Gulag Voices: An Anthology (review)

The term and the concept of the Gulag came to be accepted in the anglophone world through The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973–1975 by Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The editor of Gulag Voices, Anne Applebaum, received a Pulitzer prize for her book Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). In that sense, the Gulag should be widely known. Yet Applebaum is rightly concerned that “living memories of the society which created the gulag are beginning to disappear, along with the generation of people who still remember Stalin’s Soviet Union” (p. xiv). Hence this anthology of memoirs about the Gulag.

Although specialists will be familiar with most of the memoirs excerpted here, this volume presents them in a more accessible and readable way. The book contains thirteen excerpts from various publications, including five that are translated for the first time into English. Many were written by relatively famous people such as Dmitry Likhachev, Anatoly Zhigulin, Gustav Herling, Lev Kopelev, and Anatolii Marchenko. Applebaum emphasizes that even though the Soviet forced-labor camps may seem uniform and alike, the Gulag in fact was an “extraordinarily varied place” (p. viii). She selects thirteen themes to accompany the excerpts: arrests, interrogations, rapes, daily life, work, faith, abject submission, children, meetings with spouses, informers, jailers, punishment cells, and liberation (release). Each excerpt is prefaced by the editor’s helpful introduction to the author and theme. Some formerly taboo subjects are included here: gang rapes tolerated by authorities, children born in the Gulag, conjugal relations with spouses authorized by the Gulag administration, and the like.

By widely accepted definition the Gulag represents hell. Indeed, these accounts movingly relate the hellishness of life from arrest to liberation. Torture was common; hunger, cold, illness, and hard labor were the norm; and death was an everyday phenomenon. Survival in the Gulag was a daunting challenge, yet the majority of the Gulag inmates did somehow survive. The Gulag was not an extermination camp. As Applebaum aptly notes, however, we can no longer hear the voices of those who did not survive. But even if the survivors’ accounts are inevitably skewed, they are useful and revealing. Through them one can hear the voices of the millions who left no record of their own suffering.

Chapter 6 on faith is of particular interest. Nina Gagen-Torn describes how in the 1930s Trotskyists loyal to their beliefs staged a hunger strike in Kolyma demanding certain rights worthy of political prisoners (the right to correspond, for instance). New charges were brought against them. They went willingly to their execution. Similarly, many inmates held to their belief in nationalism (Ukrainian and Lithuanian, for example). Gagen-Torn’s description of religious believers is fascinating. In the Gulag the subbotniki, who observed the Sabbath on Saturday, were accused of being opponents of the Soviet government, but they “regarded all tsars with contempt,” believing that “the monarchy had conspired with the church to distort the word of God, had deceived the common folk by various designs, had renounced the only book given by God himself—the Old testament” (p. 77). One sister in Lagpunkt No. 6, very ill and about to be released, openly challenged Gulag overseers: “I do not recognize your authority. Your state is unholy, your passport bears the stamp of the Antichrist. I want none of it. Once I am freed you will just jail me again. Why should I leave?” (p. 74). This appears to have been in Mordovia after World War II.

Applebaum is well aware that memoirs have both strengths and weaknesses. She states that the memoirs selected here are “essentially truthful” (p. xiii). One account, however, may not be, although I do not question the part excerpted here about work in camps. This is the piece by Anatolii Zhigulin. Applebaum states that he and his friends “really had engaged in what might be called anti-Stalinist activities” (p. 58) in post-1945 Voronezh. But in fact Zhigulin’s claim about his and his friends’ “anti-Stalinist activities...