Memory of Vorkuta: A Gulag Returnee's Attempts at Autobiography and Art

After years of corresponding with the Vorkuta Museum-Exhibition Center following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulag returnee and artist Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov explained why he never wrote a memoir. In a letter to the museum from December 1996, Ivanov described himself as "derailed" from a life worthy of documenting:

I don't need to write memoirs but a confession [pokaianie]. When I wrote you about my friends-comrades and, as you say, "in connection to them I mentioned my own affairs"—I could manage. ... But to write about myself ... that is already a pretension ... a claim to be someone [lichnost´]. But I am a nobody. I am the most ordinary-mediocrity. And generally, I think that only a worthy person can write memoirs. A person who, despite everything in his life, achieved his sacred goal and benefited society with his labor, creativity, and craft and thus thanked the society for having raised, taught, [and] fed him.¹

Despite the painfulness of remembering and his hesitancy, Ivanov continued to write his memoir-letters. He was driven by his attachment to the region where he was once imprisoned, and his desire to ensure that his fellow zeks and their contributions to the transformation of Vorkuta, from a prison camp into a Soviet city, were commemorated in history: "I never like my scribble and I send it out only because I feel a debt to the small piece of the history of culture of the great city of Vorkuta. ... I am very satisfied by the fact that in some way I have managed to be useful to you in your painstaking work in search of the truth [istina]."² On the basis of Ivanov's archive, this article seeks to address two major issues: how those who survived the brunt of Stalinist violence experienced life after release, and how they defined themselves when finally given the chance in the last years of the Soviet Union.

Ivanov's contribution to the search for the "truth" about the past came toward the end of a period of intense fixation on political repression sparked by glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union.³ Ivanov was one of the thousands of rank-and-file political prisoners of Stalin's camps who wrote memoirs during this period of renewed interest in the past, whom I refer to in this article as "Gulag returnees."⁴ In her literary analysis of the corpus produced by several generations of survivors, Leona Toker describes Gulag memoirs as a genre hybrid of autobiography and memoir in which the camps occupy a central place with all other narrative details "leading down to that nadir."⁵ Yet in Ivanov's narrative, the camps are but a chapter of the life story he tells. Another key feature of this genre that we will see in Ivanov's memoir-letters is the tension between individual and collective concerns. In writing about their pasts, Gulag returnees felt it imperative to combat the oblivion imposed on official histories and Soviet cultural memory by the regime, which attempted to erase its victims from history and only later began to "rehabilitate" them.⁶ Irina Paperno shows that, in addition to bringing individual lives into the public sphere and forming "textual communities," victims of repression who wrote memoirs in the late 1980s and 1990s claimed legitimacy as sources of historical testimony by placing "I" in a certain context (the Gulag) and tracing their origins to a formative moment in personal life and history.⁷ While Ivanov's memoir-letters include many of these central themes of the Gulag memoir genre, they present us with something new.

In contrast with most Gulag memoirs, which are more finished works, Ivanov's memoir-letters illustrate the process of remembering. Despite the time that had passed since his release and the relative openness of the period in which he wrote, Ivanov struggled to write about the camps. However, over the course of eight years, Ivanov reconstructed the two chapters of his life, two corresponding selves, in an autobiographical narrative of...