Article
Ricardo Dudda
In the meteorologist, Olivier Rolin tells life in the gulag of the head of the Urss Meteorological Service, Alekséi Feodósievich Vangengheim.Falsely accused of "sabotaging the fight against drought by disorganizing the network of observatories and falsifying their forecasts," Vangengheim is sent to a field in the Solovkí Islands.There life is hell and, at the same time, an intellectual sanctuary.He is surrounded by professors, musicians, poets and scientists.There is a theater, a well -assorted library, conferences, concerts.«During his stay in the Solovkí, he reads both the universal geography of Elisée Reclus and the Cartuja of Parma or the History of Tom Jones de Fielding, and even in July 1937, the first two volumes in search of lost time,« very much ofFashion at the time, ”he says,” says Rolin.Obviously, this cultural offer was not an award: under the paranoid logic of Stalinism, these intellectuals had deviated from their course and should be educated again.
Almost 90 years later, the presence of those "enemies of the people" is still noticed in the region.An academic article recently published by Gerhard Toews, from the New Economic School in Moscow, and Pierre-Louis Vézina, from the King's College University in London, demonstrates that the regions where these "enemies of the people" were imprisoned still take advantage of that migrationForced.Following the studies on the influence of slavery in the economy and development of Latin America or the United States, the authors discovered that the areas where there were fields with the greatest number of "enemies of the people" are today richer and have better education than other areasclose.As explained in The Economist, «an increase of ten percentage points in the proportion of inmates who were enemies of the people corresponded to earnings of 8% in salaries;of 23% in income per worker;of 23% in the proportion of companies in which the average worker went to university;and 21% in the force of the light emitted at night per person, a way to measure economic production ».
Many inmates were executed, as is the case of Vangengheim, but many others not only survived, but stayed in the region and formed families.Sometimes they were released, but they were not allowed to return to their cities of origin.According to a 2016 survey, the population that lived near these fields of prisoners used to have relatives who had been "enemies of the people".42% of them had gone to university, compared to 31% of individuals who did not have relatives of the Gulag.
In recent years, economists such as Branko Milanovic or Thomas Piketty have studied the effects of education and intellectual inheritance on the concentration of wealth and inequality.The study of Toews and Vézina is a fascinating natural experiment on those effects, and also on the unexpected positive consequences of Stalin's repressive policies, which did not precisely sought the deconcentration of wealth when it sent so many intellectuals to Siberia.
