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Abstract:

Often people who suffered from Soviet repressions look faceless in the research. Scholars such as Terry Martin, Norman Naimark, and Pavel Polyan discuss them in terms of numbers, as countless innocent victims or as idealized heroes and saints. In this way, these people are perceived as what an African American historian Saidiya Hartman calls “human commodities” both by the Soviet state and some of the historians who study them. I want to focus on the voices of Gulag survivors as heard in their oral history interviews, in order to think about how their intimate gaze could refocus this perspective on Soviet repressions. The key questions for this paper are: (1) How did Gulag survivors sense the world around them during the catastrophe? and (2) How did they perceive their interactions with an external world during that period? For thinking about these questions, I focus on the Gulag survivors’ testimonies that were recorded for the last ten years by Russia’s Museum of Gulag History.

When a child of Gulag Aleksandr Zakgeim told about his mother’s 1936 arrest seventy years later, the strongest memory he had was about the smell of her perfume and color of her blouse. For Irina Somova, the moment of her father’s arrest in 1937 was associated with the sound of shaking windows’ glass on their terrace, caused by two men knocking on their door late at night. Faina Loskueva remembered that when she was in a cell waiting for the next interrogation at night and was not allowed to sleep, her cellmates came close to her pretending that they were fixing their hair and thus covered Loskueva, so that she could have a rest for some time and take a nap.

Looking at the Soviet repressions through Gulag survivors’ gaze by focusing on these and similar episodes that stayed in their memories can thus offer an alternative paradigm to the state’s and contemporary academic literature’s narratives in which those who went through the Gulag system are simply perceived as victims. It shows the internal world of Gulag survivors as a fact of history that deserves to be heard, seen, felt, and who were more than victims.