Gulag Voices

"This is an engrossing book that lets the reader hear raw voices from the Gulag. It is at once fascinating, revealing, and sobering. Highly recommended."---Hiroaki Kuromiya, Professor of History, Indiana University at Bloomington

"Gulag Voices is an extremely valuable, stimulating, and well-conceived work of oral history. The benefit of this work is that it allows readers direct access to the transcripts of the interviews and gives voice to a range of survivors who might never have thought to write about their experiences."---Miriam Dobson, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UK

"Gheith and Jolluck's collection of riveting oral histories of returnees who could finally break their silence offers powerful testimony to the enduring legacy of state-sponsored repression. These personal, often heart-wrenching narratives educate us about life and death in and after the Gulag; they are an homage to survivors and those who did not survive."---Nanci Adler, Niod Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam

"Eminent scholars Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck provide commentary and supplementary information that is at once sympathetic, respectful, and rigorously analytical. The result is a unique volume that explores not only the horrors of the Gulag experience, though that comes through in often frightful detail, but also the long-term effects of survivors' attempts to remember the experience, make sense of the radical disconnect between official ideology and real life, and heal ruptured lives."---Steven A. Barnes, Associate Professor of History, George Mason University

The first collection of oral histories of Gulag survivors to appear in English, Gulag Voices is a groundbreaking and long-overdue addition to the history of the Stalin era. The interviews assembled here represent a wide range of Gulag experiences, including prisons, labor camps and colonies, and deportation settlements. They include among them a so-called kulak who was deported in 1930, as well as an interviewee who obtained his release from a political camp only in 1986. Taken together, these accounts form a powerful picture of incarceration, forced labor, and exile in the USSR, and demonstrate the profound disruptions suffered by everyday citizens. They also reveal the long-term effects of the Gulag, demonstrating how these experiences extended beyond the fall of the Soviet Empire and into the next generation.