DOI: 10.7256/2454-0609.2023.3.40640

Abstract: The periodization of political repression in the USSR was and remains an urgent issue in the study of the GULAG. According to A.V. Bakunin, when determining the main stages of political repression in the USSR, it is necessary to proceed from the periodization of Soviet totalitarianism, which includes three main stages: the formation (genesis) of totalitarianism (1917–1929), the domination (apogee) of totalitarianism (1929–1953), stagnation and collapse of totalitarianism (1953–1991). After 1991, the mass publication of memoirs of former prisoners of Soviet camps has begun, and it is the memories that are the main source for our research. As part of the current work, we hypothesize that the perception and transmission of memories of the camps may be influenced by the period or stage of repression in which the prisoners served time. The conducted content analysis of memoirs of former GULAG prisoners in subgroups by gender and stage of political repression allows us to conclude that in all subgroups of documents the categories of "Power", "Life" and "Work" dominate, regardless of the stage of political repression and the gender of the authors of the memoirs. This confirms the thesis that in the memory of former prisoners, first of all, memories associated with daily survival in the camp and overcoming inhuman living and working conditions leave an imprint. At the same time, it can be noted that in the subgroups with a small number of incoming documents and marked elements, for example, in the subgroup "women, dates of arrest from 1918 to 1922", significant deviations in the frequency of occurrence are observed – bright connections of atypical categories are revealed. Conversely, the more texts and the larger the studied subgroup, the more common features of the perception of camp life appear. This confirms the hypothesis about the massive nature of large arrays of thematically similar texts.

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0609.2022.6.39493

Abstract: The memoirs of GULAG prisoners are an underestimated source on the history of repression in the USSR, although written and oral memories allow a deeper understanding of what prisoners had to go through and complement the dry and incomplete data from official sources. In this study the memoirs of prisoners published on the resource of the Sakharov Center "Memories of the GULAG and their authors" and transcripts of video interviews with the repressed of the project "My GULAG" of the GULAG History Museum were used as a source. The paper analyzes the features of working with written and oral memories. The comparison of the results of content analysis in groups by gender as well as by the form of fixation of memories - written (memoirs) and oral (interview materials) – was carried out to identify various gender characteristics of perception and broadcasting of camp life. The analysis suggests that despite the gender differences in the perception and translation of the camp stage of life by men and women in written and oral memories the global view of former prisoners on the period of repression does not depend on gender or on the form of fixation of memories. The more texts of memoirs and transcripts of memories there are in the group, and the larger the group of texts is studied, the more common features of the perception of camp life appear. This confirms the hypothesis about the massive nature of large arrays of thematically similar texts.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2022.1.37831

Abstract: Political terror was a distinctive phenomenon of the Soviet era, affecting broad segments of the population of the USSR. In addition to the official traditional sources on the history of this period (statistics, personal files of prisoners, court materials, periodicals), sources of personal origin play an important role – diaries, letters, interviews and memoirs of prisoners of camps and special settlers. Of particular interest among other sources of personal origin on the history of repression in the USSR are collections of memoirs of the repressed. The largest collection of memoirs is presented on the resource of the Sakharov Center "Memories of the Gulag and their authors". The texts of memoirs posted on this electronic resource have become the main source of this research. Based on the materials of the resource, a full-text thematic collection of memoirs was created and analyzed using the methods of content analysis, network analysis and statistical analysis. A comparative analysis of the reflection of camp life on the pages of memoirs of male and female prisoners is carried out. The analysis suggests that men and women converge in the fundamental aspects of the perception of camps: regardless of gender, the camp stage of life became the most traumatic and was remembered by former prisoners in similar tones. At the same time, neither the gender of the authors of the memoirs, nor the profession, nor the age at the time of arrest, nor the number of years that prisoners were forced to spend in camps globally affect these general perception trends. There are particular features inherent in individual subgroups, both among women and men, of the perception of camps, but in general the perception is the same, and it is the general features of the perception of camp life that are brought to the fore, overshadowing the particular elements. This can serve as a confirmation of the thesis that the collection of memoirs collected and studied in the framework of this study is a mass source.