where did that develop? >> guest: i don't have -- i could only guess. maybe it was watching a lot of war movies as a kid and wondering what on earth would make someone rush a machine gun 'em placement? or in the case of the civil war formation, to walk out at a very measured pace into something davis. a pair of psychologists in the second world war said it all boiled down to a simple question: what makes a rational perp actor irrationally, and tht question has formed all the research i've done in my career as a historian. >> host: what's the photo on the front of your book? >> guest: the photo is an american g.i. from the last year of the second world war somewhere in the european theater, and we felt that it captured the profound isolation that many soldiers said they experienced amidst the dispersion of battle when they were physically separated from their own comrades. >> host: yes, your book is about

soldiers, but were you able to draw any conclusions or similarities between generals washington, grant and eisenhower? >> guest: because this is a sort of ground-up look at combat and it focus mostly on the soldiers in the rank and file, soldiers you probably haven't heard of, you know, soldiers who didn't win any fame or acclaim, but who served, you know, dutifully, usually heroically and who made up the biddle blocks of the -- building blocks of the army. the leaders especially at the very top level of command intrude into that story surprisingly infrequently. but there is a constant reflection that goes on among the men in the ranks about who is leading them, what qualified them to lead them, what they look for in a leader. and here, too, you see the sort of practical fact that the

battlefield exerts enormous influence on what soldiers look for in a combat leader or. in the 18th and 19th century, soldiers are packed in, they can see what their comrades are doing. a soldier who's standing next to them whose brains are dashed out by a shell and smeared all over a comrade's tunic, there was an e enormous and, i think, well-founded concern that panic would spread like a contagion in the ranks and that if a few soldiers were seen to panic, it would spread very quickly. and so many of the combat officers who have garnered the most respect were soldiers and leaders who could at least on the outside appear to be unruffled by the teenage and the chaos -- by the teenager and the chaos around. who stood tall, who did not flinch by the gunfire, who had a booming voice and a reassuring stature and who could embody the

kind of behavior that the soldiers themselves were supposed to display. in the 20th century because the troops are so spread out, because they're camouflaged, because they're off out of view of their leaders, it was much more important for an effective combat officer to stand up and, you know, to physically model the kind of courageous behavior. most soldiers, especially experienced soldiers, understood that was just suicideally reckless. and so there are very few examples of soldiers looking, you know, first and foremost to a leader who says, follow me. in fact, there's a, an anecdote that turns up in the book where a bunch of experienced soldiers were confronted a brand new second lieutenant, and they're cowering behind a sand berm. and the knew lieutenant says on the -- the new lieutenant says follow me over that lip, and on

the count of five their lieutenant springs up and is immediately raked with machine gunfire, and the knowledgeable veterans have hung back. what they did tend to value in the 20th century was competence. leaders who knew the business of warfare, knew the business of leadership, knew how to use a happen, knew how to spot dead areas of ground, knew how to outflank an enemy machine gun position. it's very interesting to me to find examples of, you know, junior officers or ncos who in the mid 20th century who would tremble or cry in combat. it's not completely unheard of to find a junior officer who might foul himself when the shelling started and who at the same time maintained a reputation for effectiveness in combat. because here was a soldier who, clearly, knew what he was doing and had survived for months. that kind of rep aation is just

unthinkable in the 19 -- reputation is just unthinkable in the 19th century. it would be impossible for a regimental captain to have fouled himself in front of his soldiers and still enjoy any credibility as a leader. >> host: christopher hamner is an associate professor of history at george mason university what do you teach? >> guest: i teach mostly american military history. >> host: "enduring battles: american soldiers in three wars, 1776-1945." published by the university of kansas press. we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. and now,. >> and now an interview from george mason university. >> host: depth and redemption is the name of the book, the gulag and the shaping of soviet

society is the title. stephen a. barnes is the author. first of all, professor barnes, what is a gulag? >> guest: the gulag is -- in short -- well, it has two meetings. it's an acronym for a bureaucratic institution. but, of course, it's been used much more generally to mean primarily labor camps, but also a system of interimly-exiled people and some prisons as well. in the large part, we're talking about the soviet penal system, but also a system that held political prisoners in the soviet union. >> host: when and how were they developed? >> guest: the first lay wore camps -- labor camps start very early in the soviet period. lenin himself talks about the need to put the enemies of the revolution into concentration camps. and they start playing around after the revolution in 1917 with ideas of using no, forced r at various economic projects,

but also using labor as was common in penology at this time as a method of trying to reform or transform criminals. but the real expansion of the gulag to what we kind of know it as, this huge, multimillion prisoner institution, really waits for the death of lenin and the rise of stalin and his so-called revolution from above. so as he is in the midst of what they call collectivizing agriculture which is basically taking land away from the peasant owners and turning it over over to the state and forcing the peasants to become, essentially, state employees working on what had been their land, well, of course, there was a loot of resistance to this -- a lot of resistance to this. so they deported a substantial number of peasants internally, so sent them off to siberia, central asia, and also arrested large numbers of people. so this was the real expansion of the gulag into this huge institution. now, when does the gulag end?

it's a good question to think about. as a massive institution that held especially these political prisoners, but also criminals, we really see it start to come to an end after stalin dies in 1953. so by the late 1950s, there are relatively few political prisoners left in the soviet union. still maybe 10,000 or so. this is not a small number, but compared to what it had been in the stalin era, these are numbers that are quite small. but forced labor and forced labor camps continue throughout the soviet period, and they hold primarily after that point hardened criminals. >> host: professor barnes, who did stalin send to the gulag? >> stalin sent a wide variety of people to the gulag, and i think we can, essentially, think of three groups of individuals. first, we can think of those that we might understand as political prisoners. these are those who were understood by the stalinist regime to be in opposition to that regime. now, of course, a great many of

these people had never done anything oppositional in their life, and they might have been caught up in the midst of a denunciation from somebody who wanted their apartment, or maybe someone saw them spill a cup of coffee and took this as evidence of some kind of terrorist intent against stalin. so this is one big group of prisoners. but the other that we always have to keep in mind with the gulag and one of the things, i think, makes the gulag quite interesting and unusual in history is that it also held the criminals of the soviet system, exactly the kind of people that are held in penal systems around the world. and then the third big group which i think you don't classify as political or as criminal is a group of people who were caught up in some really harsh legal campaigns against very petty theft, against absenteeism from work. there are a number of decrees according to which, you know, you take a few potatoes from a

field in the midst of a famine to try to feed your family, and you get seven years in a forced labor camp. or you show up to work habitually late, and you get time in a labor camp because this is what they call shirking the duty to work, right? ..

>> guest: prisoners were allowed to not work for a day. it was a place that was marked by violence, among prisoners themselves, bodyguards and that prisoners. it was a place in which prisoners had way too little food to survive. it was a place in which sexual violence was rampant. every imaginable thing that could make one's life an absolute living hell. that's what the gulag was like. >> host: why did you focus on kazakhstan? >> guest: i was trying to do something new with this book. here we are, and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the soviet union. the soviet union was coming to him. we finally got access to official information on the

labor camp system. all of the stuff had been classified top secret. and so we start to learn that a substantial number of prisoners were released every year. this force us to really think again about what the system and what exactly it was doing. so what i wanted to be able to do was to look at the system throughout its chronology, to look at it in the multiplicity of institutions that made it up. these labor camps, exiled people, all these kind of individuals. but also make this something that is manageable in the course of a single book. the hoover institution archives at stanford university where's i national where i was a graduate student, struck a deal to microfilm the central gulag administration archives. is now available in the united states and a number of different libraries. the original agreement of this

microfilm project was for 1.5 million friends of microfilm. and exceed it. so you can imagine nobody can ever go through all of this. you have to decide as an author how are you going to come up with a project that is manageable that allows you to the store you're trying to kill. so i decided that i would do this by way of a local study, look at the bright of institutions in a given location and that would allow me to look come into the sea shape the way i went to these materials but also to get out of just miniatures that are available in moscow are now in united states is central archives. and go and look at the way that an individual camp and its commanders and its employees try to do with the demands that they were receiving from moscow. you know, there are a number of different places one can choose to do this. i chose the city of karaganda and central kazakhstan. it is today the third largest

city in kazakhstan but it's an area that was built by gulag labor's. and i chose this for a number of reasons. one, it lasted as long as the gulag lasted. it had this wide variety of institutions and it but also because, frankly, it's well below the arctic circle. a lot of these camps are located in just and possible locales. when it comes to think about sending six, seven, eight months slogging to archives in the middle of the winter, the idea of it nothing 24 hours of darkness is quite appealing. i think this has allowed me to tell a story that both grapples with what the gulag means as a whole, but then also was able to look at a specific institution and see the lives of specific individuals as they move to this institution. >> host: steve barnes, now that you're going to academic research on the gulag, how accurate and significant was the archipelago?

>> guest: as i have worked on this over the course of many, many years now, but i'm always struck by how much salt in each and you think i had all of the event she didn't have. among other things nobody was going to arrest before the work i was doing. i have access access to official information. i could write without fear. i had access to all kinds of published an true. i had access to his work. and what's amazing is in the midst of the difficulties of doing the work that he did, he is so often i. i write i in the book about an upgrade happened in a camp in june 1954. the 40 days. and these prisoners managed to kick the cars and the gulag administration out of this camps on and hold it can't go up over the course of 40 days. i was able to look at the official documentation, both

from moscow, but from the locality in kazakhstan here. and read about this up right. and he writes only fasting things. he writes about the prisoners using kites, flying kites to try to drop leaflets on the local population to quickly find? the prisoners were using kites to try to drop leaflets on the local population. he writes about the broadcasting via radio. what if i want to get into the archives? the prisoners use running water to create a very low watt essentially powerstation to power these radios to try to broadcast their message to local population largely without they can get somebody from moscow to come and look into what they saw or understood as violation of legality on the part of these local authorities. but again and again and again i found him to be correct. is not correct about everything. there certain things he simply couldn't know because of the limitation of what had access

to. answer his phone number on these kind of details incidents where he can talk to participant in them. where he was wrong he was wrong about the total number of prisoners. he had this number higher than what it does. but how could have possibly known? how can you extrapolate from your experience and from talking to the number of people into estimating the size of institution that we now know was over 5 million individuals. so there's some things like that he was incorrect about but i'm far more astounded at how much he got right than the few errors that what they're. >> host: how many of these camps were there? who ran them? how autonomous? >> guest: the exact number of camps is something we can't really know, because it depends of what your definition of a camp is. now, when you think they can't you might think of a zone is surrounded by walls with a

barbed wire, this kind of thing. but if you're talking about, then everything that was officially in camp, in terminology has a huge number of sub camps. it's these sub camps that were these individuals don't. so we are talking about thousands of these individual locales, certainly. but the official number of camps, a prison different times which are often talking less than 100 which makes it sound far less extensive than what it was. these camps were run by the soviet secret police. these variety of acronym names that it had, but, of course, all these forerunners, more well known kgb. they were run by these institutions. being the head of an individual camp might have been a position that somebody would have wanted, at least as a steppingstone to something better within the camp system. but there was of course tremendous danger of being involved in any of this.

if the argument escapes from the camp that you run you could wind up arrested yourself. the commander in the 1930s as a rest in december 1938 and is executed for allowing too many escapes, and for a decline in discipline among the laborers. i mean, it's a frightening position to be in. but if you go down one more level and you look at the employees like the armed guards, not a position of the most people would want to have. when it's 40 below out, it's 40 below out even if you're a card and your dress a lot better than a prisoner. but you are still outside in this kind of weather. and again, he faced the possibility of criminal prosecution if one of their prisoners escape on you. so they have to provide tremendous inducements to get individuals to take these positions. they would provide salary boosts or they would promise you go and work your for two years and we will let you choose your next position. so you can return to your home or something like this.

they often turn, demobilize red army soldiers into world war ii, to working in, and the soviet union you really had a true free choice in terms of the job you're going to have to. so sometimes they told you this was your job, and you said yes or and you did it and you try to keep your head kind of low and not be noticed. >> host: when did the gulag system collapse and how? >> guest: well, the gulag reaches its largest in terms of its population in the very late stalin years. talking about after world war ii, late 1940s, early 1950s. in march of 1953 and stalin dies. and literally three weeks after his death they announced a massive amnesty that will release well over 1 million prisoners, nearly half of the total labor camp population at that time. and they did this because they had come to understand that this

was not a financial benefit to the soviet state. it was causing an incredible amounts of money to run the system. the laborers, they were very unskilled labor in these horrible conditions. you had to provide in at least some amount of food to try to keep them alive to do this labor. you have a whole system of circulation of classified material. you had to pay for the guards, the administered come all these kind of things so they understood this was costing them tremendously. what they did, this was sort of the notorious head of the secret police who goes to the center committee after stalin dies and says look, we have lots of people here who are not really a danger to the soviet state. they are people have fallen afoul. and he says we have to change what we're doing here. he proposes this amnesty that were released people with relatively short sentences committed for what they called

counterrevolutionary, we think of nonpolitical offenses. and he also says if you don't change these laws, that we will soon have this many prisoners all over again. so this is the beginning of the decline of the gulag system. then this all gets caught up in the midst of what is often called desalinization. s. khrushchev eventually comes, becomes the supreme leader in the soviet union, and part of his strategies in power was to move away a little bit from the worst of the stalinist violence. he starts a process of releasing the political prisoners. and this will take place at last half of the 1950s. but the gulag in terms of thinking of it as a forced labor camp system, it never collapse. it never goes away in the soviet period. it turned its attention almost exclusively towards the hardened criminals.

there are still a number of prisoners are held throughout the soviet period, but accountability small part of what the gulag system does. and, frankly, if you look at the former soviet union today, and you look at some of the different locations there, you will find that using prisoners in forced labor is something that hasn't gone away entirely even today host mac you're watching the tv on c-span2, and we are on the campus of george mason university in fairfax, virginia, talking with some of the professors here at gmu who have also written books. record we talked with history professor steven barnes. "death and redemption: the gulag and the shaping of modern society." professor barnes, as far as you can tell have you done our research in the soviet gulag archives and anybody else since they have been opened? >> guest: i don't know if i were to add in more than anybody else. that are other scholars have

been doing work and there are a number of really good russian scholars have been doing work since the late 1980s. but i certainly am one of those have done the most. as terrific, i think it's a subject we really need to know more about. there are a lot of young scholars that are coming along today both in the united states and in the former soviet union who are doing work on this today. i ran a conference at the davis center for russian eurasian studies at harvard a few years ago and we had well over 70 applications from various scholars to participate in this conference were doing the kind of research that we need to understand this system. this book, which i think is a very important contribution to this, only begins to address so many things that we need to go into a lot more depth in trying to understand. just think right about the amount of literature that is out there on the nazi concentration camp system. and there's nowhere near this

kind of information and available on the soviet labor camp system. it's something we need to know more about. we need to know more about the people who were employed by the camp system. we need to know more about these women in the camp system. we need to know more about all of these different localities that help these camps. we need a more pashtun world about the difficult camps, the different kind of laborers these prisoners perform. all of these things are really pretty critical. i'm so pleased that there's some really fine young scholars working on this today host mac "death and redemption," particularly retention, where did you come up with that for the title? >> guest: as i was to this project i was trying to come to terms with the fact that the gulag reference to very important things. one would always done was it was a place of massive death even by official statistic which are probably too low, we know in the labor camps alone, well over 1 million prisoners die in the stalin era.

in the worst years during world war ii they would be as many as 25% of all the prisoners in the camps in a given year. one out of every four per year. but we've always known this was an incredibly brutal place. what surprised us when we learned, or when they got access to official information, was the number of prisoners who were released every year. no less than 20% of the gulag population released every year in the stalin era. this is at least 150,000 prisoners every year. some years we're talking well over half of a people getting out. of that race for a lot of questions that you have to start asking but what this system in. who was getting out? how would they determine who would get out, who would not get out? did the soviets care about what these people are becoming and whether they would be dangerous to society after they got out? so what i have tried to understand the gulag as, is to think of it as an attempt by the individual prisoner to be part of that 20% that is released every year. to be part of those that don't

wind up with the death but wind up with retention. this is the origins, the title is trying to take susie both parts of this. some respects the book will be more surprising to people for the retention element, for the fact these prisoners are getting out. but you can never fully understand what the system is about, what stalin so union was about, without taking significant account of the massive number of death that is happening here. the communists under stalin didn't care that millions of people were dying. because if that's what it took us they understood it to build what they thought of as a utopian communist society. unit, so be it? what's the loss of a few million acre talk about the end of history, talking of heaven on earth. so you have to understand these things together in order to understand what the system it, what it was all about. >> host: steven barnes is associate professor of history and director of george mason's center for russian studies.

"death and redemption: the gulag and the shaping of modern society" is the book we have been talking about. thank you. >> guest: thanks very much. >> every weekend booktv of offers for eight hours of programming focus on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> karen beckwith, "political women and american democracy." how did you decide which essays to include in this work? >> my co-editors and i organize a grant from a foundation, a project on american democracy at university of notre dame that we would convene by our estimation the best scholars on women's and politics in u.s., not only in the u.s. but scholars who were working on u.s., women and politics we brought together a range of people whose research we knew well, and convened for a two-day conference at notre

dame. after which, at that conference we discussed all the manuscripts they constitute a chapter of these books, of this book. and have some commentary about it and discussion come and put together as an edited collection which camp at university press published in 2008 spent describe the role of women described in this book. >> there are several in the books let me play first what we are not doing in this book. were not liking a public policy per se. we are not looking at women in the executive because even in 2008 there were so few women in the executive, and not yet a major female candidate for the nomination for president of a major political party in the united states. women at executive level which meant research wasn't there to support a good discussion and finally we didn't address women in the judiciary. so what did we address? we looked at the behavior of women as voters, the behavior of women as candidates for office, both state and national office,

behavior of women within political parties, behavior of women once elected to national office. we also have a huge factor that look at the gendered nature of the u.s. political institutions as well as u.s. politics for women and politics in the context of comparative politics. that is, what does a situation like in u.s. compared to the rest of the world. the picture is not so pleasant actually. we have one of the least pretentious least advantageous electoral system at the national level for women. which is a single matter of plurality system with some modification. we also have only two major political parties which are informal in the internal construction, have no clear formal construction for becoming a candidate, offer very little clear structure means by which women can work the party so to speak so there are lots of

disadvantages that women have indiana state in terms of actual achieving elected office. >> in relation to the political party, as a woman voter, what are the findings related to encouraging, related to women's? >> there's interesting things that make women in fact applicable the democratic -- demographic category. there are more women. second of women have slightly higher registration rates than do men, and women turn out at higher, slightly higher percentages than demand. larger number of sub number of women combined with women heightened turnout makes for a big electoral impact. women also are disproportionately democratic. this is true across all age groups and is also true across all racial groups. so racial and ethnic groups. women's love a slight preference for the democratic party compared to men. so when we come into an

election, it things like turn and the range of issues that attract women are very important. women are more likely than men to go for the democratic presidential candidate. that's been the case since 1992. that gap has been between two percentage points the five percentage points, depending upon the such a look at. but nontheless, the democratic advantage in the electorate for the democratic party. in general, because of women. the absent members, katrina and the preference of the democratic party. the issues that seem to mobilize women and attract their vote have to do with social welfare issues, have to do with foreign policy issues and also to a certain extent so-called brown issues. but on these, very. on issues like same-sex marriage, women are much less opposed to that than are men, for example. not a huge margin but nonetheless there's a difference there. women are more concerned with foreign policy security issues,

and economic impact on women's though. and, finally, women are more concerned about social welfare issues. health care, employment, the state of the economy, education. >> with a woman candidate for president coming into the campaign, do you see those preferences changing in 2012? >> first of all, i see no female canada becoming presidential candidate in 2012. that are only two on the list, i don't see either of them being the ultimate candidate for the republican party. and on the democratic side, all things being equal, the current president barack obama will be the candidate so that will foreclose any opportunity for a

woman in that part to come forward. so i see no presidential candidates in 2012. let me to say that some polling data, and the most recent i've seen has only been from 2008 coming in very early in 2008 presidential primaries, about 87% of americans are willing to say they would vote for a qualified woman regardless of sex, that they would be as one to vote for a woman as a man. americans are more likely, more willing to vote for someone who's african-american or someone who is jewish for president than they are for a woman. and i think that number is slightly lower than had been the previous result because in 2008 there was a clear potential female candidate and that was hillary clinton on the democratic side who ultimately failed to win the nomination. >> what are some recommendations for women in that position, are

running for office? does that matter come up in book? >> we don't turn to the presidential specifically but we do look at women candidacies for lower level office. so a couple of recommendations, these are not recommendations for women's let me just make clear we only need about 4000 women nationwide to contest and win elections to have equitable representation in the senate and the house and in state houses. there are not that many elected offices of the legislative level at least that require we need 1 million qualified women. i think we can find 4000, 4500 qualified women to run. that's not the issue. the problem is not with women. it's with political parties and the unavailability of access to candidates, both of the incumbents affect. if we have, as we do, 83% of congress consisting of men, and

most of those men are incumbents it will be very, very difficult to renew openings for new candidates whether or not the candidates are women. so part has to do with political parties willingness to persuade members of congress, seated next of congress to step down, willing to support women challenge incumbents within the own parties, willing to recruit women for office. right now the so-called big money people on the republican side are trying to recruit governor christie from new jersey to enter the presidential nomination on the republican side, which he so far at least has refused to do. but there are women that might be recruited. there are some very good female governors on the republican side who might be recruited. at this point my argument is it's not a problem of women. it's the problem of parties and specifically i might add the republican party. women are represented in the democratic party everywhere over republicans. >> thank you for. >> you're welcome.

>> is there a nonfiction author or book he would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals.

>> and welcome today to a booktv on c-span2's live coverage of the texas book festival held in and around the state capital in austin. we've got about six hours of live coverage from the booktv tent ahead. here's our line appeared in just a bit you'll hear from robert morgan was written about called "lions of the west: heroes and villains of the westward expansion." after that we will do an interview with well-known historian doug brinkley about his latest book, on the alaska wilderness. in about an hour or so a panel on mexican drug cartels with ioan grillo whose book is "el narco: inside mexico's criminal insurgency," and sylvia longmire, "cartel: the coming invasion of mexico's drug wars." and we want to get your reaction to the panel during an open

phone segment. then there's a panel on the arts of nonfiction. three authors will be on that panel. then we will talk with david sobel. in about four hours and off a panel on the air of spring. three well-known authors will be on that panel. again, you have a chance to weigh in. we want to get your reaction to that panel as well. in the last panel of the day, at about five hours from now, adam winkler has written a book called gunfight, the battle over the right over the right to bear arms in america. so that's our line up today from the texas book festival in austin. as you can see, they c-span bus is here as well. we are handing out bookbags with our partner