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In the Footsteps of the Past In the footsteps of the past Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing Master thesis Russian and Eurasian Studies (20 ECTS) Faculty of Humanities Leiden University Author: L.M. van de Mortel Date: 30 August 2019 First supervisor: Dr. O.F. Boele Second supervisor: Dr. E.L. Stapert Word count: 22768 1 Table of contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 3 1.1 The historical background of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing ................... 4 1.2 Research objectives ............................................................................................................... 7 1.3 Selection of primary sources ............................................................................................ 10 1.4 Importance of the research ............................................................................................... 11 1.5 The structure of this thesis .............................................................................................. 12 2. Retrospect, testimony and bi-functionality in the prison camp memoir .................. 13 2.1 Retrospect ............................................................................................................................... 13 2.2 The testimonial function .................................................................................................... 17 2.3 The bi-functionality of prison camp memoirs ............................................................. 25 3. The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the morphology of the Gulag memoir ............................................................................................... 28 3.1 The Gulag memoir as a genre .......................................................................................... 28 3.2 The morphology of the Gulag memoir ........................................................................... 30 3.3 The morphology of the Gulag memoirs applied to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs................................................................................................................. 32 3.3.1 Morphological feature no.1: A tension between the ethical drive and aesthetic impulse ......................................................................................................................... 33 3.3.2 Morphological feature no. 1 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ...... 34 3.3.3 Morphological feature no.2: The interconnection of individual and communal concerns ................................................................................................................... 35 3.3.4 Morphological feature no.2 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ....... 37 3.3.5 Morphological feature no.3 The inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables ......................................................................................................................................... 40 3.3.6 Morphological feature no.3 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ....... 43 3.3.7 Morphological no.4: A modal scheme that can be described in term of Lent 48 3.3.8 Morphological feature no.4 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ....... 49 3.3.9 Conclusion on the analysis ........................................................................................... 51 4. Looking back in time: the interconnection of Russian prison camp memoirs ....... 52 4.1 References to the Gulag past ........................................................................................... 52 4.2 Gulag memoirs looking back in time ............................................................................. 55 4.3 The palimpsest of Russian prison camp memoir writing........................................ 60 4.4 Deploying the past in the contemporary prison camp memoirs........................... 63 2 5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 66 6. Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 69 3 1. Introduction The first book I read in detention that came to me from outside was And the Wind Returns, by Vladimir Bukovsky. The first book that robbed me of two days’ sleep, because I read it cover to cover, several times, was Kolyma tales, by Varlam Shalamov. Both books were written by Russian prisoners, so-called enemies of the state. Less than a year later, I would find myself in a penal colony near the one in the books: in the Perm region, in the northern Urals.1 This fragment is from the book Riot days (2017) written by Maria Alyokhina. She was one of the members of the Russian protest-art collective Pussy Riot that performed a ‘punk prayer’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012. They wore bright colored dresses and balaclavas and performed the song ‘Mother of God, banish Putin’. She was later arrested, together with two other women of Pussy Riot, and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Riot days is a memoir about her experiences, from the performance to detention and the trial, and later the penal colony. Penal colonies are in fact prison camps, and Riot days can therefore be regarded as a prison camp memoir. Russia has a long history of prison camp literature, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, to Gulag literature such as Aleksandr Solzhetitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. This history of prison camp literature is a result of Russia’s long history of prison camps: the katorga camp system since the eighteenth century in the Russian Empire, and, the Gulag camps during the Soviet Union. The term Gulag was officially the acronym of the agency that was responsible for the camp system: Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei (Main Administration of the Camps) that was established in 1930. 1 Maria Alyokhina, Riot days (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 74. 4 Later, it came to denote the Soviet camps in general, especially because of its use in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.2 Prison camp literature is something we in general associate with the past: in particular Holocaust literature and Gulag literature. However, Alyokhina’s memoir is a contemporary Russian prison camp memoir, and moreover, in the aforementioned fragment she refers to two Gulag memoirs. What makes this so compelling? It is not that she just refers to the Gulag history and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, she also connects her story to the stories about the Gulag camps, and she identifies herself with Shalamov, who was in Stalin era Gulag camps, and Bukovsky, who was in a Brezhnev era prison camp. This finding was the starting point of this thesis that focusses on the memoir, and will be about contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs and the way they relate to Gulag memoirs. 1.1 The historical background of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing The number of published Gulag memoirs is relatively small, especially compared to the scale of the repression and the percentage of victims who survived it. Even if you add all the unpublished memoirs that are kept in archives, the number stays relatively small, argues Irina Shcherbakova in ‘Remembering the Gulag . Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003).3 Nevertheless, she delimits a periodization of when the memoirs were written, in the Stalin and post-Stalin era. In the period from the 1920s to the 1940s only a few testimonies appeared about the Soviet camps. These were only published in the West, since they were the stories of people who succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union. The number of people abroad who had been in the Soviet camps grew larger, also during the Second World War and hereafter. The memoirs written then in the West still did not receive great public attention and had very little resonance in the West, and were rather unknown in the Soviet Union itself. Wide interest in the theme of 2 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 249. 3 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 Geltrinelli, 2003),188. 5 repression, and thus the camps, both in the Soviet Union and in the West only began in the mid-1950s, thus after Stalin had died in 1953.4 In the first phase, from the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 to the 22nd Congress in 1961, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin gave a mass stimulus to people to write about the repression. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin went hand in hand with mass rehabilitations of (former) inmates. Moreover, between 1953 and 1960, the Gulag was dramatically downsized: the prisoner population of the Gulag was 2,5 million when Stalin died, but shrank to approximately 550.000 in 1960 (only people in camps, not including those in prison).5 Memoirs that were written in this period often emphasize that the author wished not to forget the nightmares they had witnessed, but to remember them to be able to tell about them later.6 A new phase began in 1962, with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan
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