Gulag

Despite many setbacks, this Russian exploration of the Soviet past continues today. True, the first decade of the twenty-first century is very different from the final decades of the twentieth century, and the search for history is no longer either a major part of Russian public discourse, nor quite so sensational as it once seemed. Most of the work being carried out by Russian and other scholars is real historical drudgery, involving the sifting of thousands of individual documents, hours spent in cold and drafty archives, days spent looking for facts and numbers. But it is beginning to bear fruit. Slowly, patiently, Memorial has not only put together the first guide to the names and locations of all of the camps on record, but has also published a groundbreaking series of history books, and compiled an enormous archive of oral and written survivors’ tales as well. Together with others—the Sakharov Institute and the publishing house Vozvrashchenie (the name means “return”)—they have put some of these memoirs into general circulation. Russian academic journals and institutional presses have also begun to print monographs based on new documents, as well as collections of documents themselves. Similar work is being carried out elsewhere, most notably by the Karta Society in Poland; and by historical museums in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, and Hungary; and by a handful of American and West European scholars who have the time and energy to work in the Soviet archives.

While researching this book, I had access to their work, as well as to two other kinds of sources that would not have been available ten years ago. The first is the flood of new memoirs which began to be published in the 1980s in Russia, America, Israel, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. In writing this book, I have made extensive use of them. In the past, some scholars of the Soviet Union have been reluctant to rely upon Gulag memoir material, arguing that Soviet memoir writers had political reasons for twisting their stories, that most did their writing many years after their release, and that many borrowed stories from one another when their own memories failed them. Nevertheless, after reading several hundred camp memoirs, and interviewing some two dozen survivors, I felt that it was possible to filter out those which seemed implausible or plagiarized or politicized. I also felt that while memoirs could not be relied upon for names, dates, and numbers, they were nonetheless an invaluable source of other kinds of information, especially crucial aspects of life in the camps: prisoners’ relationships with one another, conflict between groups, the behavior of guards and administrators, the role of corruption, even the existence of love and passion. I have consciously made heavy use of only one writer—Varlam Shalamov—who wrote fictionalized versions of his life in the camps, and this because his stories are based upon real events.

As far as was possible, I have also backed up the memoirs with an extensive use of archives—a source which, paradoxically, not everyone likes to use either. As will become clear in the course of this book, the power of propaganda in the Soviet Union was such that it frequently altered perceptions of reality. For that reason, historians in the past were right not to rely upon officially published Soviet documents, which were often deliberately designed to obscure the truth. But secret documents—the documents now preserved in archives—had a different function. In order to run its camps, the administration of the Gulag needed to keep certain kinds of records. Moscow needed to know what was happening in the provinces, the provinces had to receive instructions from the central administration, statistics had to be kept. This does not mean that these archives are entirely reliable—bureaucrats had their own reasons to distort even the most mundane facts—but if used judiciously, they can explain some things about camp life which memoirs cannot. Above all, they help to explain why the camps were built—or at least what it was that the Stalinist regime believed they were going to achieve.