Bosses in Captivity?: On the Limitations of Gulag Memoir

In one of the most compelling scenes in Gulag Boss, author Fyodor Mochulsky and two close friends struggle to make their way to a labor camp above the Arctic Circle, after the river upon which they have been traveling by boat freezes early. Twenty-two-year-old college graduates used to urban life in the Soviet capital, with no knowledge of how to ride, they are each assigned two horses laden with supplies and instructed to proceed to headquarters through 100 miles of virgin forest in the Ural Mountains. Even amid such difficulties, the high-achieving young Communists—all of whom had agreed, at the urging of party authorities, to volunteer for Gulag service—maintain attitudes of stoic fortitude. But when, after several days, one of their horses blunders into a pool of quicksand, Mochulsky finally acknowledges a feeling of fear. For as the animal drowns, he and his companions realize that its loss will qualify at least one of them for ten years’ servitude in the very labor camp system they have been assigned to oversee. They understand that they could easily become Gulag prisoners even before they take up their positions as Gulag employees (20).

This point—the ease with which Soviet guards could become prisoners and prisoners, guards—is one of the most compelling in Mochulsky’s memoir. In this case, he and his friends are saved when a chain-gang convoy miraculously appears and a sympathetic commander orders several inmates to jump into the bog and extricate the animal. Over the ensuing months, however, Mochulsky learns that such close calls are an unavoidable ingredient of Gulag life and comes to describe them with near indifference. Referring to a colleague sentenced to three years for losing his pistol, Mochulsky notes only his “surprise” that his former associate, during his first night in captivity, somehow avoids having his sheepskin coat (a warm and highly coveted garment issued only to camp authorities) “torn off” him by his fellow inmates, clad in far less sturdy “padded jackets and lined shirts” and probably eager for revenge (46).¹

In equally unsentimental fashion, the author relates an ostensibly happier tale about a “cheerful guy” in the Pechorlag Camp Administration who “loved to joke around.” This man had been arrested in Moscow in 1937, sentenced to 25 years, and, once in the Arctic, assigned slave-labor tasks he barely survived—only to be pardoned “out of the blue” in 1939 and offered a chance to “stay on at the Gulag and work as a civilian” (28). Mochulsky ends his account of this man’s biography by stating simply, “He agreed to stay”—a brief, factual conclusion typical of the author’s narrative style, which avoids any reference to a potential wealth of underlying paradox, drama, and loss.² Mochulsky’s autobiography is full of such summary mention of the tosses and turns of individual fortune; their very ubiquity seems to contribute to his lack of emotion regarding the particulars of any one fate. Consequently, Mochulsky’s narrative is just that—a straightforward account of events, driven by plot rather than character, without much attention to feeling or psychology.

The furthest Mochulsky ventures into the emotional realm comes when, facing criminal prosecution for a shortfall in railroad construction supplies, he acknowledges himself as “depressed” and even grateful, at one point, for “some liquor to calm [his] soul” (71). Yet once again, he is saved—this time when a friend, the head of the Department of Technical Supplies, reveals that he has been holding some long-forgotten, unaccounted-for building materials...