Guillaume Minea-Pic is a Ph.D. candidate in History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence and at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His Ph.D. thesis explores the global origins of the Gulag in the pre-Stalin period and interrogates concentration camps' role in early Soviet culture. While in Oxford, under Prof. Dan Healy's supervision, he is working on the Soviet Secret Police studies and approach towards criminality and on soviet penitentiary science, forensic studies, and criminology in a comparative and global perspective.