Decolonizing the Gulag: National Voices for Understanding the Experiences of Imprisonment

While perceptible ethnicization of the Bolsheviks’ concept of an ‘enemy of the people’ and corresponding shifts in Soviet repressive and penal policies played crucial role in determining demographics and social dynamics in the Gulag before, during and after WWII, the Gulag studies paid very little attention to the anthropology of various national groups of prisoners. Historians unanimously agree on the fact that a system of informal networks of mutual assistance based on ethnic/national membership existed in the Gulag and was essential for political prisoners’ survival in camps, but very few researchers endeavor to explore specific features that actually distinguished those national groups. Why ethnicity – despite being a matter of vital importance – is still a marginal subject in the Gulag studies? Why major works in history and anthropology of the Gulag are based (almost) exclusively on the testimonies of its Russian survivors? Why the voices of Ukrainian prisoners – who constituted up to 20% of the Gulag population – were excluded from the scholarly discussion? And how neglecting or diminishing specific experiences of prisoners of national origin other than Russian affects our knowledge of the whole phenomenon? What could other national narratives of surviving the Gulag add to our understanding of the functioning of the totalitarian regime in general and of human experiences in confinment in particular? Based on the research of everyday lives of the Ukrainian female political prisoners in the Gulag in the 1940s and early 1950s, this paper criticizes the perils of scholarly fascination with Russian Gulag memoirs and exemplifies the great heuristic potential of in-depth research on experiences of national groups.