Abstract
The scope of the Gulag—the Soviet system of incarceration and internal exile—is immense yet relatively little known. Millions of people died in the Gulag, and millions more had their lives radically disrupted by arrest, exile, or hard labor in camps or in the labor army. The effects continue to be evident in people’s memories, in fiction and other forms of art, and in many social phenomena, including people’s reactions to government.
Of the 350 people, 100 died … They went around the houses on a horse every day, on a horse they go around, collecting the bodies … They couldn’t cope with all of them. There was this special, this big barrack, it was called the sickhouse. They put all the people infected with typhus in there, gathered them up. It held 70, and it was full up. Full up. And those bodies, down below, they put them in a stack. And in March, it was already getting warm, they had put them in a stack, they were lying in this big stack, they dragged them all out of the houses and brought them out from that sickhouse. Well, they piled up a hundred people there. And they made us dig—I took part myself—dig a mass grave.
Robert Avgustovich Ianke, commenting on a 1943 typhus epidemic in a forced labor settlement near Perm
I had felt that I was an awful person since I couldn’t tell anyone about being in prison, or prove that I had been there, and also because I signed [the false confessions]. I punished myself, I didn’t stand up for myself and then I wondered, why didn’t I go abroad [and escape the Gulag]? Then I saw people here from other countries, how they acted. If they are hot, then they take something off … but if I was hot, then God forbid anyone should know that I was hot. I would die but I wouldn’t tell anyone that I wanted to eat.
Nina Ivanovna Rodina, describing her attitude after her release from prison in 1953, until the late 1980s
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Notes
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 2.
The secret police (then OGPU) began controlling a large percentage of the prison system in 1928–1930; in 1931 they began to oversee “special settlers.” Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 50.
Other categories of exiles existed, but, unlike the special settlers, they were neither subject to forced labor nor under the surveillance of the secret police. J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997), 55.
Exact figures will probably never be known. According to NKVD documents, nearly 1.4 million of those arrested were convicted, and more than half of them executed. See J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–39 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 588–89; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 289–90.
Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalins Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), xxxi.
Gulag Boss, the memoir of a camp official, provides an important new perspective on these officials’ lives, making it clear that choices made by Gulag guards were often made under intense pressure. Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, trans. Deborah Kaple (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalins Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (New York: New York University Press, 1994), passim; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London: Pimlico, 2008), xviii; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 590–94; Steven Rosefielde, “Incriminating Evidence: Excess Deaths and Forced Labor under Stalin—A Final Reply to Critics,” Soviet Studies vol. 39, no. 2 (1987): 292, 304; Stephen Wheatcroft, “More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Soviet Studies vol. 42, no. 2 (1990): 355–59; 366.
Nanci Adler, “Return of the Repressed,” in Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds., On Living Through Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2004), 215.
Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27.
Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalins Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 137.
Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova, “After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union,” in Luisa Passerini, ed., International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Vol. 1, Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89.
Stephen Jones supports this point: “Soviet propaganda creates a chasm between official and popular reality. Under these conditions, official history, as part of official reality, becomes suspect, and personal memory becomes the ‘truth.’ In Western pluralist systems, history as conveyed by historians and the media, is seen, on the whole, as more trustworthy than personal memories.” Stephen F. Jones, “Old Ghosts and New Chains: Ethnicity and Memory in the Georgian Republic,” in Rubie S. Watson, ed., Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 153–54.
Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 48.
Vieda Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (New York: Routledge, 1998), xii, xiii.
Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, trans. Yuri Slezkine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–4
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “Innocent Victims and Heroic Defenders: Children and the Siege of Leningrad,” in James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 288.
See, for example, Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, trans. Keith Gessen (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005); Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York: Penguin, 2000) and Ivan’s War. Stephen Jones also alludes to this aspect of memory in the USSR. Writing on Georgian national identity, he suggests that the USSR’s attempt to destroy certain kinds of memory (such as those of the national minorities) actually made those memories stronger: there was a powerful reason to remember. Jones, “Old Ghosts,” 160–64.
Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 2.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60.
Adi Kunstman has recently called for scholarship of the Gulag to “provide a more careful and informed reading of the memoirs’ silences, and question the very formations of humanness in the memoirs.” Adi Kuntsman, “‘With a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag,” Slavic Review vol. 68, no. 2 (2009): 328. Although the oral histories presented here rarely directly address the questions of “disgust” and maintenance of boundaries that Kuntsman describes, they do provide important additional perspectives on the memoirs’ silences.
Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), x–xi, 15, 57, and passim.
Solzhenitsyn conducted interviews of Gulag survivors before the 1980s as did Irina Sherbakova. Although they did not publish transcripts of these interviews, their works provide sources that can be referred to in thinking about how time period affects the shaping of memory and narrative. See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Passerini, International Yearbook of Oral History, 103–15. Readers may also want to look at the post-perestroika interviews (in Russian) online at orlandofiges.com.
This is one of the central arguments in Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Examples include: Adler, Gulag Survivor; Applebaum, Gulag; Barnes, Death and Redemption; Figes, The Whisperers; Skultans, Testimony; Cathy Frierson and Simeon Vilensky, Children of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
Iosif Segal, “Mnogolikaya Vishera,” in Zemlya Rodnaya. Vishera. Zametki, ocherki, stat’i (Perm’, 1995), 85, cited in Judith Pallot, “Forced Labour for Forestry: The Twentieth Century History of Colonisation and Settlement in the North of Perm’ Oblast’,” Europe-Asia Studies vol. 54, no. 7 (2002): 1056.
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© 2011 Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck
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Gheith, J.M., Jolluck, K.R. (2011). Introduction. In: Gulag Voices. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116283_1
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