A book can never be completed without support and assistance from many sources. I would especially like to thank my doctoral adviser and friend, Amir Weiner, for his patience, valuable advice, and critique at every stage of the project. The final revisions would have never been finished without the expertise and advice of my mentor, colleague, and best friend at George Mason University, Rex Wade. Finally, special thanks goes to my graduate school colleague and longtime friend Andrew Jenks, who has challenged and sharpened my thinking over many years.
My research and writing was generously supported by Stanford University’s Department of History, George Mason University’s Department of History, the Anatole Mazour fund, the International Research Exchanges Board, the Giles Whiting Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Consortium in International Peace and Cooperation coordinated by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Virginia E. Hazel Research Leave fund at George Mason University, and the Allen and Gwen Nelson Junior Faculty Research fund at George Mason University. Thanks also to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of the http://gulaghistory.org Web site, which now houses many documents used in this study.
Alma Sultangalieva, Kaidar Aldazhumanov, Zhambyl Artykbaev, and Diusetai Shaimukhanov were absolutely critical in generously smoothing the path to archival access in Kazakhstan. I am especially grateful to the underpaid and overworked staff of all the Russian and Kazakhstani archives used in the present study. Thanks also to the library and archives at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace—a resource without parallel.
Stephen Kotkin graciously offered valuable advice at the project’s earliest stages. Numerous other colleagues have provided intellectual critique and emotional support. My thanks to Norman Naimark, Terrence Emmons, Robert Crews, Katherine Jolluck, Lynne Viola, Claudia Verhoeven, Steven Harris, Matthew Romaniello, Charles Lipp, Cynthia Hooper, Miriam Dobson, Margaret Paxson, Yuri Slezkine, Elizabeth Wood, Jehanne Gheith, Pamela Kachurin, Golfo Alexopoulos, Ron Suny, Alexandru Lesanu, Eric Lohr, Richard Stites, Michael David-Fox, David Nordlander, Paula Michaels, Liz Tarlow, Penny Skalnik, Elizabeth Wood, Vladimir Brovkin, Stuart Finkel, Paul Stronski, and Ann Livschiz. The anonymous readers for Princeton University Press offered challenging and helpful critique.
Special appreciation to all those who got me involved in the public and digital history of the Gulag, and helped me learn how to present the topic to a general audience. I hope this has found its way into my book. Thanks to Louis Hutchins, Marty Blatt, Viktor Shmyrov, Tatiana Kursina, Oleg Trushnikov, Roy Rosenzweig, Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, Elena Razlogova, Stephanie Hurter, Gwen White, Anastasia Mikheeva, Sheila Brennan, Jeremy Boggs, Mikhail Vinokur, and David Hosford.
Participants in Stanford’s Russian and East European history workshop read drafts of several chapters and offered valuable advice. Various parts of the text benefited from the participants in the Washington, DC, Russian history workshop as well as from workshops and conferences at the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, the School of Slavic and East European Studies at University College London, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California at Berkeley, Miami University in Ohio, the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the University of Hawaii.
From the first day to the final printing, the assistance of the staff of the history departments at Stanford and George Mason was crucial. Special thanks goes to Monica Wheeler, Gertrud Pacheco, and Lynn Kaiser at Stanford, and Laura McCloskey, Sharon Bloomquist, Susie LeBlanc, and Carrie Grabo at George Mason.
The responsibility for the content is, of course, entirely my own.
Finally, thanks to my parents and my wife, Erika, for their personal support; to my two daughters, Julia and Emma; to the Don, the Doc, and the Bird for laughter unending; to Ron Shults for fostering in me a love of books; and to Vitalii and Iuliia Kapinos for the special friendship that made my time in Karaganda better than bearable.