The evils of the gulag: personal accounts

Many gulag survivors, having experienced suffering and degradation during their imprisonment, took up the pen after their liberation. Their stories, full of strength and courage, are invaluable testimonies. They provide an insight into the reality of survival conditions in Soviet camps, as well as into the innermost depths of the human soul.

From March 3 to 17, 2020, the BCUL Unithèque site will be showcasing a selection of documents in its open-access area.

The following testimonies were strictly forbidden from publication for decades:

Our hut is like a hospital. Scurvy is weakening us one by one. Everyone is sick. You could spit in the face of anyone who dares to say they’ve been deported to the Arctic Circle without falling ill with scurvy. Everyone is affected to varying degrees. The disease manifests itself in bleeding gums. They swell and turn blue, the teeth start to move, then fall out painlessly, leaving only the roots (Dalia Grinkeviciute, Prisonnière de l’île glacée de Trofimovsk, Pocket, 2018, p. 93)

In the 1920s, outdoor work […] had to stop at minus 25° Celsius. Later, secret instructions raised the bar higher and higher, reaching minus 50° C in the Kolyma camps […]. Prisoners were used by Soviet authorities as guinea pigs to test human resistance to cold (hunger, ill-treatment, etc.). (Jacques Rossi, Qu’elle était belle cette utopie, Interférences, 2016, p. 161.)

Any inmate who failed to meet the standard would be considered guilty of sabotage; she would not only be deprived of food, but placed in a disciplinary cell. […] It’s hard to describe this disciplinary cell. It was a small, unheated shack that resembled a public latrine: it was absolutely forbidden to leave, and no buckets had been installed. To sit down on the single tree trunk that served as a bench, you had to queue up: we were forced to spend most of the night standing up (Evguénia Guinzbourg, Le vertige, Seuil, 1997, pp. 453-454).

Sylvia Biro, academic collections, BCUL site Unithèque