Short Abstract

This paper explores how Japanese first-hand accounts about internment in the Soviet Union compare to accounts about the Gulag. It focuses on how these sources reflect Soviet ethnic diversity and what that conveys about the postwar Soviet Union, the internment system, and the nature of memory.

Long Abstract

Between 1945 and 1956, more than half a million Japanese soldiers were forcefully interned in the Soviet Union, about ten percent of whom died during the internment. The first-hand accounts of those who returned comprise a vast corpus of memory literature which has been studied largely in isolation from similar accounts in other languages. This paper offers a comparative perspective that combines Japanese internment accounts with those about the so-called Gulag—a system of internment for Soviet citizens. While the infamous Soviet camps have been depicted in many languages by former internees, scholarship about the “Gulag literature” is still dominated by an overwhelming focus on Russian texts. Thus, this paper utilizes instead accounts written in Lithuanian, in an attempt to explore the possibilities of multidirectional memory without falling back on the usual sources, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Gulag Archipelago." At the center of the analysis is the question of cultural diversity which was characteristic not only of the camps but of the Soviet Union more generally: how is the cultural Other represented in accounts about the internment written in Japanese and Lithuanian? What role do these representations play in the text and what can they tell us about the time they were produced in as well as the period their authors aim to describe? When placed in dialogue with accounts written by Soviet domestic prisoners, the reports and memoirs of Japanese internees reveal an underlying desire to describe not just the prisoner-of-war camps and the hardships endured during internment, but the Soviet Union more generally, including the people that inhabit and sustain it. By recounting numerous encounters with the cultural Other from behind the Iron Curtain, former internees contributed to the Cold War discourse surrounding not just the Soviet Union and communism but also Soviet colonialism and the people who were affected by it.