labour camps – the notorious Gulag system – were places of injustice, suffering, and mass mortality. The Gulag exploited prisoners, forcing them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, 18 million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness.

It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in these camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses, and paramedics – about 40% of whom were themselves prisoners.

While scholars of the Gulag have long been aware that medical facilities existed in the camps and knew about their work through some of the most vivid prisoner memoirs, they have avoided systematic study of Gulag medicine. Explaining the paradox of medical care in places of mass morbidity and mortality was daunting; and the great chronicler of the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had simply dismissed Gulag medicine as complicit with Stalinist inhumanity.

In The Gulag Doctors I set out to understand the people who worked in the camp hospitals. Reading biographies and memoirs by doctors, paramedics, and nurses, and comparing what they experienced with what the archives of local and central Gulag administrators recorded, I sought to look beyond Solzhenitsyn’s condescension at how this service functioned and evolved. Travelling to Gulag-built cities like Magadan and Ukhta, I discovered how local historians and museum curators hail these prisoner-medics as founders of their cities’ healthcare services.

What became apparent as I researched the lives of medical workers, like Nina Savoeva, a young graduate physician who in 1940 ‘chose’ to work in the Magadan camps as a freely contracted employee of the Gulag, or Lev Sokolovsky, a naval psychiatrist arrested in 1940 who established psychiatric care for the prisoners of Ukhta, was that Gulag medicine was not as detached from civilian Soviet medicine as Solzhenitsyn claimed. Rooting their careers in the broad sweep of Soviet medical history and investigating the ties between Gulag and ‘free’ Soviet healthcare, became a focal theme of this book. My book thus offers a history of Soviet medical values and medical practices – a field that remains poorly understood.

The Gulag Doctors also illuminates the lives and experience of an occupational group in the camps who contended with two forms of power: the ‘sovereign power’ of the camp commandants and bureaucrats, and the ‘disciplinary power' of the medical world. Doctors, whether prisoner or free, in Gulag hospitals and clinics walked a fine line between what camp bosses expected and what their medical training dictated.

Like geologists, engineers, and other experts hired by or imprisoned in the camps, medical workers contributed to the construction of new cities and industries in remote regions over a quarter century of the Stalin era. I describe how the memory of their contributions to building new Soviet cities in Russia’s Far North and Far East is celebrated today. Local memory of the Gulag doctors makes a troubling but fascinating contribution to the ways in which cities like Magadan, Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Ukhta remember their penal roots.

Professor Dan Healey, Emeritus Fellow

Not yet another history of the Russian Revolution, eh? Well, I hope the book has something new to say about a year that transformed what could and did happen around the world for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

I started from a feeling that too many accounts underplay the impact of the First World War, and my aim was to give due space to the exceptional strains that the protracted conflict with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans had on the political, social and economic conditions in the empire of Nicholas II. Without Russia’s entry into the war, there probably would still have been revolution in the Russian capital, but it would not have inevitably turned out to be the earthquake that happened between February and October 1917.   And that meant that I wanted to look not just at the Imperial court and the Duma opposition, but also at how so-called ordinary people reacted to and coped with – or failed to cope with – the terrible hardships inflicted by the wartime campaigns.

Another of the book’s purposes was to bring to light the rationales motivating the ruling groups from Tsar Nicholas’s cabinet to Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional and finally to the Bolshevik party dictatorship. As far as I know, no previous author has scrutinised the minutes of all three administrations. Lots of documents were already available but neglected before the fall of Soviet communism in 1991, and I collected more records in subsequent years.   Not everything that a minister or a commissar did was senseless. Moreover, many of the difficulties faced by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin during and after the Civil War had already confronted the country’s rulers in some way or another in 1914-1917.  What emerges is something that I have always thought: namely that however dictatorial a Russian ruler has been, Russia remained and will remain an extremely difficult state and society to rule.

Allied to this was my objective to examine historical sources of personal experience.   Traditionally this has been achieved by turning to memoirs, usually written many years afterwards. Russian archives are now practically closed to foreign scholars. But the tin is not yet hermetically sealed. Diaries are unusually useful in showing how people at the time – not just the politicians – thought about what was happening in the ageing Russian Empire or the nascent Soviet Union. The judgements in them on Nicholas II, Kerensky and Lenin were always perceptive. They brought home to me that most of the populace in that period held themselves back from political or military involvement if they could help it. Each of them also had complex attitudes to what was occurring. Nothing could be more wrong than the idea that Russians and other national groups had stereotypical outlooks. Ordinariness is not the same as simplicity or stupidity.

I wrote this book to get the Russian Revolution out of my system. As usual, the research and the writing only served to make me think that there is so much to learn about and, more especially, to learn from 1914-1924.

Professor Robert Service