{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01870748299319728, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004251700680272109, 'mean_word_length': 5.005102040816326, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Convicts and Concentration Camps

At first glance it is not at all clear why the readers of Kritika should be particularly interested in these books. True, Clare Anderson’s edited volume contains a lucid essay by Sarah Badcock and Judith Pallot on convicts and penal colonies in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which is an excellent introduction to the subject; otherwise, neither Aidan Forth’s monograph nor the other contributions to Anderson’s volume seem to have anything in particular to say to historians of Russia and Eurasia. Looming over both these books, however, is the question of how far the forms of incarceration developed by liberal European states at home and abroad before World War I were precursors of the camps that came to define the history of 20th-century Europe: Nazi labor and extermination camps and the Soviet Gulag (though not—and I will return to this—the vast system created by Communist China). In their essay Badcock and Pallot are absolutely clear that the most obvious predecessor of the Gulag—the Siberian exile system under the tsars—was very different in both scale and kind.1 Between the 16th century and the October Revolution,