Unclaimed. Stories of people who survived what we fear most
Unclaimed. Stories of people who survived what we fear most is a record of the accounts of Gulag people who were on opposite sides of the barbed wire - officers and prisoners.
Although they tell dramatic stories, this is not a chronicle of violence and suffering - they are a testimony that even in hell, one can retain humanity and dignity. It is the story of ‘an abnormal, often unbearable, but nevertheless - life’.
The book's authors, special correspondents for Moscow's Novaya Gazeta Yelena Racheva and Anna Artemyeva, reached out to the last former prisoners of Stalin's gulags and Gulag employees and recorded their accounts between 2012 and 2018.
The book's protagonists worked in the gulags or were imprisoned from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, the period of Stalin's most terrible repression. Some were imprisoned there for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’, others worked there: in the administrative division, as guards, medical staff. The book's protagonists include a pianist imprisoned on the day the war broke out for ‘performing a fascist hymn’ (a Bach piece), a painter accused of ‘trying to dig a tunnel from Leningrad under Lenin's mausoleum’, there are stories of a priest's first religious ecstasy and a partisan about the first Chekist killed. There is talk of a professor at Moscow State University who ate pearl porridge from among other people's excrement, and of a guard who taught his pet dog Sonko to track people and pass the paw. There are stories of female prisoners who curled their hair into rollers to get out through the barbed wire at night for a date, and of a camp nurse sacked from her job for loving a convict.
The book can be purchased from the KARTA Centre bookshop.
In addition to the prisoners' stories, the book includes memoirs of guards and other functionaries and employees of the Gulag. This publication is an extremely rare opportunity to learn about the history of repression from the other side - the system's functionaries occasionally dare to speak about themselves as co-conspirators and their motivations for carrying out such an occupation. It is a warning that the ‘executioners’ are not some ‘beasts’ but ordinary people. Their stories are particularly important - we should take them as a constant warning, an alarm signal.
The accounts, recorded by ‘Novaya Gazeta’ journalists, cover not only the Gulag experience itself, but reach into the entire biography of the protagonists, as well as the impact of the experience of being imprisoned or a functionary of the oppressive system in the context of the protagonist's further life, his family and environment, contemporary awareness and perception of this phenomenon, which concerns the history of millions of people.
The whole is complemented by archival and contemporary photographs of the protagonists and objects related to their story: gulag artefacts, personal items not miraculously confiscated during searches, documents. The authors do not provide extensive commentary on these statements; they allow the reader to draw their own conclusions.
It is not the case that after the publications of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski or Anne Applebaum, everything has been said about the crimes of Soviet communism, because the immensity of evil can never be fully told. As the authors wrote in their introduction:
‘There is a lot of love in this book. There is also a lot of death. Many half-dead prisoners licking dirt off the furniture. There is the beauty of Tchaikovsky's music heard through the camp loudspeaker, the weight of lumps of uranium ore in a wheelbarrow and the taste of the first gingerbread bought in freedom. There is a lot of pain, light, blood, laughter and the lust for life, but also the trauma that has been unprocessed for decades.’
This is an important publication at a time when the rehabilitation of Stalin and the Soviet system is taking place in Russia itself.
