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Viewed Prisoners As Well As Free Settlers in the Remote Regions of Russia’S Far East Sakhalin Island

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Viewed Prisoners As Well As Free Settlers in the Remote Regions of Russia’S Far East Sakhalin Island Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School Labor Camps in the Russian Empire and tJohnhe Joseph So vCastleiet Union in Russian Literature Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES LABOR CAMPS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE SOVIET UNION IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE By JOHN CASTLE A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2020 John Castle defended this thesis on April 23, 2020. The members of the supervisory committee were: Nina Efimov Professor Directing Thesis Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya Committee Member Jonathan Grant Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to sincerely thank my committee. Thank you to Dr. Efimov, who was the first to encourage me to study in Russia and continue my academic career in studying Russian language and literature. Through her lectures on literature as well as her trip to Irtkutsk inspired me to research this topic and study it in depth. Thank you Dr. Wakamiya, for your course on Transnational Literature. This course presented to me different perspectives and writing styles. Finally, thank you to Dr. Grant, who suggested several sources to aid my research and whose classes on 19th and 20th century Russia gave me a solid background on my topic. I would like to also thank the endless support of my parents, JoAnn and William Castle, who encouraged and supported me to pursue a university education. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. v INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 1. The History of Labor Camps in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ............................ 10 2. Labor Camps in 19th Century Russian Literature ................................................................... 20 3. The Depiction of the GULAG in 20th Century Russian Literature ........................................... 47 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 66 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 69 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................ 72 iv ABSTRACT This thesis analyzes Russian labor camps as represented in 19 th and 20 th century literature. A background on the history of the development of labor camps is provided in order to help develop a significant understanding of how and why the labor camps of the 19 th and 20 th centuries developed and who the people were who had been sent to them. This thesis starts with an analysis of the people who were sentenced to the katorga during the 19 th century. George Kennan’s journeys to Siberia, in Siberia and the Exile System as well as letters and memoirs from exiles such as the Decembrists are discussed. Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization of kulaks and development of the GULAG labor camps are studied using memoirs from survivors and political figures. The characters, living conditions, and escapes in the novel The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky are investigated and compared with the people, living conditions and escapes observed in Sakhalin Island by Anton Chekhov. The fictional characters and their experiences based on Dostoevsky’s life while living in the Tsarist labor camp are examined with actual prisoners whom Chekhov met with in his journey throughout the labor camps on the Sakhalin Islands. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s experience represented in Gulag Archipelago is analyzed and compared with the fictional characters in the novel Generations of Winter by Vasily Aksyonov. The comparison of both fiction and nonfiction novels is necessary in understanding the trauma the authors seek to convey to the reader. This comparison will also allow for further evaluation of how the labor camps have changed from the katorga of the Russian Empire, to the GULAG in the Soviet Union. v INTRODUCTION The study of Russian literature cannot be completed without a thorough understanding of the literature of the labor camps. The literature of labor camps is a unique genre and it is not easily understood by the reader without careful examination of the works. Censored in the authoritarian climate of both the 19 th and 20 th centuries, labor camp literature makes it possible for the reader to understand a time and place that only a few were able to experience and live through. It gives a voice that would otherwise be silenced to countless victims of the labor camp system. The earliest author to write on labor camps in Russia was Fyodor Dostoevsky with his novel The House of the Dead which he based on his experience living in the penal labor camp or katorga . Under an authoritarian regime, Dostoevsky’s work offers the world a perspective from the minds of a prisoner who is living with his past, as he struggles to make it through his present situation. Since Dostoevsky’s novel, several authors have contributed significantly to the genre of labor camp literature. Anton Chekhov investigated the katorga himself where he interviewed prisoners as well as free settlers in the remote regions of Russia’s Far East Sakhalin Island. It is in his notes that he is able to present to the reader the conditions in labor camps which Dostoevsky portrayed in his fiction. In comparison with the 19 th century literature and the Tsarist penal system, Solzhenitsyn wrote on his experience as a prisoner in the Soviet Union’s GULAG under another totalitarian ruler, Joseph Stalin. Unlike in Dostoevsky’s novel, where the main character is not the author, but a fictional prisoner, Solzhenitsyn wrote on his experience as he recalled events and people while he served his sentence in the GULAG. The injustices of the GULAG are complemented with Solzhenitsyn’s personal experiences and reflections. He included his own involvement with arrest, interrogation, and manual labor during his incarceration. 1 In the fictional novel Generations of Winter Vassily Aksyonov uses his characters experiences as a way to connect with the reader. Aksyonov establishes this connection between characters and readers by allowing the reader to sympathize with the torment and agony of their experiences in the novel. This is not possible in the memoirs of Solzhenitsyn just as it is not possible in Chekhovs notes from Sakhalin Island. The connection to the fictional characters in the novels of Dostoevsky and Aksyonov do more than just depict events that occurred to real people, but establish emotional significance to the reader that brings out a deeper meaning in the literature. In the Russian Empire the labor camps served a different function than in Soviet Russia. The Tsarist katorga were used as a correctional institution where convicts performed forced labor in Russia’s remote regions. The katorga had several purposes in Tsarist Russia, one allowed for the country to develop the uninhabited regions in Siberia, while another sought not only to punish the convicts, but to rehabilitate convicts into contributing members of society. The prisoners in the 19 th century labor camps took their families with them, they had incentives to finish their work and be as productive as possible. While under the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime, people accused of committing crimes would disappear with little or no time to say goodbye to their families. Their families were told to denounce the accused and did not have the same opportunity as those a century earlier, to travel with them to their labor camp to support their time in forced labor. In the Soviet system, many accused of crimes had not committed crimes; their families were declared “enemies of the people” by association with the accused. The forced labor camps in the GULAG system were not there to develop the prisoner mentally, or physically, but served to break if not kill the victim. The forced labor of the GULAG was a significant contribution to the Soviet economy, which built roads, canals, and cleared land for development. 2 The goal of this thesis is to show how the labor camps and their victims developed and changed throughout history by exploring the arrests, living conditions, and abuses as documented historical memoirs and fictional novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The House of the Dead reflects on his experience as a prisoner in the labor camp. While in the labor camp “He managed to keep a ‘Siberian Notebook’ in which he recorded hundreds of pithy expressions and prison adages” (Lantz 285) Dostoevsky’s novel exposed the conditions of the Russian katorga in that its “whole existence was known but whose inner workings had remained a dark mystery”(285 Lantz) In Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead “He describes the severity of the prison, the debasing hard labour, the fights, fetters, and punishment floggings”(Baak 250) . Anton Chekhov journeyed to the Sakhalin Island’s prison colonies with the intention to conduct a census “I carried
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