sign in sign up
<<
Home , Great Purge, Khrushchev Thaw

Memories of the

in unpublished Gulag life writing during the : A personal narrative analysis against the backdrop of the 1960s’ post-Stalinist discourse.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

Summary

The topic of my thesis is the interaction between the creation of narratives in Gulag life writing by former victims of 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 The primary sources of this study are three unpublished Gulag memoirs, written by Moiseevna Goldberg (1901-1984), Olga Michailovna Kuchumova (1902-1988), and Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia (1898-1984), written resp.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 ‘’. 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 . What is surprising though, is that the authors break with the Party’s caution not to start a second 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.

ii

Table of Contents

Summary ii Acknowledgements iv Note on Transliteration v

Chapter 1: On the research subject and methodology 1 1.1 Introduction 1 1.2 The genre of the Gulag memoir 4 1.3 Selection of primary sources 6 1.4 Methodology and limitations 8 Chapter 2: Theoretical framework 12 2.1 Discourse 12 2.2 The self 13 2.3 Experience 14 2.4 Personal memory and remembering 15 Chapter 3: Historical context and public discourse 16 3.1 Silent de-Stalinisation (1953-1955) 16 3.2 The Secret Speech (1956) and its aftermath 17 3.3 Memory and trauma 19 3.4 Responses from ‘below’ 21 Chapter 4: Textual analysis 23 4.1 Framing 24 4.2 First stage: Deprivation of freedom 28 4.2.1 A period of uncertainty 29 4.2.2 The arrest 30 4.2.3 Prison and sentence 32 4.2.4 Etap 34 4.3 Second stage: Life in the camp 36 4.3.1 Human dignity 37 4.3.2 The other 43 4.3.3 On the connection with the nation outside the zone 48 4.3.4 On release and return: reflections 49 Chapter 5: Conclusion 52 Bibliography 55

iii

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 in through which I got access to the archive in which the memoirs of former victims of 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.

Arthur Koeman

iv

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’.

v

Chapter 1: On the research subject and methodology

1.1 Introduction

Shortly after the death of First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1953, the Presidium of the USSR 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 the 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 ’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 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 could be openly discussed. First within the upper

1 , 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’, -Asia Studies 51, no. 1 (1999): 5–19. 1 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 fuelled the debate in society about the release of prisoners and their 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 ’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 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. 2 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 in the late . 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: Indiana University Press, 2012). 3 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 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 of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s’, The Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 327–52. 4 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 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. 20 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, 198. 5 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 . 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) Archives F.2 Op.1, no. 47 (1963). 6 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 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 , 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 ), 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 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]. 26 Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, Memorial (Moskva) Archives F.2 Op.1, no. 105 (1964). 7

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 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. 8 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. 35 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 78. 9 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 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. 39 Smith and Watson, 16–17. 10 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: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 4 (2001): 835–47. 11

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. 12

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. 13 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. 14

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. 15

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

1 Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation), 72. 16 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 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. 10 Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer (New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), 81. 17 the transcendent cult of personality – “a cult that is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-” – 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 ‘’ (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. 18 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. 24 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 142–43. 19 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 22nd 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. 29 Jones, ‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw’. 30 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 137. 31 Jones, 132. 32 Jones, ‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw’, 360. 20 pathological view on trauma. Literary characters that, despite being mentally damaged by the experience of terror, managed to be cured of their ‘disease’ of having traumatic memories and were able again to focus on the future, rather than dwelling on memories of the past. The memoirs and biographies that were published by the Soviet press in the early 1960s, often written by victims from the Party elite, were primarily intended not to dwell on the destruction caused by Stalin. In contrast, it propagated a positive view of the resurrection of Leninist principles embodied in the protagonists.33 As a consequence, by presenting a model of the brave and loyal survivor as representative for Stalin’s victims and by focussing in specific on the victims of the terror years in the late 1930s, it excluded many others who did not fit into this larger narrative.34

3.4 Responses from ‘below’

By means of writing letters to newspapers, journals, members and institutions of the Party, and above all the writing of memoirs, citizens massively voiced their opinions and memories during the height of de-Stalinisation in the early 1960s. A turning point in breaking the ban for citizens to speak about the Gulag and Stalin’s rule was the publication of the short novel ‘One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’ by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, published in the literary journal Novyi Mir in November 1962. A controversial fictional work, mainly because of its raw representation of the camp life and the ‘convict slang’ used in the novel. Since this novel had been widely available, its publication engendered a debate on Stalin’s victims and perpetrators. A debate that went, as Miriam Dobson shows in ‘Contesting the paradigms of de-Stalinisation’ (2005), beyond only literary intellectuals and Party officials. Ordinary readers also sent letters to the journal to articulate their opinions about the novel of Solzhenitsyn and about how to deal with the past.35 One of the dominant themes in the reader’s responses was whether those, who were once categorised as ‘Enemies of the People’, should now be fully reinstated as Soviet citizens and as members of the Party. Dobson shows that the reactions do not reflect total disapproval of the rehabilitation of the purge’s victims, but still, people wondered whether all former ‘Enemies of the State’ deserved this rehabilitated status.36 If not, such a view could easily undermine the legitimacy of the state, since after the death of Stalin the Party had not changed much in its composition.37 People also complained that the policies of de-Stalinisation were applied too broadly. Rising criminality in the 1950s mainly caused this anxiety after the mass releases from the Gulag and the

33 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70, 144. 34 Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 213. 35 Miriam Dobson, ‘Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization: Readers’ Responses to “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”’, Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 581. 36 Dobson, 586. 37 Adler, ‘Life in the `Big Zone’ : The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression’, 16. 21 subsequent threat that their return would degrade Soviet culture and society.38 Over the course of de-Stalinisation, the regime also articulated its concerns about the honesty of some of the returned Gulag prisoners. As a consequence, it restricted the heroic status that was earlier attributed to all purge victims and warned society to be aware of the false and real criminals among the returnees.39 However, as it concerns the people who were involved in the years of repression in the role of executors of Stalin’s policies, the Party was very cautious in blaming them and rarely addressed this topic in speeches and public statements. Only a few prominent Party elites, such as Molotov and Beria, were considered the real ‘enemies’. The only way to prevent a second purge within the Party and society of those considered post-Stalinist ‘Enemies of the People’ was to focus on the cult of personality of Stalin, and focus on the future rather than on wrongdoings in the past. As a result, camp guards, chiefs and other NKVD officials on the local level were never brought to trial.40 In this context of relative openness to remember and talk about the past, the authors of the memoirs in this study, together with many others, decided to write about their memories of the Gulag. Although the authors’ intentions with writing varied, the political climate of relative openness apparently encouraged former victims to write, not least because the Party had finally offered a narrative to understand their own past.

38 More about the rise of criminality together with the downsizing of the Gulag, in: Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. 39 Dobson, 213. 40 Adler, The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation), 150. 22

Chapter 4: Textual analysis

The three authors of the selected memoirs, Olga Mikhailovna Kuchumova, Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia, and Maria Moiseevna Goldberg, share a common fate. All three women were sentenced in the notorious ‘Years of Terror’ (1937-1938) as ChSIR1, family members of ‘Traitors of the Motherland’. The arrest of close relatives of a person arrested under the 58th article of the Criminal Code of the Russian SFR – those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities – was made possible by an NKVD decree issued in 1937.2 In these years, the language and attitude towards prisoners changed drastically. Whereas earlier in the 1920s prisoners sentenced under article 58 were called ‘Political prisoners’, in the late 1930s terms like ‘Enemy of the People’ and ‘Traitor of the Motherland’ became the official terms to label these prisoners. Using these propagandistic terms, and by letting go the preceded idea of the camp as a place for criminal re- education, it was made clear that prisoners (zeki)3 were not considered full citizens nor communists anymore.4 Because of the standardised procedures of arrest, the sequence of events is very similar in the experiences of these three women. They all underwent a standardised process of arrest, first of their husbands and after several interrogations soon their own arrest followed. After staying in a city prison for a while – some were locked in city prisons for months or even years – the prisoners were called to hear their sentence during an unofficial court and were forced to sign the sentence. Next, they were transported to corrective labour camps by train. Children often ended up in orphanages or juvenile prison camps, after being separated from their parents with the arrest. The youngest children were arrested together with the mother, as is exemplified by the story of Maria Sandratskaia, and nurtured in a child care centre in the camp. All three authors make extensive use of flashbacks, to actively remember specific events, thoughts and the conversations they had, and of flashforwards to the narrator’s present at the time of writing. By means of this discontinuous style of writing, the narrators themselves reflect upon the events and decide what is important to mention at a certain moment in the story. Besides factual and contextual similarities, the story narrated out of each’ experience is still unique and different in approach. There are fundamental differences in the initial framing of the narrative by each author, as I will show in the first paragraph of this chapter. I distinguish two stages in the experience of imprisonment to structure the textual analysis. The first stage includes the consecutive events of arrest, detention, sentencing, and transport to the camp (the etap5). Events

1 Acronym for: Family Member of a Traitor of the Motherland (Сhlen Sem'i Izmennika Rodiny) 2 Applebaum, Gulag - a History, 102. 3 Abbreviation of zakliuchennyi (Prisoner or inmate) as used in Russian slang. In colloquial language, female prisoners were referred to as zechka. 4 Applebaum, 109, 112. 5 The word etap can be both translated as ‘transport’ as well as ‘stage’. 23 that the authors tell in a strictly chronological manner. I take this as a structure for analysis of the first stage. The second stage is the period of actual detention and work in the labour camps. Since the authors narrate the second stage in a more anecdotal and thematical manner, I discuss the central themes and the use of discursive devices in these anecdotes and reflections. Because of the discontinuous style of writing, in some cases, I will deviate from this structure for the benefit of the content.

4.1 Framing

Whether it is a preface, a summary, an included biography or a few comments and reflective thoughts, all three authors actively reflect in their memoirs upon their own experience. By giving such ‘meta-comments’ on one’s life story, the authors provide a framing according to what they intend to communicate with the life writing and how they would like the reader to interpret it. Recalling that the narration is an intersubjective process, the authors fall back on discursive devices that they expect are known to the reader and have meaning. For the reader, this framing can be used as an interpretative tool, at least for the interpretation as the author intended it to be. In this paragraph, I discuss the prefaces and meta-comments (if present in the text) that are provided by the authors to frame the memoir. Maria Moiseevna Goldberg, an employee of the Communist Committee VKP(b)6 in the mid- 1930s, introduces her memoir with a short abstract wherein she frames the fate she herself and many other Soviet women befell during the Stalinist repression because of the ‘connection’ to their arrested husbands. This story, she explains, is about the “free, honest (chestnye) Soviet citizens whose fate had been unknown to them for a long time, but kept a deep faith in the cause of the Party”, and about those who “beyond strength and capacity, participated in the construction of the new life”.7 Maria Goldberg does not frame the story as one solely of victimhood but, more importantly, she frames her experience as a story of strength, endurance and steadfastness in the women’s loyalty to the Communist Party.8 She does also articulate a clear objective with writing the memoir, that is to speak out and give a voice to those who perished and those who survived the imprisonment. The public condemnation of Stalin’s cult of personality, as seen during the 20th and 22nd Communist Party Congress (resp. 1956, 1961), was and remains necessary, she states, but yet there is a role for ‘us’:

6 Acronym for ‘All-Union Communist Party () (Vcecoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partia (bol’shevikov) – the name of the Party after 1925. 7 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 1. 8 Nanci Adler has discussed several explanations for the phenomenon that survivors still remained loyal to the Party. Among these are a developed ‘traumatic bond’ between prisoner and perpetrator, religion as model to understand the power of communism, cognitive dissonance and pragmatism. In: Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party - Communist Believers Return from the Gulag. 24

Because our number [of victims and witnesses] decreases ever more, it is needed to let our bitter experiences serve as a warning and to sharpen the people’s vigilance to even the slightest manifestations of a [personality] cult.9

Her words resemble the words spoken by Khrushchev in his speeches to the Congress as it concerns the condemnation of the cult of Stalin. Goldberg explicitly condemns the lawlessness of those times and the fact that “a public figure [Stalin] turned Soviet women, who occupy a specific place in the construction of the Motherland, into a thing, an appendage”.10 Since not much yet is written in this spirit, she clarifies, the memoir is an attempt to tell about that, what it was to be a witness and what she herself experienced together with thousands of other women in these years.11 Goldberg attributes with her objective a vital role and responsibility to the survivors of the repression and attributes a testimonial character to the memoir. Rather than voicing underexposed victimhood, she attributes a larger historical purpose to her narrated experience in a spirit of ‘never again’. Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia, employee in the literary publishing department of the People’s Commissariat for Education in Moscow, starts off her memoir (1964) with a very personal and emotional introduction: “I fell under the wheel of events of the year 1937. It crushed me, exhausted the , the brain, forsaking life”.12 After having summed up the main events of her imprisonment, she poses the question: “What for?!...”. Even though she could not understand why this all happened to her, and “having drunk the cup of grief to the bottom”, she did not lose faith in life after all. Not at least because already back then she knew that there would be a time that the Party would come to understand who had been right and who is to blame.13 In the introduction, she makes clear that besides the fact that she did not lose faith in life, she also did not lose faith with the Party and the cause of communism. However, the paradox remains how the same Party gave rise to such repression and terror during Stalin’s rule. Maria Sandratskaia, like Khrushchev in his Secret Speech, finds only one answer to this problem:

9 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 1. 10 Goldberg, 1; Maria Goldberg uses a similar rhetoric on gender as used by Soviet propagandists to legitimize the Soviet regime in relation to Western Europe. Gender equality was a main ideological aspect of Soviet identity. See also: Choi Chatterjee, ‘Ideology, Gender and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey’, Left History 6, no. 2 (1999): 11–28. 11 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 1. 12 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 2. 13 Sandratskaia, 2. 25

It is needed to remember anything, tell anything, so that my children and grandchildren know what has happened.14 (...) But, what will I say to my children and grandchildren when they ask me: “Why did you, communists, not avert it back then?” – We believed in Stalin. 15

By answering in the first person plural, speaking on behalf of the communist collective, she rhetorically shifts responsibility from herself to the larger group of communists who trusted Stalin at the time but were apparently mistaken. She communicates not that “I” was wrong, or naive, but “we” all were. Whilst she now admits that she had been wrong, her steadfast belief in Stalin back then testifies of continued loyalty to the Party in the present, and thus she presents her naive belief not as a weakness, but moreover as evidence of continuously being a true communist. A similar passage appears in the memoir of Maria Goldberg: “Because of our routed faith in Stalin, we did not understand it” (to be a deviation from the Leninist line).16 The common saying “chips fly, when trees are being cut” (les rubiat – shchepki letiat) likely offered the only explanation for the arrest of innocent communists at the time. By considering oneself and other sentenced innocents as such a chip, justified the within the Party as a historical necessity. Both authors thus do not blame themselves for their passivity back then but in particular refer to the cult of personality around Stalin, that had made them blind and incapable of intervening. Later on in the story, Maria Sandratskaia turns to the topic of Stalin’s cult of personality, stating that “by the light hands of Stalin, bloodstained with the blood of good people, our epoch was disgraced”.17 By the same hands of this heartless man, she continues, dozens of women were arrested and sent to prisons and camps (following from the decree regarding the sentencing of wives of arrested husbands under the 58th article of the Criminal Code).18 Her words are a fierce criticism of Stalin in person, but Sandratskaia, as well as Goldberg, carefully circumvent the quest of guilt within the Party. However, the memoir of Maria Sandratskaia cannot be solely understood as a political and personal critique. Sandratskaia has included a short (auto-) biography in the narrative that is centred around this very identity of being an honest, loyal and hardworking communist. After having worked as a medic at the front of the First World War, she distances herself from the pre- revolutionary military leadership and moves to Moscow in the October days (1917), where “I found the real truth, which I passionately sought”19 and joins the communist movement. From the start of the revolution onwards, she presents herself as a participant of the revolution, sympathising with the Bolshevik cause. This identity had received a reinstated

14 Sandratskaia, 17. 15 Sandratskaia, 18. 16 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 7. 17 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 16. 18 Sandratskaia, 17. 19 Sandratskaia, 9. 26 meaning in the post-Stalinist years since Khrushchev himself returned in his speeches to the rightness of pre-Stalinist communism. I understand such autobiographical elements included in the memoir as an attempt to gain both authority as a narrator as well as to gain recognition for their innocence and honesty. Such a narrating strategy is very similar to petitions ex-prisoners have written in the 1950s to the authorities in a request for rehabilitation and release. 20 For Maria Sandratskaia the memoir is thus partly an attempt to purify the names of herself and her deceased husband. Olga Michailovna Kuchumova, a journalist in the editorial office of Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), does not articulate a clear objective with writing the memoir, nor does she explicitly frame her story in a way that it coincides with or opposes the official Party line and dominant discourse at the time of writing. The only passages in which she touches upon the question of guilt and innocence is with the arrest of her husband. She firmly defends her husband, remembering him as a loyal and enthusiastic communist for the time she had known him. The same biographical details of her husband, she mentions, were written down in a letter to Stalin after her husband’s arrest. 21 The apolitical character of this narrative contrasts with the framing of the narratives by Goldberg and Sandratskaia and seems to be written primarily as a private account of her memories wherein the storytelling and the act of remembering are superior to any politically related objectives. In the memoir’s introduction, she writes (after 20-25 years): “For the second time, I go over everything in memory in search of truth, in search of a reason.” 22 Remarkable though, is that she does not specify what she considers as being the truth, nor is clear for what she searches a reason. During the storytelling, she will not return to these questions. It is, therefore, safe to assume that the primary objective for Kuchumova had been to come to terms with the past by actively remembering and writing down what had happened. On a small accompanying note from the person who handed over the memoir to Memorial is written that Kuchumova wished to let her memoir be published. However, she voiced this wish only but a year before her death in 1988. From the preface and the manner in which Maria Goldberg and Maria Sandratskaia frame their memoirs, I conclude that they both envision their memoir to function as a public testimony. Apart from the criticism of the person of Stalin in a spirit similar to that of Khrushchev’s speeches, they keep away from criticising the Party and its ambiguous attitude towards the victims of the Gulag over the years after Stalin’s death. In contrast, they are grateful for the achievements of the

20 Irina Shcherbakova makes this argument relating to the early (1950s) memoirs because the authors were at the same time seeking and petitioning for rehabilitation. The petition forced people to narrate their own biographies in such a way that it would be a proof of their innocence and above all of their honesty (chestnost’). In: Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, 190–91. 21 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 10–11. 22 Kuchumova, 10. 27

Party and praise the public condemnation of Stalin. In this aspect, by aligning themselves with the official Party line, their stories are rather a reconfirmation of loyalty to the Party. I understand from the articulated historical objective by Maria Goldberg that the memoir was intended to be published or at least distributed to a broader audience. Maria Sandratskaia explicitly mentions her children and grandchildren as the intended audience of her testimony. In the memoir of Olga Kuchumova, no larger objective is articulated but to come to terms with the past. As a consequence of framing, the concept of relationality in the narrative – the other through which the narrator narrates one’s formation or modification of self-consciousness23 – has a different meaning in each memoir. To exemplify this: Maria Goldberg and Olga Kuchumova both narrate with the voice of the first person plural to give a collective voice to a shared experience. What is different though is that Maria Goldberg explicitly refers to the honest (chestnye) Bolshevik women, whilst Kuchumova does not attach any political notion to the collective of imprisoned women. The use of the plural ‘we’ can thus be interpreted either as exclusive or inclusive, depending on the author’s perspective, objectives, and the framing of their writing. As seen in this paragraph, by initial framing the author consciously situates oneself in history and positions oneself in relation to the Party and society as a whole. The framing also communicates the message their stories convey and how these should be read. However, this does not imply that the narrative needs to be read solely from the perspectives mentioned above. The creation of narratives and the act of actively remembering also actively engages in the process of coming to terms with the past and one’s (traumatic) experiences. This is clear from the reflexive meta-comments all three authors give on the emotional difficulties they encounter in remembering and narrating the tragic events in the past. Moreover, as I will show in a later stage, from the textual analysis also implicit objectives can be revealed from the narrating strategies and the themes the authors address.

4.2 First stage: Deprivation of freedom

The first stage of the prisoners’ experiences can be divided into several periods and events that are all narrated by the authors. The first part of the period in-between the arrest of one’s husband and one’s own arrest afterwards covers the women’s first and personal confrontation with the severe repression in the years 1937-1938 and the uncertainty that emerged from it. I define the second part as the event of the author’s own arrest. The third part addresses the sentence in court, and the last part of this first stage is the transport (etap) by train to a labour camp or transit prison.

23 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 86. 28

4.2.1 A period of uncertainty

The period between the arrest of the women’s husbands and their own arrest is a crucial part of the narratives. It is a period of uncertainty and the realisation of being systematically excluded from society. After the arrest of Olga Kuchumova’s husband Misha, she was called to her redactor in the TACC to whom she, moved to tears, “confessed” the arrest of her husband. Describing it as a “confession” (ispoved’), as if she herself had committed a crime, shows how sensitive this topic was since the wives of sentenced husband in those years were met with suspicion and exclusion. Through propaganda, categories such as ‘Enemy of the People’, ‘Trotskyist’, and ‘Traitor of the Motherland’ had become widely acknowledged categories and caused immediate social exclusion for the wives of sentenced husbands, since everyone was well aware of the meaning and consequences of those categories. Kuchumova was fired the next day without any explanation, and later she would lose her membership in the Communist Party. At home, she was afraid to go outside, because she felt like a “plague” to others.24 Eventually, Kuchumova remembers feeling a sense of calmness when she was arrested and imprisoned: “The circle is closed and I can’t go anywhere anymore – body and soul are imprisoned”.25 Maria Goldberg describes the events as a ‘relay race’ from Kyiv, where her husband was arrested. A relay race of arrests that headed towards Moscow and soon she would be fired and lose her Party membership.26 She herself also “did not survive the bitterness of disappointment, when the eyes of close relatives suddenly became cold and suspicious”. 27 As a consequence, the year 1937 had been a “year of deep loneliness” she tells, because in order not to complicate the life of friends or to endanger their ‘free status’ she carefully avoided them. What was left for women like Maria Goldberg was the apartment and a few relatives. Only two days before her arrest in January 1938, Goldberg had a conversation with her friend Eva. Eva told her how the children of an arrested relative of her were taken to an orphanage. The children were treated as prisoners: they took their fingerprints and hurled the same epithets as their parents at them, such as ‘Traitor’, ‘Trotskyist, and ‘Enemy’.28 Maria reflects:

This conversation with Eva slightly opened my eyes. I understood, that in my life yet everything could happen. (…) For the first time after this long year [1937] I thought: what is after all needed to live for, is to live for the children. I really need them.29

24 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 12. 25 Kuchumova, 14. 26 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 7. 27 Goldberg, 8. 28 Goldberg, 10. 29 Goldberg, 10. 29

Maria Sandratskaia tells about the moment when she realised having lost any status but that of a zek at the moment the train was ready to leave Leningrad for the etap to Tomsk. She asked the guard of the wagon: “Comrade, where are we going to?”. The guard boldly answered: “I am not your comrade (...) because I am free, and you are imprisoned, ‘kontrik’ (contra-)”.30 While leaving Leningrad, she spoke to herself “Goodbye, my Leningrad”. The guard heard these words and responded: “It is not your Leningrad. You are an enemy and traitor of the Motherland”.31 Several meaningful identity markers have been taken away from these women in this period of uncertainty, such as their Party membership, work, and their husbands. This all had been part of a process of ostracism from Soviet society in which these identity markers were vital to surviving. Although they could not fully understand what was happening, the women soon realised they had become social pariahs. From their experience becomes clear how binary social categories in Soviet society had supreme power to either include or exclude people.

4.2.2 The arrest

That one would be arrested was already clear for the authors, but when and how, remained uncertain up until the moment that the doorbell rang. Whilst the arrest itself happens in a very orderly manner, it is the farewell of one’s children and close relatives that seemingly has been most difficult for the authors since the narrative about the arrest is largely revolved around the children. Olga Kuchumova remembers that after the arrest of her husband she hid everything for her eight-year-old daughter: “We, with my mother, told her that her father was on a long business trip”; words that emerged to be allegorical in these years so that everyone knew that it meant someone had been arrested.32 Then, in the night in November 1937 “my hour also struck” (probil i moi chas)33, she writes and starts off an extensive and detailed narrative of the arrest, revolved around her daughter Tania.

I did not want that she would see everything that would now happen. After all, she is already eight years, and she would understand everything. (...) She should know nothing, nothing she should see!34

30 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 24. 31 Sandratskaia, 24. 32 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 10. 33 Kuchumova, 12. 34 Kuchumova, 13. 30

She passed by the neighbouring door, neighbours to whom she had brought her sleeping daughter, but did not have the strength to open it and see her. “I did not have tears. It was as if I was petrified (okamenela)”.35 In a very similar way, Maria Sandratskaia narrates the moment of arrest. A worker of the NKVD came into the house and ordered her: “Get ready with your child”. She already expected a visit from the NKVD but is now shocked that her two months old child would be arrested with her. In a self-reflective mode she writes:

I myself am surprised that I can write about this, even now after 27 years… I remember these words like a bullet that hit the heart, wounded it, and up until now this wound is not healed, it bleeds…36

After endless interrogations by the NKVD after the arrest of her husband, Sandratskaia was already broken, exhausted and prepared for everything, she writes.37 The hardest part was the farewell to her children, who stayed close to her during the moment of arrest. She remembers comforting the children by saying: “Don’t cry, I will be back tomorrow”, as was told to her by the NKVD worker. Then, her daughter Svetlana responded: “Yes, returning.. Papa also was told that after two days he would return”.38 Maria reflects: “I did not know, that I would never see my Svetlana again”. Later, in a letter sent to the camp by a good friend of her, Maria was informed that her children were taken away to a children's dispensary prison only half an hour after her arrest. Her daughter Svetlana had died in a psychiatric hospital during her mother’s imprisonment. Maria Goldberg tells how she had prepared her daughter for some change in the family’s situation, but not for such a definite separation between mother and daughter. Disillusioned by anxiety she remembers how just after the announcement of her arrest she turns to her friend:

I could not order my thoughts, and suddenly, I do not remember how from me escaped [the words]: “Lenushka, we will not see each other again”.39

When the NKVD agent came to arrest her, it appeared she had already been sentenced in absentia a month earlier. She then closed the door, in order to open it again after eight years.40 In a mode of reflection, she writes:

35 Kuchumova, 14. 36 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 19. 37 Sandratskaia, 19. 38 Sandratskaia, 19. 39 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 11. 40 Goldberg, 12. 31

Now, after many years have passed since this frightful moment in the life of those, who have experienced this (we do not forget that it was the Soviet authorities who arrested us), wonder how one has not gone crazy and still kept one’s human dignity.41

This human dignity is, among other things, the ability not to succumb in front of one’s perpetrator. Maria Goldberg assures the reader that she could still look the NKVD agents right into the eyes when they came to arrest her. 42 Somewhat proudly she quotes the poet Tikhonov, who wrote about the communists: “If nails would be made from these people; there would not be a nail in the world that is stronger”. Goldberg thus attributes her strength and emotional stability to her identity as a communist and her firm hold to this identity. There was only one solace to endure, she writes, that is being aware of your honesty to the Party.43 What is remarkable in the narratives about the arrest is that the authors describe in such detail the last words, gestures and thoughts at the moment they were led away. The reader senses the great difficulty the authors experience in remembering the event, as seen in the reflection of Maria Sandratskaia who uses the metaphor of the unhealed ‘wound’ in memory. It has certainly been one of the most difficult, not to say traumatic moments that would have chased them in memory during their stay in the camp and the many years after. Using this metaphor of the unhealed wound, and with other reflections in which the authors reflect upon the difficulties they experience when remembering events in the present, the narratives in these memoirs break with the official heroic narratives of survivors that were published at the time. Narratives of protagonists who been able to overcome the past and the obstacle of personal trauma. Because the women’s narratives are revolved mainly around the children, I conclude that it was not even their own fate and unknown prospects that frightened them most at that moment, since they were already prepared for it, but what dominates the narrative are the worries about what would happen with the children they left behind. This abrupt and definite separation of mother and children is a recurrent theme in the memoirs and is both a way of mourning as well as it is a critique of this policy, as I will exemplify with other passages in the second stage.

4.2.3 Prison and sentence

When already on transport, Olga Kuchumova remembers in a flashback the time in prison and ‘court’44. After half a month in one prison cellar, the women had become friends. To exemplify the

41 Goldberg, 12. 42 Goldberg, 6. 43 Goldberg, 6. 44 Between single quotation marks, since the sentence was not given by an official court, but by a special ‘Troika’ of the NKVD. This commission, consisting of three jury members, was established by decree to easily sentence political prisoners accused of violation the 58th law article and those who were family members of already sentenced relatives. 32 bond between the prisoners, Kuchumova mentions: “We all knew each other by name, we all were [called] by ‘you’ (ty)”.45 They knew each other’s stories, how they all had been separated from their relatives and children. The common misfortune had brought them closer together. From this moment onwards Maria Kuchumova narrates most of the time in the first person plural, speaking on behalf of the group of fellow imprisoned women: “Everyone [of us] survived the most frightful day in prison when we were driven like cattle out of the room”, heading to hear the sentence. All of them were forced to sign the sentence, and at this moment, as if she finally realises that freedom will be now definitely deprived of her, she remembers: “My knees were shaking and as if the heart stopped, to speak words was no strength”.46 Some of the prisoners started laughing loudly in answer to the sentence. She experienced this laughter like a whip striking through the nerves: “it seemed to me, that at that moment something burst in the brain…”.47 And the most strange thing, she mentions, was that none of the voices rose in protest to the sentence. After the absurd and unreal event, the women spoke to each other: “How is this possible?! What is this?!.. In which world are we?!”.48 Instead of expressions of anger and blame, she stresses the absurdness of the performance and the passiveness towards the judicial system that had taken her freedom. Whilst Kuchumova remembers herself as passive, and mentally and physically deeply touched by the events, Maria Sandratskaia, in contrast, only briefly mentions the events and narrates in a very stoical manner: “I remember that I took the sentence in my hands, read it one time, another, a third time… and I could not understand anything”.49 Having received eight years in a Corrective Labour Camp (ITL50), she asks the court’s spokesman: “From what do I need to be corrected?”. From the short, cynical conversation that follows the only answer she gets is that she had to be corrected because of the connection with her husband.51 She realises that to contest the decision would be fruitless and describes how she gave up and turned all attention instead to her two months old son, who had just woken up in her arms.52 In this conversation with the director, Maria Sandratskaia presents herself as bright and well aware of the sentence’s consequences. A similar question, of ‘what one needs to be corrected’, is posed by Maria Goldberg after hearing her sentence. Goldberg describes the stunned and crushed mood among the prisoners in the courtroom. However, “as always, alongside a tragedy follows a farce”, she writes, and tells about a woman who’s most substantial worries were not the faith of her children or family but instead what would happen with her newly furnished apartment.53 In the same absurd and almost comic

45 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 3. 46 Kuchumova, 2. 47 Kuchumova, 2. 48 Kuchumova, 2. 49 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 22. 50 Acronym for Ispravitel’no-Trudovoi Lager’ 51 Sandratskaia, 23. 52 Sandratskaia, 23. 53 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 15. 33 style of writing, she tells about the jokes that the women made afterwards, about the difference in sentences for ‘Bolshevik women’ (8 years) and non-Party members (5 or 3 years). The former joked about the latter as being ‘unloved wives’.54 Despite the miserable and humiliating circumstances in prison, Goldberg shows that the absurd situation and powerless state of the women provided room for lightness, a certain calmness and sometimes even cynical jokes and laughter. Prior to the court, she tells:

Clearness no one had, but, surprisingly, despite that the whole of our lives was up until this time impregnated with a poison of distrust, we did not bring this into the room. We talked open-heartedly (...) and understood that the trouble of every one of us is far from personal, not accidental.55

The meeting of fellows who had befallen the same fate is a turning point in the women’s experience. Both Olga Kuchumova and Maria Goldberg tell about the strong bond that developed between the imprisoned women. Collective victimhood gradually replaces the individual fate of the narrator. By relationality, the authors come to understand oneself through the other. The arrival in prison is the moment from where on the authors start to narrate predominantly with the voice of the collective in the first plural. The individual’s experience becomes tied up with the other with whom one shares a similar fate. A remarkable difference between Olga Kuchumova and the other two authors occurs in the way they narrate how they experienced the events in court. Whilst the absurdness of the whole situation results for Kuchumova in a total shock, Goldberg and Sandratskaia present themselves as being empowered by the absurdness of the situation. The sense of collective victimhood and the realisation that their imprisonment was far from personal, as Maria Goldberg describes, probably confirmed the women of their own innocence and the falsity of the accusations made against them.

4.2.4 Etap

The next and last part of this first stage is the transport to labour camps or transit prisons elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Olga Kuchumova is brought from Moscow to camp Akmolinsk (nicknamed ‘Alzhir’)56 in Kazakhstan, in 17 days. Maria Sandratskaia heads from Leningrad to Tomsk, Central Russia, in 18 days and Maria Goldberg is brought to the Kazakh’ camp of

54 Goldberg, 15. 55 Goldberg, 12. 56 Acronym for Akmolinskii Lager’ Zhen Izmennikov Rodiny (ALZhIR), translated as: Akmolinsk Camp of Wives of Traitors of the Motherland 34

Akmolinsk in 21 days. Sandratskaia is arrested with her child and travels in a special wagon for mothers with their infants. All three authors tell about the horrible circumstances in the cold and overcrowded cattle wagons. Olga Kuchumova ironically calls herself “living baggage” (zhivoi bagazh), like sardines in a can.57 She remembers that the prisoners in the wagon told each other distracting stories, remembering the better days, and fantasising about arriving at a better place. Maria Sandratskaia reflects upon the experience in the wagon as unbearable, as if like a heavy nightmare. 58 Mothers lost their mind in this struggle to survive and let two women no choice but to cut their throats with a piece of glass. In the morning their bodies were thrown out of the wagon. She remembers holding her own crying child, while thinking: “to no one he is needed anymore, the tears are seen by no one…”.59 The social exclusion she herself experienced as wife and mother, she now sees mirrored in her child. Maria Goldberg most extensively narrates the etap. She remembers the sight of these women in the wagon, as if “a fruit of someone’s poor fantasy”.60 She tells about a woman in the wagon who strikingly commented: “My god, it seems that the whole world moves from its place, unknown where it is heading towards”.61 Those words strikingly corresponded to the women’s helpless feelings at that moment in the wagon. What was happening did not only concern these women, Goldberg explains, but something had arisen in this world. However what exactly, and what it had changed, was yet unknown to them.62 In Goldberg’s story, moments of grief and horror are alternated by light but absurd stories and anecdotes. Once, she tells, some women suddenly started to dance on the floor of the wagon.63 However, as sudden this dance had started, as abrupt as it came to an end and silence followed, everyone turned into oneself. “Only the eyes revealed the torment. Something far, in the distance, a lovely careless flashed past one’s eyes. It tugged at one’s heartstrings”.64 (Maria Goldberg often uses the eyes as a trope to convey a particular feeling or atmosphere with others). The word etap, as used by the prisoners to refer to the transport of convicts from one place to another, translated as a ‘stage’ is probably close to the experience of prisoners going from one place to another. As if the beginning of a new chapter, one leaves behind the old (free) life and is distanced from a place that will only remain in memory. The women remember the etap as a nightmare with a feeling close to that of dying. Again they find themselves in an absurd and

57 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 2. 58 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 25. 59 Sandratskaia, 24. 60 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 19. 61 Goldberg, 19. 62 Goldberg, 19. 63 Goldberg, 20. 64 Goldberg, 20. 35 inhumane situation, but even in here, Maria Sandratskaia tells about the bond between the women that is exemplified in descriptions of mothers helping to feed others’ infants.

Concluding this first part, the question arises why the authors dwell at length and in such detail on this first stage even though it is only a short period as compared to the many years in the camp. Because the choices and considerations of the authors are not explicitly in the text, I cannot fully answer this question. However, the significant emotional impact of this first stage probably partly explains the fact that the events and persons are remembered in such detail, whilst life and work in the camp eventually were experienced as daily life or at least a normalisation of life. Characteristic of the authors’ narratives about this first stage is that it is predominantly about passive victimhood. They tell in detail how they were treated at the moment of arrest, in prison and during the etap. In contrast to the official (state) narrative and the Party’s cautiousness of not being ‘unhealthy’ obsessed with the terror, a large part of the memoirs does dwell on the terror, traumatic memories, and on the indifference of those who executed the orders. What is remarkable though is that the narrators’ focus is mostly on the people around them, the other women who all had become victims of this system of repression. The strong sense of community leads them to speak on behalf of this collective of victims, and the story becomes a testimony of many.

4.3 Second stage: Life in the camp

In the years after, the authors have been transferred to several camps and had been occupied with various kinds of work. In contrast to the day to day narrating style of the events in the first stage, the daily life and work in the camp are illustrated by means of detailed anecdotes, mentions of extraordinary events and the life stories of others. I will elaborate on three different sets of themes that are central to the narratives of the second stage and discuss the different corresponding narrating strategies as adopted by the authors. The first theme is about ‘human dignity and agency’. Apart from presenting themselves as victims of lawlessness and violence, the authors highlight how they stood up against indifference and took the initiative in the care for others. I understand this narrating strategy as a conscious presentation of the protagonist in performing agency and the adoption of strategies to preserve human dignity, no matter how tough and humiliating the circumstances had been to them. The second theme is ‘the other’. By telling detailed life stories of others, the attention in the second stage is, on the whole, shifted from the protagonist to the other. Irina Shcherbakova points to this in her work ‘Remembering the Gulag’ (2003) and jokes that some of the memoirs resemble telephone directories. Probably, she argues, this is because when being in a very small social group for so long, any change or enlargement of that space (such as the arrival of new prisoners) would

36 be memorised easily.65 Beyond this argument of memory, I understand the inclusion of detailed life stories of fellow prisoners, but also the portraits they depict of guards and camp bosses, as a conscious narrating strategy of the author. The concept of relationality can partly conceptualise this, however, as I will explain and exemplify, it serves yet another intention that cannot be simply traced back to the self. The third important element that I will point to, however scarcely present in the memoirs in this study, are the references to life outside of the ‘zone’, the free nation. Especially during the war the prisoners gradually became aware of the nation’s tragedy, and the authors make mention of their deep concern and sympathy with the nation, while they themselves were ‘absent’ during the war and lived in another world. I argue that such elements, that connect the inside with the outside of the ‘zone’, the imprisoned with the free, need to be read against the backdrop of the authors’ resocialization and rehabilitation in society. In addition to the part of the memoirs’ framing, as discussed in the previous paragraph, I will address some of the concluding notes the authors provide in reflecting upon the memoir and their life stories in general. The themes as mentioned above need to be seen as historically specific and characteristic for the genre of the Gulag memoir and therefore it is necessary to understand the meaning of themes and narrating strategies against the backdrop of the historical context and dominant discourses in the early 1960s of the Soviet Union.

4.3.1 Human dignity

As a first approach, the memoirs of this study read as narratives of survival. The memoirists narrate extensively about the living circumstances in the camp; the exhaust from heavy workloads, the experience of malnutrition, and the humiliating treatment. Having survived the camp, they are the ones able to testify about what life has been in the camps. However, the authors do not seem to have the need to elaborate on verifiable facts, such as the work norms, food rations and the structure of the day. Moreover, rather than locating themselves in the events as passive victims they narrate a story of survival and successful preservation of human dignity. The memoirists tell about the strategies they developed to endure and how they themselves transformed the subjected forced labour into a valuable occupation for themselves to survive, both physically as well as mentally, and to contribute with their effort to the development and defence of the country. Moreover, from anecdotes of conversations with the guards and chiefs, it becomes clear that there had been still room for manoeuvre beyond what was initially permitted, in order to try to reinstate some of the prisoners’ human dignity. I take and discuss four indicators of human dignity and agency from the text: the performance of agency in negotiation with

65 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, 204. 37 superiors; the value of work and other means of occupation; the care for fellow prisoners; and literature. Whilst the system had reduced them to ‘Enemies of the People’ and ‘Traitors of the Motherland’, not all of the persons the prisoners got in contact with remained indifferent. Some of their superiors were even ready to negotiate and to some degree felt sorry for the prisoners’ tragic fate. After having arrived in the first camp, Maria Goldberg notices almost with surprise that although the prisoners walked in a guarded convoy, they were treated humanely and even with sympathy by the chief of the camp. “Apparently, everything of this ‘story’ was not to his liking at all”, she writes.66 That negotiation with superiors could be enforced is exemplified in the story of Maria Sandratskaia. Maria describes the horrific conditions for the mothers and infants in the cell of the first transit prison in Tomsk, where they would remain for two more years. Already two children had died in the arms of their mothers, in front of the eyes of the other women present, and another two women had cut their throats with a piece of glass. “We felt, that we were dying”, and otherwise many would lose their mind, she remembers.67 However, their calls for the director to visit them and redeem them from this inhumane situation remained in vain. Apparently, the director of the prison had received no different instructions for these mothers with infants than applying the strict regime as usual for (political) criminals. The prisoners agreed to go on a hunger strike, which eventually led to visits of NKVD officials and the prison director himself. Narrated in third person, she describes what followed: “A woman stood up, with a child in her arms, accurately wrapped in a red blanket. It is me, with Galia [her son]”.68 She invited the NKVD officials in so they could see themselves the situation the women and children were in. One of the men asked her: “And who are you? Are you authorised to talk to us?” – “Yes”, she self-assuredly answered. “I spoke and at the same time I looked them into the face”.69 Sandratskaia presents herself here as the spokesman of the group, the one who steps forward to negotiate with the prison director. The men did not show any affection on their faces, but Maria now wonders what would be in their hearts at that moment, since, as she rhetorically wonders, “You are , aren’t you?”.70 In contrast, the nurse who accompanied the prison director could not hide her affection: “Everyone of us saw, that she often turned away her face because no one should see how she wiped off her tears with a handkerchief”.71 The same nurse would make several requests for them. She even travelled to Moscow to request a change of policy regarding women with young children, but her voice proved to be a voice crying in the desert. Maria attributes lots of gratitude to her, because

66 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 22. 67 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 31. 68 Sandratskaia, 32. 69 Sandratskaia, 33. 70 Sandratskaia, 33. 71 Sandratskaia, 36. 38

“you returned us (back) to life, not only physically but also mentally”.72 There will be more moments during detention when Sandratskaia decides not to remain indifferent herself but to complain, make requests, and send letters to prominent Party officials. Initiated by the prisoners, it was even made possible to organise child care in the camp. However, over time the bosses of the camp were replaced and so the face of repression alternated. Because of this, the relationship between the prisoner and the chief had to be constantly renegotiated in order to establish a relationship of trust and in reward the softening of the camp’s regime. Somewhat proudly, Olga Kuchumova speaks about her acts of agency within and beyond the borders of what was allowed. As her position of experienced specialist became more and more acknowledged by her superiors, Kuchumova gained more confidence to make requests and to take the initiative by herself. Prisoners exchanged services among each other and, as a specialist on the site, Olga encouraged her own co-workers by rewarding them with all kind of goodies from the garden, such as melons from the greenhouse. But, she mentions, “I ordered them not to leave the peals around”, so that the chief would not mention it.73 Whilst all work was subjected upon the prisoners as part of systematic oppression, the memoirists do not often explicitly protest about the fact that all their work is forced labour, nor do they complain about the lack of the work’s necessity. Rather than oppressive, the women regained their dignity with the work after a humiliating process of arrest, imprisonment and transport. Therefore, as Olga Kuchumova mentions, the most difficult periods where those when there was yet little or no work available. In the first years of the camp, Maria Goldberg – who shared the barrack with Olga Kuchumova during that period – narrates with proud about their activities and achievements on the camp site. They realised flower beds next to each barrack and constructed proper lanes. “After two years, the zone of the correction camp Karlag74 was already not recognisable”.75 All women worked in good faith, she tells, with knowledge of the matter. “The work not only familiarised us with the great life of our fatherland, but it also brought us to forget..”.76 Later, Goldberg mentions, when the CHSIR – the prisoners themselves entitled each other as just ‘family members’ – would be scattered over the camps in the region, they gave there the example of conscious work in good faith. Especially during the war, when Goldberg and Sandratskaia both worked in factories of production, their effort was not in vain. Goldberg reflects upon the work as:

72 Sandratskaia, 37. 73 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 113. 74 Abbreviation for: KARagandinskii ispravitel’no-trudovoi LAGer’ (Karaganda Corrective ) 75 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 26. 76 Goldberg, 26. 39

If there was not the consciousness that, despite the hard situation of one’s life, one could devote their effort in the construction and defence of the country, she thinks, many of us could not manage to keep up their working productivity.77

Not in the first place thus the work, but rather the poor living circumstances and the prisoners’ treatment by the guards and chiefs have been experienced most humiliating by the memoirists. The living circumstances of the prisoners greatly depended upon the decisions of the chiefs, their positions in the ranks, and physical health to reach the norms and receive sufficient food portions. Olga Kuchumova and Maria Goldberg both mention the counting, the verification of the prisoners, as the most difficult moments of the day. Prisoners could hardly remain standing on their legs, and as the chief was often mistaken, he had to repeat his counting exercise. Goldberg writes: “What was good still, that we were verified by our family name, and not by a number”.78 She continues this thought on identity and describes the camp life as two-sided. On the one hand, they were fully occupied with the work, and it gave them joy and a feeling of satisfaction. On the other hand, they realised they were still ‘zeki’, with all ensuing consequences.

At work, the women were treated as specialists (Goldberg as an economist), behind the wire we were limited, hungry, cold, badly dressed, tied to a patch of land, called the zone.79

She remembers that they sometimes tried to examine their situation, as was an ordinary task for communists. However, “to liberate oneself from the position of a Zek was not only hard but also not possible”.80 Whilst the women were mostly passive regarding material factors in their position as prisoner, they were closely involved in the care for each other. All three memoirists tell about the care for ‘comrades’ (tovarishchi) and about the same care they got in return when they themselves fell ill or were too weak to fulfil the norms. Maria Sandratskaia realises at a certain point that this road of suffering would continue in the years to come and remembers:

It is as if in the soul it becomes easier. As if she [the soul] is touched by some affectionate hand. It is from the humane greetings, from simple little warmth, caring, sympathy. Thank you, people…81

77 Goldberg, 57. 78 Goldberg, 23. 79 Goldberg, 57. 80 Goldberg, 60. 81 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 41. 40

Olga Kuchumova tells that, for example, when new prisoners arrived in the camp, often weak and underfed, the women collectively took care of this person and helped them to regain strength. On the other hand, when she once fell ill with malaria, others took care of her. She reflects upon this period as: “The common effort of my comrades put me back on the feet (...) Well, how could I forget this!”.82 Another central element, particularly in the memoirs of Maria Goldberg and Olga Kuchumova, is the use of poetry and literary works. They use literature to voice their feelings, but also, as they tell, during their stay in the camp the telling of literary stories and poems functioned as means of distraction and to actively remember the past, the life as a free person. For them, it was a part of themselves that no-one could take from them because all was known by heart. Still, as Goldberg remembers, the lyric songs of Pushkin sounded somewhat bitter and sadly now in the camp.83 Olga Kuchumova tells about the festivities of the Great October Socialist Revolution at the educational institute where she resided to become a specialist in agronomy. She recites in front of the audience the work of Pushkin. While performing, she saw the lips of the people in the audience silently repeating the words of Pushkin. “How long did I not experience such happiness! (...) the joy of success that somehow was a rebirth of me as a human”.84 After the performance, she tells about a young soldier who told he had not understood anything from the piece of Pushkin’s ‘Evgenii Onegin’. One of the women then explained to him the piece so he would understand. Being highly educated and part of the urban intelligentsia, the literary culture had been part of the women’s youth and education and thus had become part of themselves, of their identity. Towards other less educated and cultured prisoners, the women’s attitude somewhat resembles the idea of kulturnost’. This concept and Soviet policy in the Stalinist 1930s was aimed to culturally educate the Soviet population on the very basic level of hygiene and literacy, but also about knowledge of the communist ideology, and the culture of propriety such as proper speech and appreciation of literature.85 In the camp, the presence of these culturally educated women stood in stark contrast with the primitive living conditions and with the other prisoners, such as the bytovichki, women sentenced for minor crimes such as petty theft. These prisoners were notorious for their behaviour, the theft of property, and their use of inappropriate criminal language. Maria Goldberg several times expresses her disapproval of their language and behaviour. To hear them speak, the “disgusting conversations, jokes, and disputes”, Maria remembers, “was a torment for us”.86 However, at the same time, she tells how some of the women undertook attempts to re-educate

82 Kuchumova, 95. 83 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 38. 84 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 47. 85 Sheila Fitzpatrick, : Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: , 1999), 79–80. 86 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 56. 41 these female prisoners not only in their behaviour but also culturally. Once, a fellow prisoner attempted to re-educate these bytovichki and invited them to their barrack to have ‘polite conversations’ with them. Olga Kuchumova shares a similar anecdote with the reader. Having arrived in the educational institute of Dolinka, where she would learn the profession of agronomic specialist, she was placed in a room with a group of underaged bytovichki. Instantly she understood that these women would steal their belongings if they fell asleep and asks the girls: “Girls, do you want me to read you some scary romans?”.87 The girls moved closer, like kids, she tells, and attentively stared to her mouth. The audience listened silently without moving, for hours and hours and only a few times she was interrupted by a discussion among the girls that offered her a break to breathe. Eventually, she was saved by the guard in the morning that came in to take her to another place. However, ‘uncultured’ behaviour was in the eyes of the authors not restricted only to these bytovichki, but also present among some of their fellow prisoners and superiors on site. Olga Kuchumova wonders about the prevalent cursing: “How are Russians themselves not aware of it, that it breaks down the language?!.. (...) my indifferent ear to these terms could not remain so!”.88 Kuchumova even devotes a chapter to this vospitanie (nurturing, education) of a fellow worker. She persuades him to stop swearing, after all, “why to make enemies” and moreover, “soon you will go into freedom, you need to pull yourself together to purify yourself”. 89 The memoirists thus distance themselves from the criminal culture in the camp, but on the other hand, they make an effort to re-educate others in terms of language and, like Kuchumova, to teach others the art of poetry and literature. Especially Kuchumova sets herself in her memoir a good example of being ‘cultured’. Concluding, rather than merely a narrative of victimhood the memoirists narrate a survivor narrative that includes the strategies they developed to physically and mentally survive. By negotiating with their superiors, acting beyond what is allowed, and by taking care of their ‘comrades’, they are able to somewhat less the heavy burden of imprisonment and retain human dignity. The same counts for mental survival, to search for ways to not lose one’s mind (soiti s uma) because of grief and hopelessness. In narrating such a survivor narrative, the memoirists present themselves as conscious individuals who, through acts of agency show they were concerned with the fate of others and showed themselves the example in work and kulturnost’. I understand this as an ethical aspect that is omnipresent in the narratives. In contrast to the indifferent and, in the eyes of the authors, unethical stance of their superiors they themselves act according to the ethics that corresponds with the idea of the socialist collective and the set of corresponding discursive devices such as sympathy, kulturnost’, and comradeship. Whilst they are

87 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 36. 88 Kuchumova, 75. 89 Kuchumova, 83. 42 seen by others as declassed citizens, the prisoners themselves take care of the new collective of prisoners, juxtaposing the unethical behaviour of their perpetrators.

4.3.2 The other

Apart from reading Gulag life writing as narratives of survival, a narrative strategy that is predominantly centred around the presentation of the self, the women’s memoirs articulate criticism directed to others and the repressive system as a whole. As mentioned in the part of framing, the political character varies significantly between the memoirs in this study. Olga Kuchumova does not present a direct criticism of Stalin nor does she tangle her story into the debate on the Stalinist past. In contrast, the memoirs of Maria Sandratskaia and Maria Goldberg contain numerous passages in which they deviate from the historical narrative of their imprisonment and articulate firm criticism of the cult of personality and the perpetrators involved in the repression. Outrage and criticism are in particular pointed to the tragic fate of children, who are, as seen in the first stage, central to the stories of the authors. Taking care of criminal juveniles, Maria Sandratskaia tells she was tormented by the question of what would become of this young generation of prisoners: “Seeing all of this, I deeply doubted whether they would be ‘corrected’ in the general [adult] camp”.90 She wrote a letter to Soviet writer and political activist – later she would get to know that he had already died in 1936 – wherein she described in detail everything she observed and knew. Maria Goldberg remembers that every time they (‘we’) received letters from the children, she had to think about how cruelly, monstrously and unnatural it was to cut off the tie between mother and child and what a harsh response should be given to those, who invented this “execution of motherhood”.91 The whole system of this repression, Olga Kuchumova understands, is directed to take away motherhood from us by taking parents away from the children. From the stories of other women, she gets to know how children had given up their imprisoned parents and regarded them as ‘Enemies’ and ‘Traitors’. With it, the system had reached its zenith, Kuchumova reflects; “an evil crop had yielded its evil fruits”.92 Maria Goldberg remembers how the women, “for whom was not more holy than the Bolshevik people, the Party of Lenin”93, struggled with the difficult questions to be asked about their time and their sentence. No one was in doubt that Stalin knew about all this, however:

90 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 53. 91 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 46. 92 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 41. 93 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 47. 43

We did not want to believe that all of this would remain this way, that the Party would not recognise the year 1937 as a mistake, and would not separate the real enemies from the imaginary ones. (...) We back then did not yet understand, that the year 1937 is an abscess, that hindered the normal development of the ‘body’, that this abscess needs to be opened, how is done with the 20th Party Congress and only then will come the real communist future.94

Goldberg uses the same trope of the year 1937 as Khrushchev in his speeches and, in the same pathological manner as the official state narrative, she describes how the memories on the Great Terror should be exposed, in the same way, an abscess should be opened to recover. The trope of the ‘body’ refers, in my understanding, to both the individual as well as to society as a whole. Goldberg even puts forward her own theory to explain why the system had been so oppressive and cruel. Those who were in charge of the interrogations, she explains, were, in fact, former Kulaki95 who managed to make-up and repaint themselves to enter the echelons of the NKVD and take revenge on the Old Bolsheviks. Those Kulaki, who had lost their property and “were evicted from their nests” during collectivisation, could now vent their long-held malice on the Old Communists.96 Then, after having told the story of a fellow prisoner, she concludes (as if she directly addresses the reader):

When you think about the tragedy of these remarkable revolutionary families, (…) you will yet better understand that to forgive, to conceal the atrocities of the year 1937 would have been a sacrilege.97

This statement speaks directly to the debate on whether to conceal or to expose the events during the Great Terror. In the memoir’s introduction Maria Goldberg already stressed that the terror should never be forgotten, in a spirit of ‘never again’, but here she adds that the atrocities cannot be forgiven and thus retribution should befall its perpetrators. Maria Sandratskaia revives in her memoir the heroism of a former Bolshevik leader, Sergey Kirov, who had spoken on the 17th Party Congress in 1934. He had been a threat to Stalin and was shot in the same year. Sandratskaia praises his devotion to the Party and remembers how they had followed his steps to where he called and led them.

94 Goldberg, 51b. 95 A term that labeled peasants who were seen as opposed to the Soviet (forced) collectivisation of the economy during the early Stalinist period in the Soviet Union. 96 Goldberg, 51b. 97 Goldberg, 62. 44

Oh, if he would know, what a bitter faith befell those, whom he loved so much (...) how these sprouts of the future, which he nurtured with such care and love, would be ruthlessly torn by the same hand that had killed himself.98

Criticizing the rule of Stalin, Sandratskaia at the same time revives the legacy of another honest Party superior and draws of him a heroic portrait and a sense of nostalgy. Remarkably, the concept of a personality cult, which was explicitly rejected by Khrushchev was reversed into an anti-cult in the case of Stalin and the concept as such, as is exemplified by this passage of Maria Sandratskaia, had not left the discourse. In contrast, others such as Lenin and Kirov – those who had, or would have opposed Stalin’s rule – were now praised with a similar cult of personality. 99 The same reversal is true for the concept of ‘Enemies of the People’. Those who once invented the concept would now themselves become the enemies of the people and foremost of the Party. The memoirists criticise not only the person of Stalin and his inner circle but also give explicit ad hominem critique as a means to expose the local perpetrators and those who can be called dishonest (nechestnyi) in the eyes of the authors. On the other hand, the authors praise those who had remained humane towards prisoners and true to their honest selves. The memoirists include biographical details, names and life stories of other prisoners. A substantial part of the narrative is dedicated to this purpose, both to name and shame the dishonest as well as to name and praise the honest people. This binary categorisation between ‘honest and dishonest’ is a reoccurring theme in all three stories. Olga Kuchumova describes the female prisoners when having arrived in an educational institute of the camp as ‘honest Soviet citizens’ and subtly adds: “more honest, perhaps, than many that guarded them”. 100 For Sandratskaia and Goldberg, the discursive device of honesty (chestnost’) is closely linked to being an honest communist who keeps faith with the Party and is concerned with the fate of one’s fellow ‘comrades’. Exemplary for this strategy of ‘naming and shaming’ is a passage written by Maria Sandratskaia, about an inspector visiting the sewing factory in which the prisoners produced clothing for the army during the war. The inspector was furious about the lousy quality of their work and had cynically shouted with foam at the mouth, choked with anger and hatred: “Do you work for Hitler?!” Maria reflects:

98 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 67. 99 This is, among others, described by Alexander Werth in his book ‘The Khrushchev phase’ (1961). In 1960, with the 90th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, entire issues of newspapers and periodicals were devoted to the person of Lenin. Lenin, as Werth describes, became a kind of substitute of the personality cult of Stalin. In: Alexander Werth, The Khrushchev Phase : The Soviet Union Enters The ‘decisive’ sixties (London: Hale, 1961). 100 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 40. 45

I cannot forgive myself for that I have not remembered the family name of this beast in human form. I gave myself the word to get to know his family name amidst my fellow imprisoned comrades. Maybe someone from them has remembered.101

This reflection shows, in my understanding, that the inclusion of names in the narratives has been important to Maria Sandratskaia and, as I argue, for the other two authors in this study too. By naming her perpetrators, she exposes them and steps forward as testifying witness. Sandratskaia, who herself sat two years in prison before being transferred to the camp, also tells about the stukachi (informers) who provoked them and eavesdropped their conversations, in order to twist their words and slander them as ‘enemies’. “It is not possible to remember them without shudder and hate”, she tells, and still, she somewhat sympathises with those women who could not find themselves the strength to resist the luring promise of early release.102 However, she tells, the vast majority of the women in prison did not lose their face, despite how difficult as it had been. In one passage, Maria Goldberg juxtaposes the binary categorisation of being humane and inhumane towards prisoners. In front of the eyes of the women, a fellow prisoner (Natasha) mentally collapsed and was refused help by the doctor of the camp. “He did not look after his comrades”, so they went to the camp chief, an old chekist103, who “differed in honest humanism and could see in all sort of verdicts a living being”.104 He then ordered the doctor to offer Natasha medical treatment in the camp hospital. Later on, Goldberg gives yet another example of this chief’s humane attitude towards the prisoners and his forgiving character. In the narrative of Olga Kuchumova, a trope of personal conversion reoccurs. People who once had been dishonest or cruel in her eyes are given a second chance when it appeared they had changed positively. After passing the exam in the educational institute, Kuchumova was re-transferred to the camp and started to work on a site. The local chief, although a prisoner too, treated her with contempt and discredited her as person and specialist. She mentions his full name and exposes his misbehaviour. However, after a couple of years, she meets him again elsewhere and notices that his temperament had tempered a bit. Whilst he had at first shouted: “I need workers, not pampered tearful touchy princesses”, Kuchumova ironically mentions that these princesses now had become his core staff on site.105 She becomes even befriended with him and is surprised about his interest in literature. She even devotes a separate chapter to a young guard, whose brutal regime and drills had made him notorious and hated in the camp. He answered them with the same hate and regarded the women

101 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 45. 102 Sandratskaia, 38. 103 Agent of the (ChK), the former NKVD. 104 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 58. 105 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 80. 46 as ‘Enemies of the People’, she writes.106 One day, during the war, he was called to be sent to the front. While he performed his last verification of the prisoners, he started crying in front of the group. He asked to forgive his cruelty. “It was impossible to look at him”, she remembers.107 An ominous silence was their answer to him; he did not hear one sound in answer to his tears. At the end of the anecdote, Kuchumova leaves the reader to judge whether to forgive this person. Not only about the wrongdoers, but the authors also give extensive attention to those prisoners who endured, did not bend for the oppression, and remained steadfastly loyal to the Communist Party. Such passages, in the form of life narratives and anecdotes, contain the two elements of victimhood and heroism. Exemplifying is the two pages long life story as told by Maria Goldberg about Shura who had been a teacher of her in the Economic Institute in the early 1930s. “Sad was it to look at this highly educated communist and a great teacher”, Maria remembers. 108 Despite her memories of Shura’s loyalty and devotion to the Party, she had ended up in the camp. In 1960, Goldberg met her again and was shocked what imprisonment and exile had done with her. Her body was broken, but still, as Goldberg tells, she continued to participate in the work of the Party vividly. Goldberg remembers that she herself was shaken by the courage of this “family of inflexible Leninists”.109 “I consciously dedicated some pages to them”, Maria reflects, because for them the “grievances and hardships never overshadowed their Party case, to which they had dedicated their life”.110 Olga Kuchumova and Maria Sandratskaia have included similar stories of other prisoners and give with it praise to those who survived and those who perished with honour. The focus of the memoirs thus is predominantly outwardly on the other, rather than only on their own survival and experience. The criticism of the person of Stalin and the repressive system reflects the debate on the Stalinist past in the years of Thaw. However, the authors also direct attention to those local perpetrators, the chiefs, guards and interrogators. I understand this strategy of exposure both as personal revenge, to compensate for their passive position, as well as it is a contribution to the debate on whom to purge in the post-Stalinist period and whom to discredit as being opposed to the Bolshevik cause. In juxtaposing the discursive device of ‘honesty’ to ‘dishonesty,’ the authors themselves define a set of values that revived pre-Stalinist meanings that corrects the false accusations made against them as being dishonest and opposers of socialist values. On the other hand, by mentioning those who had remained honest and humane in these extraordinary circumstances the authors express the need to regard them, as well as themselves, as real citizens; loyal to the country and the (Leninist) Party. Harmful exposure was carefully

106 Kuchumova, 97. 107 Kuchumova, 97. 108 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 51b. 109 Goldberg, 51b. 110 Goldberg, 64. 47 avoided in the dominant state discourse, and therefore, the naming and shaming of those involved in crimes and humiliating practices is a bold strategy to negotiate in the discourse on who is to blame afterwards.

4.3.3 On the connection with the nation outside the zone

After a couple of years after the arrest of the authors, the war with Nazi-Germany broke out in 1941. The country in war now shared some of the hardship with those imprisoned in the labour camps, but the separation and the contrast between life inside and outside the ‘zone’ remained. The outbreak of the war was not known to the prisoners in the first year of war and only gradually, from eyewitnesses who had been at the front, they got to know what happened on the western front. Later, when the reading of newspapers and correspondence with family and relatives was allowed, more and more became known to them. Main events in the war, such as the loss of Kyiv to the Germans, the bombing of Moscow and the Soviet victory in Stalingrad are mentioned and interwoven in the stories of the three memoirists. Maria Sandratskaia tells that during a briefing they heard that Kyiv had been lost to the German troops. All women in the factory shop started to cry, she tells, but the grief about the situation of the Soviet people turned into a renewed motivation for their sewing work. It would be their answer to the fascists. “We were no longer the weeping, helpless, grief-stricken women, but warriors that worked at the front”, she remembers.111 On victory day in May 1945, Maria Sandratskaia was invited to speak in front of an audience of prisoners.

There were tears, but no bitter tears. (...) we cried from joy. (..) We, the expelled daughters of her [the nation], suffered from it, that on that day we were fare hidden from the jubilant people of our country.112

Olga Kuchumova remembers reading in the newspaper about the bombing of Moscow, illustrated by a wounded Virgin that cried bloody tears about her dead sons. “This image did not leave my imagination”.113 A year later, the chief of the camp announced with great happiness a break- through in Stalingrad for the Soviet army. Kuchumova remembers:

111 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 48. 112 Sandratskaia, 69. 113 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 99. 48

From this happiness involuntarily flowed tears on my cheeks (...) our victory at the front was really huge! (...) a joy that we shared with all our relatives, remaining on the other side (of the barbed wire), this joy swept a light wave across the entire Russian land. 114

Both Kuchumova and Sandratskaia show how they, while remaining behind the barbed wire of the zone, deeply sympathised with the nation and shared the grief, worries and the joy of victory. These are essential passages in regards to the framing of their identities. Unless they were written off by society and hidden far away from the civilised world, they themselves never forgot the connection with the nation. Moreover, as they tell, they also contributed with their work to the victory of the nation. Their sympathy with the nation reemphasises the message of them remained loyal and ‘honest’ citizens during their imprisonment, and in fact, never lost its connection with the nation.

4.3.4 On release and return: reflections

All three authors have been released in the first years after the end of the war in 1945. To them, as yet unrehabilitated former prisoners it was not allowed to return and to live in their hometowns Moscow and Leningrad. Olga Kuchumova remained for another year at the site after her release and Maria Sandratskaia, with her own words, “wandered for another eight years, being expelled to distant places”.115 Olga Kuchumova shortly visited her daughter and mother in Moscow but was sent elsewhere to stay and work there for another nine years. The same happened to Maria Goldberg, who would live and worked in exile for ten years. Goldberg tells that she was fond of the work in exile, however that in the soul – a trope specifically Russian/Soviet to describe the inner self – it was never quite at all.116 There had been moments, she admits, that it was just like all was about to begin again. The time in exile had been a hard and bitter time to her, primarily because of her status as ex-prisoner, the burden of the sentence that rested upon her. However, to her surprise, she was welcomed by her old friends and comrades from the Komsomol and the Party who had not a shadow of distrust. “Apparently, I was taken by them for one of those 'chips', that fly when a tree is being cut”.117 To them, she had remained a communist who had not succumbed to the trouble that had befallen her. Maria Goldberg writes in the concluding lines of her memoir:

114 Kuchumova, 104. 115 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 71. 116 Goldberg, ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’, 69. 117 Goldberg, 69. 49

So we lived in the camps, trying to despite all the hardship, injustice, inhumanity that broke into our lives in these years (...) trying despite all this to join the labour life of our nation, keeping human dignity, the dignity of a communist.118

For Maria Sandratskaia the ‘call’ to be released did not come with the fulfilment of her term but only two years later. In a letter to her sister she writes that:

After ten years of experience, there is no hope and strength left to wait. And hoping for what? Which road is ahead of me? There are ways so many, but not for me.119

In the closing pages of the memoir, Sandratskaia returns to the question of who has been responsible for her tragic fate and who is to blame. She acknowledges that the Party had learned her to life and work, to develop a will and determination in life. However, “to intervene, in order to prevent the terrible break in life, I failed, just like the other tens of thousands that were doomed like I was”.120 There is only one answer for her how this all could happen, and repeats what she had said in the beginning, “We believed in Stalin”.121 After all these experiences, she concludes, “I kept an unquenchable love for life and an unfading sense of loyalty and devotion for the Party and the Nation.”122 This conclusion of overcoming, since Maria Sandratskaia’s depressive thoughts about life apparently had been transformed into a ‘love for life’, somewhat resembles the heroic narrative of survivors as seen in literature and official state narratives. However, from earlier passages has become clear that still, open ‘wounds’ remained with her in memory. Both the storylines of Maria Sandratskaia and Maria Goldberg show a personal trajectory of unbelief and inability to understand what happened to them, but they never doubted the Party nor the hope that all would be corrected one time. With the public disclosure by Khrushchev they come to understand themselves in the events, but still, as becomes clear from their reflections upon their husbands’ and children’s’ fate, these memories, in particular, remained to be emotionally most difficult to recall. Maria Sandratskaia and Maria Goldberg were able to come to terms with the past regarding their personal experience and role in the events. Nevertheless, the remaining uncertainty about what had happened to their close relatives causes an impossibility to reconstruct and mourn their fallen relatives. Olga Kuchumova tells how her husband was rehabilitated posthumously and that she got to know that he had died in 1939, but not how he died and where. In her closing lines, she writes: “Now, years have fallen between us that troubles

118 Goldberg, 67. 119 Sandratskaia, ‘Vospominaniia’, 70–71. 120 Sandratskaia, 72. 121 Sandratskaia, 72. 122 Sandratskaia, 73. 50 the visibility, like snow in a snowstorm.123 This metaphor does strikingly well depict the mental state of the women in the aftermath after release and rehabilitation. When years pass by, the memories remain and also the impossibility to mourn about their relatives. Therefore, time will only blur the memories but never heal the wound of the past and in particular the emotions connected to these memories.

123 Kuchumova, ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’, 133. 51

Chapter 5: Conclusion

The period of Khrushchev’s Thaw did not endure for a long time, since in October 1964 Nikita Khrushchev had to resign under the pressure of a conservative group within the Central Committee with, among others, who would take over the position as First Secretary of the Party. With the resignation of Khrushchev, the period of relative openness and freedom of publication and speech was abruptly put to an end. Opinions on Stalin’s cult of personality and stories of Stalin’s victims disappeared in the Press and journals stopped accepting victims’ testimonies.1 Nevertheless, by means of hand-to-hand distributed stories () the distribution and sharing of knowledge and experiences among survivors of the Gulag continued.2 The memoirs of this study did not see the light of official publication, and it is very likely that in this form these would not have passed the censure of editors, especially because of the explicit exposure of local perpetrators. Eventually, the memoirs have been brought to Memorial’s archive in the late 1980s by their children and relatives. Whilst the stories of these women likely did not reach a broader audience in the end, and the impact of their story remained minimal, at least for themselves the narration had been a way to remember, to process, and to understand what had happened in those years of arrest and imprisonment. The textual analysis has offered several insights into the narrating strategies of the authors and how these interact with the debates and dominant discourses of the time. The three memoirs, as studied in this thesis, show first of all a variety of style and content. Nevertheless, all three authors present a story that goes beyond passive victimhood. In their representations of the self, besides their identity as prisoner and outcast in society, they narrate how they were able at the time to preserve human dignity while coping with hardship and how they used their agency to negotiate in their relationship with those who executed the orders. The possibility of negotiation tells much about the flexibility within the Gulag system regarding the relationship between prisoner and superiors. Besides this, since the performance of agency is a central theme in the memoirs I understand the inclusion of such stories as a narrating strategy to convey a message of ethics. By using discursive devices such as the care for comrades and work in good faith, values that corresponded with the ethics of the socialist collective, they juxtapose their ethics with the indifferent and inhumane behaviour of their superiors. Moreover, by explicitly naming and shaming those who misbehaved towards the prisoners, the three authors expose their perpetrators and use the relative openness of the time as an opportunity to bring into practice Khrushchev’s ‘socialist legality’. On the other hand, the memoirs of the three women tell a story of grief and memories about the last moments with their children and husbands. Memories that

1 Toker, Return from the Archipelago - Narratives of Gulag Survivors, 52. 2 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, 192. 52 remained difficult to recall in the process of writing. This thesis has not approached the narratives through the lens of trauma studies, but this could be a beneficial perspective since the authors give numerous reflections on the act of writing and in actively remembering what had happened during the most frightful moments in their life. However, approaching writing as a therapeutic activity in the healing of trauma should not be the only perspective, as is clear from other conscious narrating strategies as found in the memoirs. In particular Maria Goldberg and Maria Sandratskaia articulate clear objectives for writing the memoir that goes beyond remembering and coming to terms with the past. Both being active members of the Party, they visibly struggle with the thorny question of who is to blame for the tragic episode in their lives. The saying “chips fly, when a tree is being cut”, which had been prevalent among communists during the Great Purge in the late 1930s, had been denounced by Khrushchev and by the Party as a whole. This implied that there had been no (historical) necessity for their fate, and the only one legitimately to blame is the person of Stalin and the cult he had created of him. In line with the official narrative of the Party, Goldberg and Sandratskaia point to Stalin when it comes to the quest of guilt, but Goldberg goes further by also denouncing the former Kulaki who, in her view, were the ones who executed Stalin’s orders to take revenge on the Old Communists. By the strategy of naming and shaming, the authors break with the official rhetoric of the Party who definitely wanted to prevent a second purge that could harm the Party’s legitimacy. Ideas about who are the ‘Enemies of the People’, a term Khrushchev denounced in his speeches, recur in the memoirs of this study, but the same idea is attributed vice versa to the henchmen of Stalin and the executors of his orders. Not the term ‘enemy’ is used explicitly by the authors, but rather the discursive device of ‘honesty’ by which the authors juxtapose the faithful with the unfaithful citizens and communists. Although the authors already had been rehabilitated by the authorities, in particular the memoirs of Maria Goldberg and Maria Sandratskaia communicate a need to reemphasise their loyalty to the Party and to stress that they never doubted the rightness of Party. Their loyalty and good faith is a narrative thread through their stories and a way of framing their actions and decisions. However, the memoirs do not only tell the story of the protagonist, but the authors have also included many life stories of other prisoners in the narratives, and with it, they also give a voice to those who perished. This outward focus and strategy of voicing experience on behalf of the other acts as a compelling testimony, that goes beyond personal memory and strengthens the shared memory of a collective of victims. By means of this outward focus, the writing of the memoir for these women is an act of empowering themselves and others within a context of distrust in society about their innocence and the warnings by the authorities not to dwell on the past. The unpublished narratives in this thesis offer an intimate insight into history from below, the experience of the individual as survivors of the Stalinist repression. However, the conclusions of this qualitative study do not imply that the experiences and the narrating strategies as found in

53 the memoirs of the three authors in this thesis can be generalised for the whole collective of victims and memoir writers. Nevertheless, this thesis has offered insight into the difficulties of writing and understanding one’s experience in a complex political climate and a carefully monitored debate on the past. In the years and decades after Khrushchev resigned and the period of Thaw came to an end, to discuss the topic of the Gulag remained sensitive and was downplayed in the memory politics of the Soviet authorities. Only in the late 1980s, Soviet leader Gorbachev broke the silence by introducing a policy of Glasnost’ that resulted in yet another boom of memoirs written by survivors of the Stalinist repression. A comparative study between the Gulag memoirs from the Khrushchev period and those written in the late Soviet period would be insightful regarding the way survivors interpreted and narrated the same events differently in a different historical and discursive context.

54

Bibliography

Adler, Nanci. Keeping Faith with the Party - Communist Believers Return from the Gulag. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. ———. ‘Life in the `Big Zone’ : The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression’. Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 1 (1999): 5–19. ———. The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet System (Dissertation). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1999. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag - a History. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Chatterjee, Choi. ‘Ideology, Gender and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey’. Left History 6, no. 2 (1999): 11–28. Chatterjee, Choi, and Karen Petrone. ‘Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective’. Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 967–86. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Dobson, Miriam. ‘Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization: Readers’ Responses to “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”’. Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 580–600. ———. Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. New York: Cornell University Press, 2009. Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford: Stanford University Press., 2013. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism : Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. ‘Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History’. Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 377–400. Goldberg, Maria Moiseevna. ‘Rasskaz O Tom, Shto Bylo I Shto Ne Povtoritsia’. Memorial (Moskva) Archives F.2 Op.1, no. 47 (1963). Gorsuch, Anne E. ‘Women’s Autobiographical Narratives: Soviet Presentations of Self’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 4 (2001): 835–47. Guillory, Sean. ‘The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs’. Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (2012): 546–65. Gullotta, Andrea. ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings’. Autobiografia, no. 1 (2012): 73–87. Hooper, Cynthia. ‘What Can and Cannot Be Said: Between the Stalinist Past and New Soviet Future’. The Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 306–27. Jones, Polly. ‘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.

55

———. Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70. New Haven : Yale University Press., 2013. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich. ‘“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. Krylova, Anna. ‘Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century’. Social History 42, no. 2 (2017): 315– 41. Kuchumova, Olga Mikhailovna. ‘Zheny / Avtobiograficheskie Zapisi/’. Memorial (Moskva) Archives F.2 Op.1, no. 79 (1961). Maynes, Mary Jo. Telling Stories : The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Edited by J. Pierce and B. Laslett. New York: Cornell University Press, 2008. Mitcheson, Katrina. ‘Foucault’s Technologies of the Self: Between Control and Creativity’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 43, no. 1 (2012): 59–75. Paperno, Irina. ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (2002): 577–610. Sandratskaia, Maria Karlovna. ‘Vospominaniia’. Memorial (Moskva) Archives F.2 Op.1, no. 105 (1964). Shcherbakova, Irina. ‘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, edited by Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, and Emanuela Guercetti, 187–208. Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2003. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography : A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Toker, Leona. Return from the Archipelago - Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Indiana, 2000. Walker, Barbara. ‘On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the “Contemporaries” Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s’. The Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 327–52. Werth, Alexander. The Khrushchev Phase : The Soviet Union Enters The ‘decisive’ sixties. London: Hale, 1961. Zagan, Cristian. ‘Tracking Foucault: The Relationship between Discourse and Power/Knowledge’. Logos, Universality, Mentality, Education, Novelty. Section: Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences 3, no. 1 (2015): 31–39.

56