Gulag in History and Memory
In Fall 2010, the Havighurst Center chose to explore the history of the Gulag as its semester-long focus. In addition to hosting speakers on the subject for the Havighurst Colloquia Series, the Center also held its annual Young Researchers Conference on the same topic. To support the exploration and discussion of this topic, the Havighurst Center created a selection of online resources for students and the general public.
History
Gulag - Russian: “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,” the system of Soviet labor camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed the political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union…
(1) - The Soviets established Perm 36, called ITK-6 camp, in 1946 as a logging camp in the forested region of the Ural Mountains near the Siberian border. Here, prisoners cut...
Perm-36 (2) - In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet government cracked down on the dissident movement. Several camps in the Perm region were transformed into the harshest camps for political prisoners. The prisoners were...
- Over a million Russians were returned against their will, and most of them were either immediately killed or sent to the gulag, where many of them later died…
- Prison in Russia is more than just a prison. Russian prisons have reached the unimaginable level of humiliation of the human personality. This special spirit of Russian prisons was formed over centuries. The Solovetsky monastery, up to the XIX century…
(in Russian)
(in Russian)
- the drawings of Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, a gifted artist who spent more than a decade in the Gulags and illustrated her memoirs upon release.( Mental Floss Magazine, August 4, 2008)
Personal Stories
| -During the first two years of Soviet occupation, Estonian born Canadian, Eduard Kolga, worked on his family farm in the rural farming community of Haapsalu to support his growing family… |
Gulag survivor George Zoltan Bien 76, an Arlington resident who survived imprisonment in the Soviet gulag after World War II and was forced to flee his native Hungary after the uprising against Soviet occupation in 1956 |
John H. Noble an American who never knew why the Soviets imprisoned him in their notorious gulag, but not only lived to write books on the grim, decade-long experience but also recovered his family’s company and castle in the former East Germany… |
| is a remarkable man. Yes, IS because although born in 1911, he is still very much alive in Russia today. Alive and healthy today, inspite of having spent years in several GULAG concentration camps… |
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- Early in 1937, Nikolai Antsiferov, a Russian literary critic and expert on the cultural heritage of St. Petersburg, was arrested in Moscow for the fourth time. A survivor of the notorious Solovki and White Sea Canal concentration camps, where he had been punished for political offenses in the 1920s and early 1930s, he was an obvious target for re-arrest during the great purges… |
Maps of the Gulags
Student Poster Project
Students in HST 436/POL 440/540 each pursued individual research for three weeks on an aspect of the Gulag that interested them. Working with Steve Norris, Karen Dawisha, and Masha Misco, each student selected a topic, developed a research question, and pursued individual research on the topic. They presented their findings in poster form before the participants in the Young Researchers Conference held from October 28-30.
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Solovki Power |
Women in the Gulag II |
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Literary Portrayals of the Gulag |
Gulag Education |
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Memorializing the Gulag II |
Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
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The Gulag Paradox |
Gulag Functionalism |
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Forced Labor in the Gulag |
Memorializing Sachsenhausen |
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Memorializing the Gulag I |
Propaganda & Labor in the Gulag |
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Gulag Prison Gangs |
Survivor Art |
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Gulag Policy toward Political Prisoners |
Americans in the Gulag |
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The Use of Political Prisoners in WWII |
 Victory Despite Stalin
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Media
YouTube documentaries
- Documentary video without sound portrays the work that was assigned to prisoners and the way they were completing it. It also includes the true Soviet administration personas with all variety of tasks it was giving to its prisoners.
- A former Nobel prize winner, and one of the Soviet Union's most famous dissident writers, has released a biography about his life opposing Stalin. RussiaToday caught up with Natalia Solzhenitsyna at a book launch of her husband.
- June 2003... In the forests of southern Siberia, workers are still working as serfs in the Gulag, paying off North Korea's $3.8 billion Cold War debt. Kim Sung Chol came to work at a North Korean Logging Camp in Siberia on a three-year 'contract'. He never received a single rouble.
Movie
- Geopolitics and big oil play into the capture of a British geologist by the Russian military in Iran at the end of 1945. As soon as they capture him, they ship him off to a Siberian prison camp. The majority of the rest of the film is about his attempts to survive, and the relationships and adventures he has while imprisoned. Despite the presence of an English star, the rest of the major performers in this film are Russian, and it was one of the first films made on Russian soil to clearly depict life in the infamous gulags (prison labor camps) of Siberia. The geologist has numerous significant relationships, but the most dramatically compelling are with a female camp doctor and a young girl prisoner.
Articles
[PDF]* - the author travels to former labor camp prisons and documents on the details he saw. His tour guide, Sergei Lunev, described the places to the author from his native perspective, which made author's observations more colorful and history-enriched.
Photos of Gulag territory
, by Dr. A. Hugentobler extracted from a “Mental Floss” magazine
by a curious adventurer Filatova Elena Vladimirovna
once hard-labour camps for Soviet prisoners, are being turned into tourist destinations by Russian entrepreneurs
are finally being released to public “The Boston Globe”
depicted on a Catholic website
effected those who absolutely did not deserved them
in Soviet Gulag
*Accessible versions are available upon request. (See ).
The abridged edition of Solzhenitsyn's hauntingly intimate portrait of his own arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, rebellion, and eventual release during Stalin's purges is a book like no other. this book, written by a constantly watched and persecuted dissident...
The first fully documented history of the Gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution...
Drawings from the Gulag consists of 130 drawings by Danzig Baldaev, describing the history, horror, and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918...
This scholarly, nuanced work shines light on Staln's forced resettlement of 2 million Soviet peasants in the 1930s. A professor of history shows how a combination of repressive central government policies...
Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, reletnless novel simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature...
Writers who suffered during the Gulag
(autobiography)
(biography)
(Biography)
