Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile by Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck (review)

This is the first volume of oral histories of Gulag survivors to appear in English. Western scholars conducted the interviews during the decade or more following the collapse of the Soviet Union, most often with men and women who had endured time in prisons, labor camps, or exile and faced the challenge of relating their experiences from a much earlier time in their lives, when they were children or young adults. As the authors acknowledge, these oral histories can sound fragmentary and disjointed, even though the interviewers attempted to produce more chronologically coherent narratives. The one-time prisoners found themselves engaging in free association, as relating one camp experience led to the memory of another, while they also recalled traumatic events that followed the arrest of parents and then their own, and the inevitable prisoner-related themes of constant hunger, transfers, forced labor, inadequate medical care, and relations with other prisoners, particularly with hardened criminals, and the dangers they posed.

The full extent of Stalin's forced labor system has been studied for decades. Based on access to archives and a long list of memoirs, writers and scholars have described a system of unimaginable dimensions, involving millions of prisoners scattered across an enormous land mass with large concentrations of prisoners in remote areas of the country, where they cut timber or worked in mines to extract the country's natural resources. Sita Stepanovna Balashina was one of those prisoners. Interviewed at the age of ninety-two in June 2004, she cut timber in the Urals for many years, even after her official release. "I spent my whole life in the woods," she recalled—each pair of prisoners had to cut seven cubic meters of wood each day, a heavy quota that determined how much they were entitled to eat (24).

At least in this modest sample of prisoners, almost all of them had been arrested for belonging to vulnerable categories of people and not for a particular criminal or politically subversive act. They were Crimean Tatars or peasants forced from their private holdings. One woman had studied German and had survived the German occupation of Kiev—she was arrested for being a spy. The husband of another prisoner had lived in Switzerland before returning to Russia to fight with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, only to be arrested in 1935. Another's parents had come to the Soviet Union from Romania out of ideological solidarity, while his mother's relatives had gone to the United States; that was enough to condemn the parents to death and consign their young son to a special orphanage for children of "enemies of the people" (129). As Giuli Fedorovna Tsivirko related, she was "ethnically Tatar, looked Japanese, and was married to a Jew." "Thus, she was foreign, (not quite Russian)," the authors observe, "on three different counts, and therefore, not regarded as a loyal Soviet citizen" (88).

Valeria Gerlin suffered a similar fate. Her father had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party, engaging in violence against the tsarist autocracy. But once the Bolsheviks gained power he became a high-ranking secret police official. At one point, dispatched to Latvia and then Germany, he specialized in foreign intelligence work. The family enjoyed a spacious apartment in central Moscow, even employing a full-time nanny to look over Valeria when she was a youngster. Her parents were arrested during the Great Terror of 1937-1938; they were sentenced to "ten years without right of correspondence," a cynical euphemism for capital punishment, and her father was executed (156). Valeria endured years in special orphanages for children of enemies of the people, or units, as such children were often called in the heartless, bureaucratic language of Stalin's kingdom.

Their time in the Gulag haunted these prisoners and their families. Even after Stalin's death, when the regime began the wholesale...