"Making Sense of the Gulag: Analyzing and Interpreting the Function of the Stalinist Camp System," no. 50 in the PERSA series, has been revised and reissued. The author is Simon Ertz, a PhD student in History at Stanford. The paper suggests that approaches focusing on administrative agents and their policies are indispensable in identifying the essential functions of the Stalinist camp system. To illustrate the point, it presents three interrelated methods suited for research in this direction. Dwelling on the insights gained in the process, it demonstrates that the Stalinist camp system, while operating within a set of politically and ideologically defined parameters, functioned largely according to economic principles, and concludes by explaining why this is not a paradox. The paper is available free of charge from www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa.