Memories of the Gulag

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in unpublished Gulag life writing during the Khrushchev Thaw:

A personal narrative analysis against the backdrop of the 1960s’ post-Stalinist discourse.

MA Thesis in European Studies

Graduate School for Humanities

Universiteit van Amsterdam

July 2018

Author:

Arthur Koeman

Student number:

10631097

Main Supervisor: dr. S. (Sudha) Rajagopalan

Second Supervisor: dr. C. (Claske) Vos

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Summary

The topic of my thesis is the interaction between the creation of narratives in Gulag life writing by former victims of the Great Terror and the dominant post-Stalinist discourses on the status of returnees in society and exposure of the past. During the period of de-Stalinisation under Khrushchev, commonly referred to as the period of ‘Thaw’, many former prisoners found the incentive to write one’s memoir. I analyse the narrating strategies as adopted in the memoirs and the use of particular discursive devices that support the narrating strategies of the author to negotiate in the dominant discourses. With this study, I aim to contribute to the understanding of the Gulag memoir as a historically specific genre.

The primary sources of this study are three unpublished Gulag memoirs, written by Maria Moiseevna Goldberg (1901-1984), Olga Michailovna Kuchumova (1902-1988), and Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia (1898-1984), written resp. in 1963, 1961, and 1964. The methodology of this study is the personal narrative analysis, as developed in autobiography studies. Such a qualitative assessment entails a close reading of the text to reveal particular narrating strategies from the explicit as well as the implicit objectives of the authors. To understand the workings of narrative creation, I explain the Foucauldian concept of discourse, the self, experience, and personal memory within a framework of subjectivity. To historicize the narrative, I sketch first the main political and societal developments during the Khrushchev Thaw and point to the dominant tropes and narratives in official statements, literature and other channels that have been dominant in the formation of the discourse.

My research demonstrates that the authors of this study either frame their stories as politically neutral or align themselves with the state by condemning Stalin and his ‘cult of personality’. Since the quest of guilt had been full of ambiguities, the authors circumvent the involvement of the Party during the repressive years and instead present their continued loyalty to the Party and the willingness to continue to work for the cause of communism. What is surprising though, is that the authors break with the Party’s caution not to start a second purge among Stalin’s former henchmen and use the memoir to name and shame local perpetrators of the camp who had lost themselves in brutality and abuse of power. On the other hand, they name and praise those who remained ‘honest’ citizens and communists. I understand this as a strategy of ethics by which the authors juxtapose their honesty with the dishonest other to renegotiate their position as a former prisoner in society and the communist collective. By narrating with a collective voice, personal experience is framed as a larger shared experience of a collective of victims. By this, the writing of such outward-looking memoirs is a powerful and mobilising force by which the authors empowered themselves as survivors in a societal climate of distrust about their innocence and a tendency not to dwell on the past.

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor dr. Sudha Rajagopalan for guiding me in the process of writing this thesis. Apart from her supervision, I would like to thank her for excellent teaching that introduced me to the scholarly field of Soviet subjectivity and the topic of Soviet self-writing. I will remember the numerous brainstorms we have had on the subject of this thesis, and I am grateful for her suggestions and for helping me with structuring my thoughts.

Secondly, I would like to thank dr. Christian Noack and prof. dr. Michael Kemper for the inspiring seminars in the master track of East European studies. Having arrived from a very different educational background, they encouraged and helped me during the year to improve my skills in writing, reading, and argumentation.

Thanks to the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and Memorial in Moscow through which I got access to the archive in which the memoirs of former victims of Stalinism are stored.

Many thanks to Vladimir Bobrovnikov for co-reading my thesis and for helping me with difficulties in translation. I am grateful for the many suggestions he gave on supplementary readings. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, mum and dad, who supported my choice to enrol in this master. Without their support, it all would not have been possible.

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Note on Transliteration

To transcribe particular Russian words in Cyrillic script into the English Latin script, I make use of the ‘Modified Library of Congress’ system of transliteration because of its simplicity and readability for non-Russian speakers. In some cases, I deviate from this system if it concerns names of persons, cities and concepts that are better known by its English Latin script – for example, the family name Goldberg instead of Gol’dberg and the first name Olga instead of Ol’ga. As it concerns the bureaucratic acronym of ‘GULag’ (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei or: Main Camps' Administration) I will refer to it as ‘Gulag’.

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1 Chapter 1:

On the research subject and methodology

1.1 Introduction

Shortly after the death of First Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet decreed a mass amnesty for the release of a million prisoners that were sentenced and sent to labour camps during Stalin’s reign.1 It was an

extraordinary reform that would be the start of a period usually referred to as the ‘Thaw’(Ottepel’). Led by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet Union underwent a period of de-Stalinisation, that is the reversal of Stalin’s oppressive policies and the removal of Stalin’s ’cult of personality’ (kul’t lichnosti) that, according to Khrushchev in his 1956 Speech as delivered to the Congress, had been the source of all evil in the past decades. The repressive and authoritarian reign of Stalin, together with the destroying impact of the war, had left deep material and emotional scars in Russia’s society. Over the years, millions of Soviet citizens had been arrested for minor crimes, the thwarting of state policies, or simply out of suspicion of being a ‘Counter-revolutionary’ (Kontrrevoliutsioner). Those ‘Enemies of the People’ (Vragi Naroda), as Stalin referred to political prisoners, were sent away to stay and work in labour camps for years. Having its antecedent in pre-Soviet Russia, the system of labour camps expanded during the early Soviet era with camps set up all over Russia and the southern Soviet republics. This cheap resource of labour had the potential to be contributive to the economic development of the country, and besides this, work in the camp was a means of re-education and reformation of the criminal into a good Soviet citizen.2 The system of labour camps, better known by its acronym ‘Gulag’, and the procedure of

arrest, interrogation, transport, and work, were standardised and optimised over the decades. Because of the system’s enormous size, some former prisoners described that at its height it had created the image of two versions of life in Russia: life within and outside the ‘zone’ of the camp.3

The long duration of imprisonment and often poor living conditions in the camp caused many deaths among the prisoners. The death of Stalin marked a change in the state’s attitude towards the Gulag and its prisoners. In the years after the mass amnesty of 1953, under the supervision of Khrushchev, a growing number of amnesties were issued to camp prisoners and among them also the political prisoners. The return of former political prisoners proved to be an uneasy re-unification of the two Russias since it confronted society and the authorities with a past full of difficulties. It was only in the late 1950s with a ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956 given by Khrushchev that the topic of the Gulag and the political repression could be openly discussed. First within the upper

1 Anne Applebaum, Gulag - a History (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 430.

2 More on the origins and development of the Gulag, I refer to: Applebaum, Gulag - a History. 3 Nanci Adler, ‘Life in the `Big Zone’ : The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression’,

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echelons of the Party but soon the reforms were discussed on local Party level and in the Soviet press. This period of de-Stalinisation, with a zenith in the early 1960s, proved to be productive as it concerns to the self-writing of memories (vospominaniia) by former prisoners. For years, survivors had lacked public narratives that they could connect to their own subjective experiences, and while the Party allowed people to speak out, the narratives about the Stalinist past were still closely managed by the state.4 In the same period, the publication of the novel ‘One

day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’ (1962) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn fuelled the debate in society about the release of prisoners and their rehabilitation in Soviet society. In this context, many found an incentive to write one’s own personal account of life in the Gulag, and many sent it for publication to the newspaper, literary journals or if possible to publishers abroad. The Gulag memoirs, especially the ones that were published abroad, have long been the few sources of information for Western scholars about the period of terror and what life was in the Soviet labour camps. Since the opening of the Russian Soviet archives in 1991, more information about the Gulag did become available for researchers and also for the ex-prisoners that were still alive at that time. The period of Glasnost’5 in the late 1980s again generated a mass outpouring of Gulag life writing.

The collection of Gulag memoirs, both the published as well as the unpublished as found in the archives, have already been used and studied by several scholars. By bringing together different narratives and comparing these, scholars like Nanci Adler with her dissertation ‘The Great Return’ (1999)6, and Anne Applebaum with her book ‘Gulag – a history’ (2004)7, have made

a great contribution to a better understanding and overview of the Gulag experience and its aftermath by giving a voice to the experiences from ‘below’, using the memoir genre as one of their main historical sources. Focussing on the Gulag memoir as a separate genre, Leona Toker, in ‘Return from the Archipelago’ (2000)8, and Irina Shcherbakova, in ‘Remembering the Gulag -

Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003)9, have provided a general overview of

the collection and specified common characteristics of the memoirs in structure as well as in content. On how to approach this body of Gulag writing, Andrea Gullotta proposed the perspective of trauma to help understand phenomena such as fallibilities and discontinuities in descriptions

4 Polly Jones, ‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture

of the Thaw’, The Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 346–71.

5 Glasnost’ can be translated as ‘openness’ or ‘transparency’. This trope was used and implemented by

Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s to strive for transparency concerning the work of the authorities and to give openness about the (Stalinist) past.

6 Nanci Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation) (Amsterdam:

University of Amsterdam, 1999).

7 Applebaum, Gulag - a History.

8 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago - Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Indiana, 2000).

9 Irina Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, in

Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Appendix on the Italian Victims of Repression in the USSR, ed.

Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, and Emanuela Guercetti (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2003), 187–208.

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of time and space, as found in some of the Gulag narratives. However, as Irina Paperno argues in ‘Personal accounts of the Soviet Experience’ (2002)10, trauma should not be the only perspective

to interpret the meaning of the memoir for its authors. Compared to the return and resocialization in society of Holocaust survivors after World War II in Western Europe, survivors of the Gulag camps returned in a much more ambiguous political and societal climate that lacked a clear and single narrative to explain the fate of political prisoners, especially for those who were sentenced during the Great Purge in the late 1930s. Because of these ambiguities and the state of uncertainty, Alexander Etkind argues in ‘Warped Morning’ (2013)11 that mourning about fallen relatives had

been a political act in the early post-Stalinist period. Moreover, mourning – understood as a process to come to acknowledge the reality of having lost the other – was hardly possible in a destructive context where “death could not be recognised as death, and survival could not be relied upon as life”, as Alexander Etkind characterises the state of being of Gulag survivors.12

Ex-prisoners not only had to deal with traumatic memories and mourning but also with finding a satisfying explanation for what had happened to them and how to relate oneself towards the authorities and the Party. The same Party had not changed significantly in its composition since Stalin, but it did show a different face by reversing Stalin’s policies and adopting reforms to the judicial and political system. Eventually, many former prisoners and members of the Party were reinstated in the Party and remained loyal communists. Nanci Adler discusses this phenomenon in her work ‘Keeping Faith with the Party’ (2012)13 and gives several explanations why so many

former prisoners kept faith with the Party, based on memoirs and oral interviews.

However, what is still unexplored in studies to the experience of Gulag returnees, and in specific in the narratives as created in Gulag memoirs during the Thaw period, is the interaction between dominant (cultural) discourses in Soviet society and the creation of narratives by its authors. I argue that understanding this interaction is necessary to explain the Gulag memoir boom in the early 1960s and the way survivors came to understand their experiences in the Gulag. This thesis aims to get an understanding of the contemporary meaning of the genre of the Gulag memoir for its authors, against the backdrop of the historical context and dominant discourses in this period. Instead of a quantitative approach, this thesis is a qualitative assessment of a selection of memoirs using as its method the personal narrative analysis, as developed in autobiography studies. Building on Michel Foucault’s concepts of the discourse and what constitutes selfhood, this thesis questions in what way the authors of Gulag life writing negotiate in the dominant

10 Irina Paperno, ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian

History 3, no. 4 (2002): 577–610.

11 Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. (Stanford: Stanford

University Press., 2013).

12 Etkind, 18.

13 Nanci Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party - Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Bloomington:

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discourses of the post-Stalinist period on the experience and status of returned former prisoners in society. I focus at particular narrating strategies as adopted by the authors and the use of discursive devices – ‘tools’ or resources that are available to the narrator – to represent the self and the experience of the Gulag.

I have chosen a sample of three memoirs from which I aim to get the characteristic discursive devices and themes by which the authors narrate their experiences and, with it, either align themselves or oppose the dominant discourses of the Thaw period. In the second and third paragraph of this first chapter, respectively I define and historicize the genre of the Gulag memoir and introduce the reader to the selected primary sources. In the fourth paragraph of this chapter, I introduce the methodology of the personal narrative analysis and discuss its limits and shortcomings. In the second chapter, I provide a theoretical framework that covers several theoretical concepts necessary to understand how narratives are being created and how the act of creating narratives interacts with the narrator’s subjective self. In the third chapter, I sketch the historical context of the Thaw years and the evolution of official and dominant discourses concerning specific notions on Stalin, the Gulag and its returnees, and on memory and trauma. The actual personal narrative analysis is executed in the fourth chapter. Since all selected writings cover the full period of imprisonment from arrest to release, I will distinguish several central themes from the memoirs to serve as a structure for this thesis. This thematical structure helps to compare the different narratives of the authors and to point to differences and commonalities between them. In the end, I give a conclusion and suggest possible further research on this topic.

1.2 The genre of the Gulag memoir

From a genre perspective, Andrea Gullotta categorises the Gulag memoir (lagernaia memuaristika) as part of the genre of Gulag literature (lagernaia literatura), a subgenre in Soviet repression literature (literatura o sovetskikh repressiiakh).14 I use this categorisation into

historical specific genres, to stress the unique position and historical character of the Gulag memoir within the corpus of Russian Soviet literature. In Russia, the memoir has been a popular genre of self-writing for centuries. As Barbara Walker shows in her article ‘On reading Soviet memoirs’ (2000) about the history of the ‘contemporaries’ genre, the memoir had been an institution of the Russian intelligentsia culture within the circles of the intellectual elite. She argues that the ‘contemporaries’ memoir contributed to the development of the intelligentsia identity and functioned in the circle-formation among Russian intellectuals.15 Since most authors

14 Andrea Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings’, Autobiografia, no. 1

(2012): 73,75.

15 Barbara Walker, ‘On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the “Contemporaries” Genre as an Institution

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of the unpublished memoirs about the Gulag were not part of these intelligentsia circles, the majority were former Party and Soviet middle-class and urban intelligentsia,16 not all accounts

within the corpus of Gulag memoirs fit into this tradition of the ‘contemporaries’ memoir. Nevertheless, the Gulag memoir cannot be isolated from the long tradition of memoir writing in Russia since this genre was very likely known to the authors of Gulag life writing. Moreover, in Soviet life writing the genre of the memoir was encouraged by the Soviet authorities already from an early stage onwards.17 Treating the Gulag memoir as a separate historical genre, with respect

to the historical context, allows new perspectives on the meaning of the memoirs for its authors. Gullotta has provided useful criteria for the sub-genre of Gulag literature within the genre of Soviet repression literature that I use to define the genre. The main defining criteria are first that Gulag memoirs are written by authors who were directly affected by Soviet repression and secondly, that regarding content, the authors describe the life in the Gulag and their experiences in that period.18 What is different from the autobiography as a genre, is that the authors focus or

even restrict their stories to their experiences in the camp. The genre of the ‘memoir’, as I define as a retrospective account of one’s memories over a specific period, is closest to the content and format of these writings titled ‘memories’ (vospominaniia). However, some of the writings do contain elements, such as long autobiographical parts or interwoven diaristic entries, that do not fit the strict definition as defined. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson define in ‘Reading Autobiography’ (2010) the genre of ‘personal life writing’ that concerns the act of self-writing about one’s life, with the author as protagonist or subject of the narrative.19 When referring to the

act of writing, I prefer to use the term personal life writing since both the autobiography and the memoir fall into this category.

Whilst the Gulag memoir has never been institutionalised as a genre, the narratives in Gulag life writing developed within a common framework, within the boundaries of a genre. At first, all writings share a retrospectivity since its authors wrote their memoir after they had been released from the camp. Moreover, as shown by Irina Shcherbakova, the writings in the collection of Gulag memoirs share common characteristics and standardised formats that she calls the ‘hypertext’.20 It is clear thus that the writers, as people do in general, made use of the formats

known to them. The similarities between the Gulag writings could occur because different authors used the same examples, writings that already had been published and were available to them. Otherwise, even when people did not have access to other works, similarities occur because the

16 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, 196. 17 See: Sean Guillory, ‘The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs’, Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (2012):

546–65.

18 Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings’, 79.

19 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4.

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authors share a same cultural understanding of what constitutes a memoir or autobiography. These conventions of what is essential to include into the narrative and what is not, are predominantly determined by this cultural understanding that even determines what people remember and what they do not, as I will further explain in the theoretical part. Besides this, in the act of writing the narrator makes conscious choices that are part of a writing strategy. There are thus many conscious and unconscious aspects at play that eventually have resulted in the narrative on paper.

1.3 Selection of primary sources

The primary sources are a selection of memoirs collected and stored by civil rights society Memorial in Moscow. Additional biographical information of the authors is provided by the online catalogue of the Sakharov Centre.21 The inventory consists of 145 memoirs, essays, letters, diaries

and short stories, of which the majority is written in the late 1980s. The following selection criteria are set to get from the collection the most valuable and useful writings for the research question of this thesis. Firstly, the memoir is written by a survivor who has been directly involved with terror and was imprisoned in the Gulag. Secondly, the memoir covers at least the whole period from arrest to release. Thirdly, the memoir dates back to the period from 1953-1964. As a result, the writings that meet these criteria are written predominantly by female authors.22 Besides

gender, the selection is very homogeneous, as is the whole collection, in professions and place of residence in the two major cities, Leningrad and Moscow. Finally, I have taken a sample from this selection respecting the criteria of completeness, detail, available biographical information, and as much diversity as possible. For practical reasons, some of the writings were excluded in advance from the selection because of illegibility, primarily those hand-written entries in the archive. All memoirs selected are (officially) non-published writings, however, there is no information available about if and how these memoirs have been distributed and who had been its readers.23 The following three writings are selected to be the primary sources for the textual

analysis in this thesis:

Maria Moiseevna Goldberg (1901-1984), ‘A story about what was, and not will be repeated.’ (1962-1963).24 Goldberg was born in 1901 in the city of Nikolaev, southern Ukraine. As

21 Accessible on the website of the Sakharov Centre: https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=list 22 This corresponds with the findings of Irina Shcherbakova. As one of the reasons for this, she points to

the fact that much more women survived the camps and terror than men. In: Shcherbakova, 196.

23 Seen the poor illegibility of in particular the memoirs written by Olga Kuchumova and Maria Goldberg, I

assume that the documents as found in the archive of Memorial are second or third copies of the original. Hence, several copies had been around at the time and some of the copies probably were read by relatives or editors, in the case they made a request for publication.

24 Maria Moiseevna Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, Memorial (Moskva)

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a member of the Party in 1936, she became a member of the Moscow committee of the Party and moved to Moscow. Her husband was arrested in Kyiv in December 1936. In 1938, Maria herself was arrested and put in prison. Her sentence: eight years in a camp for being a ‘Family Member of a Traitor of the Motherland’ (Сhlen Sem'i Izmennika Rodiny). She was transferred to the camp of Akmolinsk, Kazakhstan. Here she was occupied with sewing work, and in 1940 she was replaced to Kengir labour camp, Kazakhstan in which she did administrative work in her profession as an economist. When she was freed in 1945, she was sent to exile in Kolchugino and worked as an economist for a company until 1956, the year of rehabilitation. The memoir covers the period of 1936-1956.

Olga Michailovna Kuchumova (1902-1988), “Wives – Autobiographical notes” (1961).25

During the 1930s, Kuchumova worked as a journalist in the editorial office of Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS). In 1937 her husband was arrested, sentenced to death and shot in October 1937. Olga was arrested in November 1937 and transferred to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow and sentenced to eight years in a camp as ‘Family Member of a Traitor of the Motherland’. She was then transferred to Kazakhstan, just as Maria Goldberg to Akmolinsk. Here, and in other camps, she would be occupied with construction work, work in the fields and work at a barn. After she completed her term in 1945, she remained yet one more year to work on the site as ‘free’ citizen. Afterwards, she went into exile in Rybinsk to work in a factory. During a three day stop in Moscow, she reunited with her daughter and mother. Ultimately, she was rehabilitated in 1954 and moved back from exile to Moscow.

Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia (1898-1984), “Reminiscences (vospominaniia)” (1964).26

Sandratskaia was born in 1898 in Odessa, Ukraine. During the first World War, she worked as a nurse in a medical department of the army. After the revolution in 1917, she takes part in revolutionary activities and the subsequent Civil War. She moves in this period to Moscow and starts to work at the literary publishing department of the People’s Commissariat for Education. In 1937, living in Leningrad (nowadays Saint Petersburg), her husband was excluded from the Party because of ‘Contra-revolutionary Activities’ (Kontrrevoliutsionnaia Deiatel'nost’), arrested in May the same year and shot. Not long after, Maria herself was arrested together with her daughter and receives an eight years sentence of imprisonment in a camp. She is first transferred to a prison in Tomsk in 1937 and eventually brought to a labour camp in 1939 where she worked in a sewing workshop. Her daughter could return to family in Moscow when she turned four years old in 1941. In 1947, Maria was released and rehabilitated in 1955. She continued to live in Leningrad.

25 Olga Mikhailovna Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, Memorial (Moskva) Archives F.2

Op.1, no. 79 (1961). – [‘Wives’ refers to the wives of sentenced husbands].

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1.4 Methodology and limitations

The method that will be used in this thesis to the study of Gulag life writing is the personal narrative analysis. The personal narrative analysis is a textual analysis of the personal narrative, the retrospective story created by the individual about one’s past life or specific events in which one was involved. I choose to closely read and analyse the full story as is narrated by the authors, rather than to read the memoir through a single thematical lens and extract parts from the writings to strengthen one particular these. An analysis of the full story allows me to follow the development of characters and the different styles of narration depending on the event or theme that is addressed. To use as a handbook, I make use of the multidisciplinary guide on autobiographies ‘Reading Autobiography’ (2010)27, by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, and

‘Telling stories’ (2008)28, by Mary Jo Maynes, ea., on the method of the personal narrative analysis.

The analytical question ‘what can be done with personal narratives’ seems from the perspective of the authors of the Gulag memoirs to be an irrelevant question. Obviously, Gulag life writing is not in the first place written with the intention to let it function as an object for study. The primary objective of writing is rather to narrate a convincing story that is true to one’s experience and is narrated in such a way that it supports the writer’s intentions and reaches a particular audience. This primary objective is essential to keep in mind while reading and analysing the memoirs for scholarly purposes.

The personal narrative analysis is a method that produces a different type of knowledge, as compared to more common research methods in social sciences, because of its approach of history ‘from below’ (also referred to as ‘social history’29). This method does not require the

collection of a large amount of data and statistics to make an argument but constructs an argument from the perspective of the individual.30 Whilst for historians the personal narratives are valuable

testimonies of events in the past, these narratives cannot be reduced to or exclusively understood as historical records or factual histories.31 Smith and Watson argue that because the narrative in

self-writing is a subjective representation of history, it should be read against the backdrop of ideological and cultural discourses.32 By reasoning from the perspective of the writer, history is

then understood not as an objective truth about reality, which requires the support of multiple

27 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives.

28 Mary Jo Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, ed. J.

Pierce and B. Laslett (New York: Cornell University Press, 2008).

29 Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed to the factor of having limited access to Soviet archives that encouraged the

approach of ‘history from below’ among Western scholars studying Soviet history. In: Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History’, Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 377–400.

30 Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, 10. 31 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 14. 32 Smith and Watson, 25.

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kinds of sources to verify, but as a subjective individual experience lived by the individual. Therefore, the personal narrative is a representation of the author’s experience of history and the result of how one chose to narrate it. The value of the personal narrative for social sciences is thus precisely this presumed subjectivity and the different narrating strategies adopted by the author in narrating one’s history.33

Besides the memoirs accessible in the Memorial archive, few other information is available on the authors and their intentions with writing. Therefore, the analysis of this thesis is mostly limited to the text itself. Since no textual research has access to the thoughts and intentions of the authors, one needs to be cautious with the part of the interpretation. The personal narrative is thus not fully transparent evidence of one’s experience and notions about the self. 34_Moreover,

the analysis is restricted to what is on paper and does not have access to what is not. The same applies to choices the author made while writing since only the result and not the considerations to come to this result are available to the reader. One way to tackle the methodological problems as mentioned above is conducting oral interviews with the authors, which is not possible in this case study since all authors passed away. However, even when conducting oral history, an analytical gap remains between what is on the author’s mind and what is expressed to an audience, whether it be the interviewer or an imagined audience in the case of writing the memoir. Nevertheless, although the memoir is the final product of numerous conscious and unconscious choices and considerations that are unavailable to the researcher, the choices that are made and have resulted in the narrative on paper communicate a message to the reader. By examining the narrating strategies and discursive devices used, against the backdrop of the dominant discourses of the time, I remain cautious to make claims about the intentions of the author but will rather attempt to explain what message is communicated to the reader. Since I am not a Russian native speaker, nor do I share the cultural background and historical context with the authors, this is certainly a limitation in fully understanding what is communicated and written between the lines. Part of this understanding is an intersubjective process, but for a crucial part, interpretation relies on the reader’s individual subjectivity.

To engage in the personal narrative analysis, I use three concepts or tools as explained by Smith and Watson. Firstly, as a distinction, it is useful to separate, using the concepts of Smith and Watson: the ‘real’ or historical “I” (the living, historical person), from the narrating “I” (the author), the narrated “I” (the version or representation of the self) and the ideological “I” (the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when telling the story, notions that change over time).35 The personal narrative analysis calls for the historicizing of the narrating “I”

33 Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, 10. 34 Maynes, 41.

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that is, as Smith and Watson propose, to approach life writing as a performative act in time and a specific setting.36 Defining the categories of the “I” as mentioned above, and distinguishing these

in the textual analysis, helps to understand the complex interaction between the narration of the “I” back then and the “I” now. However, what complicates this distinction is the use of the first person plural, by which the author speaks on behalf of a group with whom one shares a particular experience and identifies oneself with. The use of plural can be both a conscious and intentional strategy to stress the shared experience and collective identity, as well as it can be a culturally determined way of self-representation. For the Soviet context, such a cultural understanding of the self is the anti-individualist and collectivist notion of subjectivity that was dominant in the official Bolshevik discourse and during the period of Stalinist industrialisation in the early 1930s.37

Secondly, the concept of relationality is essential to the author’s understanding of oneself. Relationality implies that autobiographical stories are bound up or constructed by others and the stories of others.38 This relationality ‘blurs the line’, as Smith and Watson write, between

autobiography and biography. The ‘other’ is engaged in the formation of self-consciousness and subjectivity, and thus it is important to depict the other in the personal narrative through which one understands oneself. Thirdly, life writing needs to be understood as an intersubjective process between writer and reader, the (imagined) audience or addressee. Superior to the truth status of the narrative, the emphasis in reading life writing should be, according to Smith and Watson, on the processes wherein by means of a dialogic exchange a subjective experience is shared with and understood by the reader.39 Underlying to this intersubjective exchange is a

shared sense of what has meaning, based on certain conventions in the act of narration and in general the cultural discourse (which I will theorise in the next chapter). By the same intersubjective exchange, the author also negotiates and claims authority to have the ‘right’ to tell a story and experience. Since it is impossible to identify the author’s imagined reader without verifiable information, this is not the aim of the thesis. What is interesting though is how the imagined reader (if known) changes the narrating strategy of the narrator. Such interaction between the author and imagined reader is a topic for further research.

Because of the homogeneity in the selection of memoirs I feel obliged, as a final note, to touch upon this topic briefly. This thesis does not pretend to draw conclusions from this small selection as representative for a larger group of Gulag survivors. It is a qualitative assessment and therefore the homogeneity of the sources is not an obstacle or limitation to come to the articulated result of the thesis. Apart from similarities in social background and professions, all three authors are women. Contemporary discourses on gender certainly influenced how Soviet women

36 Smith and Watson, 61.

37 Anna Krylova, ‘Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century’, Social History 42, no. 2 (2017): 315–41. 38 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 86.

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perceived themselves, and as a result, shapes how they narrate about themselves and how they perceived their role in the events. However, as Anne E. Gorsuch argues in a review to three studies of Soviet women’s life stories, there’s a risk of generalising gender roles and attribute certain qualities and values to gender, because it easily creates a dichotomy between men and women that is not always reflected in reality.40

40 Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Narratives: Soviet Presentations of Self’, Kritika:

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12 Chapter 2:

Theoretical framework

To understand the workings of narrative creation, I introduce four theoretical concepts to theorise the creation of narratives: discourse, the self, experience, and personal memory. All concepts, share the common denominator of subjectivity, that is what constitutes the individual and determines how one perceives reality and reacts to it. As I will show in this chapter, subjectivity is constructed only through our interaction with others, the social. Since our subjectivity is constantly subjected to self-reflection and change, any personal narrative captures a single moment in time wherein the writer reflects upon himself, back then and in the present, and experiences the past in the present. By using secondary literature, mostly in the scholarly field of social sciences, I explain the concepts in their definitions as used in the social sciences and point to their relevance in understanding the process of narrative creation. In the basis, as it concerns to the concept of subjectivity and conceptualisation of the discourse, I build on the work of Michel Foucault (1926-84) that has been ground-breaking and is widely used in the social sciences.

2.1 Discourse

The concept of ‘discourse’ has been very broadly used and interpreted in many different (social) disciplines. In the most general definition, I define discourse as a social system in which is determined what can be said and what not. It was Foucault who redefined the concept of discourse, not as a linguistic concept, but as a what he calls a group of ‘statements’. These are functions that belong to signs, are governed by rules of the discourse, and belong to the same discursive formation.1 This Foucauldian understanding of discourse links the discourse to certain

bodies of knowledge that are locatable but change over time, such as scholarly disciplines or disciplinary institutions. The discourse produces and defines objects of knowledge and restricts how within the discourse certain topics can be discussed, by defining what is meaningful and what is not.2 Foucault explains that discourse is manifested only through our relationship with others.

Foucault positions the subject in a network of ‘power relations’, the idea that power is not something that is possessed but actively reproduced through relations of power. The discourse is established within the context of these power relations. By means of authority, persons or institutions have the ability to develop dominant discourses that, when institutionalised, infiltrate at different levels of the subject’s daily life.3 Within these discourses, narratives are created. The

life narrative thus needs to be understood by its temporary meaning in the dominant discourses.

1 Cristian Zagan, ‘Tracking Foucault: The Relationship between Discourse and Power/Knowledge’, Logos,

Universality, Mentality, Education, Novelty. Section: Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences 3, no. 1 (2015): 32.

2 Zagan, 37. 3 Zagan, 35.

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Through language, particular narrating styles, and certain presentations of the self, discourses are manifested. Moreover, since power is performed through discourse, I argue that by writing individuals empower themselves in response to the power strategies of actors in the individual’s web of power relations and negotiate in the established discourse by adopting discursive strategies in order to normalise a particular subjectivity.

2.2 The self

The self, also referred to as the reflexive self, is the theoretical concept to refer to what constitutes the individual. The reflexive self implies, according to Chatterjee and Petrone, “an active agent that scrutinises both itself and the world it inhabits”.4 For a long time, notions about subjectivity and

the self in Western philosophy were rooted in the tradition of Enlightenment. These notions emphasise the individual and autonomous capacity of the subject to reason and act accordingly.5

Michel Foucault criticised this notion of autonomy and proposed to historicize the subject to understand the formation of subjectivity. He argues that even while actors claim to be free agents, one needs to recognise that from early childhood, the individual has been ‘subjected’ to disciplinary strategies that have created a certain subjectivity. Foucault argues that this subjectivity is constituted not passively by coercion of power, but by means of self-reflection and work on the self by the subject’s own activity.6 The individual’s ability of self-formation – that one

can act on the self – is what Foucault calls the ‘technologies of the self’. This productive ability of self-reflection can be defined as the mechanism in which agency – the ability of the subject to act otherwise than prescribed or demanded by the strategies of power relations7 – is operative.

Katrina Mitcheson draws, in her work ‘Foucault's Technologies of the Self’ (2012), three conclusions from Foucault’s theory about subjectivity.8 Firstly, the process of self-formation

occurs only in relationship with others and therefore within the context of power relations. Secondly, what is used as resources that constitute the self and provide ideas about an envisioned self, are drawn from the existing power order in culture and society. Thirdly, any agency of the subject emerges from the same existing power order. Hence, the construction of subjectivity and Foucault’s technologies of the self are only productive within the individual’s network of power relations. However, this does not exclude the possibility of self-creativity. In his theory, Foucault allows certain creativity of the self, since our reactions are not fully determined by the power

4 Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, ‘Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical

Perspective’, Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 967.

5 Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, 17.

6 Katrina Mitcheson, ‘Foucault’s Technologies of the Self: Between Control and Creativity’, Journal of the

British Society for Phenomenology 43, no. 1 (2012): 62.

7 Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, 22. 8 Mitcheson, ‘Foucault’s Technologies of the Self: Between Control and Creativity’, 62.

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strategies to which one reacts to.9 The individual’s agency to form alternative subjectivities

beyond the subjugated subjectivity of dominant power relations and discourses emerges from the creativity of the Foucauldian technologies of the self. I argue that the act of writing, in the context of this study the Gulag life writing, can be seen as such a technology of the self. By means of remembering and reflection on the self and one’s experience, the author actively shapes subjectivity through narration. However, these creative subjectivities still take form and have only meaning in strategic interaction with others.10 This ‘routing’ of the self through relations with

others, Smith and Watson argue, undermines the idea that the “I” is a unique, individuated narrating subject.11 Any representation of the self needs to be understood within the context of

discourse and within the power relations in which one is operative.

2.3 Experience

The narrative in Gulag life writing can be seen as an account of the prisoner’s experience in the camp, but what exactly is ‘experience’? Experience does not refer only to the factual event itself, but rather to how the event is perceived by the individual, the ‘experiencer’. Experience can be seen as an interpretation of reality, or a part-reality, and is thus a subjective account of the event. In the context of the topic of this thesis, life in the Gulag can be experienced differently by different prisoners, dependent on each’ role in the event, one’s character, the knowledge available, personal history, etc. Experience is an attempt to create meaning out of events and is in constant need for interpretation, because of its discursive character. To know what counts as experience, and how we can relate ourselves to that experience, the subject makes use of the discourse.12 Because

experience is formed through discourses, and the discourse changes over time, experience is not a static concept but is receptive to change in meaning.13 What once was perceived as an arbitrary,

meaningless event can emerge over time into a meaningful experience, for example when more or different knowledge becomes available. In the end, experience can be understood as something that constitutes and shapes the subject as part of the formation of subjectivity.14

9 Mitcheson, 66. 10 Mitcheson, 73.

11 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 88. 12 Smith and Watson, 32.

13 Smith and Watson, 32. 14 Smith and Watson, 33.

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2.4 Personal memory and remembering

Memories of one’s life history, here defined as ‘personal memory’15, share the same characteristic

with experience that it is a ‘living’ concept, which is an active, constructivist process.16

Remembering is an act of reinterpretation of the past in the present, a past that can never be fully be recovered or replicated.17 In the act of creating narratives about the past and the self,

remembering is attributing a certain meaning to events that took place in the past and therefore, memories can be best understood as records of our experiences. What is remembered is for a great deal even a culturally determined ‘technique’. Personal memory thus has no meaning outside of social relationships and therefore, remembering is a discursive process that is determined by what is meaningful to remember and what is encouraged to remember by others.18

Although personal memory on itself often has little meaning in the public discourses, together with other personal memories within a fragmented community (in this case of survivors) it can form a mobilising force that is powerful enough to shape public memory and to become a widely acknowledged collective memory of a community or country.

What is central in the theoretical concepts of discourse, the self, experience and personal memory as explained above is the relation between the individual and the other, the social. As a consequence, unique individuality is an illusion since one is only able to think about oneself through others, using the discourse that is established by others. Whilst this seems to be the death of the individual, I have tried to show that the individual can still perform agency in this web of power relations, the forces that establish the dominant discourses, as well can personal memory become part of larger collective memory and receive significant meaning and mobilising power.

15 A specific class of memory as defined by Paul Connerton, which “refer to those acts of remembering that

take as their object one’s life history”. In: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22.

16 Maynes, Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, 39. 17 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 22. 18 Smith and Watson, 22.

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16 Chapter 3:

Historical context and public discourse

The three memoirs as studied in this thesis are written in the period 1961-1964, almost 15 years after the women’s release from the camp in the second half of the 1940s. In this period of the early 1960s a significant number of memoirs have been written and some of them, mostly from Soviet elite authors, even appeared in the Soviet press in these years. It is not surprising that these three, as well as many other memoirs, have been finished in this period of the zenith years of de-Stalinisation during the Khrushchev Thaw. To fully understand the meaning of the Gulag life writing, acknowledging that narratives are created within contemporary discourses, it is necessary to read the stories against the backdrop of the historical, political context and the dominant discourses of the time. With the help of secondary literature, I provide in this chapter a sketch of the events and political reforms prior to the memoir boom in the early 1960s and the vivid societal debate that emerged on the years of repression under Stalin and the trauma of its victims. I point to those main elements, whether expressed in official Party statements, published literature or letters from worried citizens which shaped and dominated the discourse in the period, the memoirists of this study created their own narratives. The elements found will function as a frame of reference in the textual analysis of the next chapter.

3.1 Silent de-Stalinisation (1953-1955)

As a rule, released prisoners received a passport with certain limitations, such as a prohibition to settle in major cities. Because of this, many were sent to exile in order to work and live on the margins of society for an undetermined period of time. Since these former prisoners returned to a society that had yet not drastically changed under Stalin’s rule, re-socialisation in Soviet society brought many difficulties in, among other things, employment and housing. The attitude of society towards ex-prisoners was one of suspicion because of the presumption of guilt, as Nanci Adler characterises it in her dissertation ‘The Great Return’ (1999).1 Because of this stigmatisation of

still being considered ‘Enemies of the People’, personal relationships were hard to maintain and re-establish after release and rehabilitation in post-war Soviet society. After Stalin’s death in 1953, a period of drastic reforms started regarding the Gulag and policies concerning its prisoners and the victims of the Stalinist repression. Soon after the death of Stalin, his NKVD trustee Beria (who soon was arrested, blamed as an enemy of the Party and shot) had pursued drastic reforms, such as the mass release of prisoners from the Gulag. A factor that certainly played a role in restructuring the Gulag penal system was the state’s recognition of the unprofitability of the Gulag

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for the country’s economy and the necessity to reform.2 In early 1954, after having received a

report on the numbers of political prisoners, those sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes, Khrushchev set up a national committee to re-examine all their cases.3 Both political, as well as

ordinary prisoners, received the right to write petitions in the camp to let their cases be re-examined. This period between 1953 and 1955 is what Nanci Adler calls the ‘silent de-Stalinisation’, a period in which releases and rehabilitations were issued without explanation.4

Adler carefully speaks of the rehabilitation in this period as a kind of social contract, an unspoken agreement to remain silent about the past and to go on.5 Returnees in this period were yet not at

all in a position to be too demanding regarding the authorities.

Even though the Party and Khrushchev himself had not yet publicly condemned the rule of Stalin and his justice, the mass releases from the Gulag and the re-examination of sentences showed a clear reversal of the type of Stalinist justice; a reinstatement of ‘socialist legality’ (sotsialicticheskaia zakonnost’).6 However, Adler argues that in first instance individual freedom

and democratic rights had never been the goals of the reformers with reinstating socialist legality. Rather, it was used as a rhetorical device to justify the reforms as legal and socialist.7 Nevertheless,

new thoughts within the Party resulted in diverging views on the domestic and foreign policies of the Union and fostered debate within the Party.8

3.2 The Secret Speech (1956) and its aftermath

It would take until February 1956 that the legacy of Stalin himself emerged at the centre of the debate with the so-called Secret Speech ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’9 as

delivered by Khrushchev to the Central Committee. This speech can be understood, according to Miriam Dobson in ‘Khrushchev’s Cold Summer’ (2009), as an attempt to resolve and clarify some of the uncertainties and questions that had arisen from the reforms and de-Stalinising policies after Stalin’s death.10 In this speech, for the first time, the person of Stalin and the cult present

around him was criticised in public by Khrushchev. Taking the legacy of Lenin as a starting point,

2 Applebaum, Gulag - a History, 474. 3 Applebaum, 506–7.

4 Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation), 21.

5 Adler, ‘Life in the `Big Zone’ : The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression’.

6 This reversal of Stalinist justice would later result in a significant revision by Khrushchev of the famous

58th_{article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for political prisoners.}

7 Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation), 107.

8 Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (New Haven :

Yale University Press., 2013), 17.

9 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, ‘“On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” Delivered at the

Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - Proceedings and Debates of the 84th Congress, 2nd’ (History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, 1956), http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115995.

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the transcendent cult of personality – “a cult that is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism” – could only be explained as a deviation from the ideas of Lenin about the constructive role of the masses, the people.11 This deviation was reflected in Stalin’s style of governing, Khrushchev

argued. In contrast to Lenin, “Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion.”12 In the speech, Khrushchev touched upon several Stalinist concepts and tropes in order

to denounce these and attribute new meanings to it. One example is the concept of the ‘Enemy of the People’ (Vrag Naroda), which Khrushchev originates in his speech to Stalin in person. A term that had allowed to oppress anyone who disagreed with Stalin; a term “violating all norms of revolutionary legality”. Whilst Lenin also used harsh methods, Khrushchev admits, since it was necessary for the ‘struggle for survival’ of the Bolshevik cause, Stalin used repression at a time when the revolution was already victorious and the Party was already consolidated.13 The

unnecessary repression thus had only been the result of Stalin’s distrust and anxiety. A repression that could be carried out because of this very cult of personality elevated him above all Party authority and allowed him to decide on whatever he pleased. Khrushchev exemplifies this in the speech by showing that by means of false allegations and fabricated cases, in a context of lawlessness (“a criminal violation of revolutionary legality”), a majority of the Party’s Central Committee was arrested and shot in the years 1937-1938.14 To further deconstruct the cult of

Stalin, Khrushchev questioned in his speech the achievements of Stalin and stresses that the historical victories were attained thanks to the Party and the self-sacrificing work of the nation, rather than the achievement of Stalin himself.15 As a consequence of this statement, those who still

praised Stalin for his achievements during the war could only be blind as a result of the cult of personality. Khrushchev concluded by stating that the Party should once and for all break with the ‘cult of the individual’. He promised that the Party would restore the Leninist principles and correct the evil caused “by acts violating revolutionary socialist legality”.16 Although Khrushchev

intended to let the speech remain secret for the outside world, its message soon spread through the country, not least because the text was distributed to all local Party organs. It caused debate among governing members of the Party, since in many ways the speech was ambiguous and yet incomplete, and letters were sent to the Committee by Party members. In a subsequent resolution, in response to the questions that had remained open after the 1956 Secret Speech, Khrushchev

11 Khrushchev, ‘“On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” Delivered at the Twentieth Party

Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - Proceedings and Debates of the 84th Congress, 2nd’, 8. 12 Khrushchev, 3. 13 Khrushchev, 3. 14 Khrushchev, 4. 15 Khrushchev, 8. 16 Khrushchev, 9.

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drew a more balanced view on Stalin by acknowledging his good work for the Party in the early years.17 What the consequences of his speech would be for the rehabilitation of former prisoners

remained yet unclear. Moreover, the official recognition of the victims of Stalin’s Terror did only to a little extent resemble practice in the way how former prisoners who requested rehabilitation were treated.18 Nevertheless, this dossier would certainly test the limits of de-Stalinisation and its

meaning in practice for the Terror’s victims. Over the years, the process of rehabilitation can be characterised as one with great variability, unevenness, and inequity in reinstating former prisoners into society. These characteristics can be partly explained by the state’s ambiguous attitude towards the past19, but also because of the highly diffused character of the committees

and individuals who reconsidered the cases of prisoners.20 As it concerns the returnees, the

constantly evolving political climate in those years brought them only but uncertainty whether rehabilitation would come after all. For many, the request for rehabilitation demanded a lot of effort and patience from their side.21

3.3 Memory and trauma

Since the authorities were well aware of the mobilising power of public memory, they carefully monitored and defined what could be said and, on the other hand, should be considered as non-constructive or even anti-Soviet speech. At the 22nd_{Party Congress in 1961 more was being}

revealed to the people about the Stalinist Terror years (the year ‘1937’ became a reoccurring trope in the speeches of delegates). Moreover, Khrushchev offered a stage and prominent role in Congress to a number of high-ranking victims of the terror. In order not to interpret these performances as a critique on the current leadership it was framed in such a way, by presenting celebrative stories of healing and successful rehabilitation, that the speakers showed solidarity with the current leadership.22 In order not to dwell on the repressive years, expressions of

survivors’ victimhood were consciously counterbalanced by an optimistic narrative of recovery and the healing of trauma.23 The 22nd_{Congress thus provided the nation, but also editors of Soviet}

literature, newspapers and magazines, guidelines how to remember the Terror ‘properly’ and selectively on who to blame and shame.24 The Congress also offered an alternative narrative that

linked the difficult past to a clear an appealing vision of the future of the Union’s trajectory. It

17 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 51–54. 18 Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation), 124–25. 19 Adler, ‘Life in the `Big Zone’ : The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression’, 5. 20 Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, Chapter 2 - ‘the art of petitioning’.

21 Applebaum, Gulag - a History, 513–14.

22 Cynthia Hooper, ‘What Can and Cannot Be Said: Between the Stalinist Past and New Soviet Future’, The

Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 313.

23 Jones, ‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the

Thaw’, 353–54.

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offered the victims of repression a format to interpret own’s own suffering.25 Although the Terror

was acknowledged by the authorities as an obstacle necessary to overcome, the same terror should not be seen as shameful but rather as potentially revitalising.26 The same moral rectitude

and heroism by which survivors had succeeded to survive could help every individual to turn one’s traumatic experience into a spiritual resurrection in the present.27 Jones characterises this

promoted view on the traumatic memory of the Stalinist repression by the Soviet press and Party propaganda in the early 1960s as pathologised. It approaches trauma as a disease that implies a necessity to be healed. The definition of what was healthy or unhealthy in remembering the past was thus largely reserved to the Party that had to govern the ‘recovery’ and ‘purification’ of society.28

Controlling and defining prevalent narratives by the authorities is what Foucault called the institutionalisation of the discourse. In the context of the Soviet Union, such institutionalised channels of information and narrative formats were the Union of Soviet Writers and the state-owned press. In ‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories’ (2008), Polly Jones shows how literature played a central role in narrativising trauma at the height of de-Stalinisation.29 From

letters sent by readers in response to published literary novels is clear that the task of Soviet literature was seen by many as to reflect the people’s experiences and memory (a concept called narodnost’).30 Between the 20th_{and 22}nd_{Party Congress the theme of the Stalinist terror appeared}

in Soviet literature through fictionalised stories about returning Gulag prisoners or relatives and friends of terror victims.31 Although the authors wrote their narratives in the spirit of the Secret

speech, it still got critical reviews from its readers and the Party authorities. Central to the debate among editors and the authorities was to what extent the past should be remembered and exposed in length to overcome a collective trauma. Khrushchev himself alternated in his speeches between the two sides of the debate. Whilst he acknowledged the difficult years of repression, he also articulated not to be ‘unhealthy’ obsessed with the past and rather direct attention to the present and the future.32 By means of editing and censoring the press and publication of literature,

the balance between victimhood and the more positive narrative of survival and rehabilitation was carefully preserved. Not least to control the flood of victims’ testimonies sent to magazines and newspapers. Because of this monitoring, literature reflected the official narrative with a same

25 Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 200. 26 Dobson, 213.

27 Dobson, 207.

28 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 141.

Thaw’.

30 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 137. 31 Jones, 132.

Memories of the Gulag - in unpublished Gulag life writing during the Khrushchev Thaw: A personal narrative analysis against the backdrop of the 1960s’ post-Stalinist discourse.