The use of mass terror was one of the most representative characteristic of the Stalinist regime. The gulag was the embodiment of the constant and large scale use of fear by the Bolsheviks to control the population. Among the numerous accounts on the life in the gulag, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Fedor Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss stand out by their treatment of the question. Indeed, Shalamov, a writer who spent 17 years in the gulag depicts a cold and implacable environment which when it doesn’t physically kills you, sucks up all humanity out of yourself until you are turned into a soulless being. Shalamov counts about every aspect of the gulag through his perspective as a prisoner, without politicizing his texts. On the other hand, Mochulsky’s work is written by a former guard after the fall of the USSR. In his book, Mochulsky attempts to explain his past behavior, not to say exonerate himself. Therefore, Kolyma Tales and Gulag Boss provide two valuable accounts of the gulag in the Stalinist era from two opposed perspectives and with different purposes. Kolyma Tales and Gulag Boss relate the same events, namely the daily routine of an arctic gulag. However, these two works deal with this topic from two diametrically opposed perspectives. Indeed, Shalamov was a political prisoner while Mochulsky was a supervisor in the camp. Their experience of the gulag are different in almost every domain. First, Shalamov writes about the impossibility of forming true friendship in the gulag given the conditions of living: “Cold, hunger, and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible […] friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy.” One the other hand, Mochulsky evokes the valorization of friendship among guards: “they also very m... ... middle of paper ... ...in Era (Studies in Russian and East European History). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lapidus, Gail Warshofky. 1978. Women in Soviet Society. Berkeley: University of California Press Berkeley 94720. Randall, Amy E. Fall 2011. ""Abortion Will Deprive You of Happiness!": Soviet Reproductive Politics in the Post-Stalin Era." Journal of Women's History 13-38. Sacks, Michaael Paul. 1977. "Women in the Industrial Labor Force." In Women in Russia, by Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, 189-204. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1920. "U.S. Constitution. amendement. XIX ." Viola, Lynne, and Beatrice Farnsworth. 1992. Russian Peasant Women. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Z. Goldman, Wendy. 1993. Women, the state, and revolution: Soviet family policy and social life, 1917-1936. Cambridge, New-York: Cambridge University Press.
"Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom." Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. .
The use of mass terror was one of the most representative characteristics of the Stalinist regime. The Gulag embodied the constant and large scale use of fear by the Bolsheviks to administer the population. Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Fyodor Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss stood out by their treatment of the question. While relating the same events, namely the daily routine of an arctic Gulag, these two works dealt with this topic from two diametrically opposed perspectives. Indeed, Shalamov was a political prisoner for seventeen years while Mochulsky was a supervisor in the camp. Therefore, their experience of the Gulag diverged in nearly every aspect. Furthermore, Mochulsky and Shalamov pursued different designs. On the one hand, Shalamov attempts to depict the Gulag’s ability to dehumanize prisoners. On the other hand, Mochulsky wrote his book after the fall of the USSR. As a former guard, he attempted to justify his past behavior, not to say exonerate himself.
Bernstein, Laurie. Sonia's Daughter's: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Being one of the greatest Russian writers of 20th century, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn had a unique talent that he used to truthfully depict the realities of life of ordinary people living in Soviet era. Unlike many other writers, instead of writing about “bright future of communism”, he chose to write about everyday hardships that common people had to endure in Soviet realm. In “Matryona’s Home”, the story focuses on life of an old peasant woman living in an impoverished collectivized village after World War 2 . In the light of Soviet’s propaganda of creating a new Soviet Nation, the reader can observe that Matryona’s personality and way of life drastically contradicted the desired archetype of New Soviet Man. Like most of the people in her village,
Gender roles in Russia have dramatically changed since the fall of the former Soviet Union and the fall of communism. It is hard to look directly at the constitution of Russia seeing as though the drafting and redrafting of their constitution is still underway. However, looking at the constitution of the former Soviet Union, you can see it is clearly stated that: “Women and men have equal rights.” It is very clear that in the Soviet Union they were trying to make it so that women and men were equal. It is still clear today that those same basic ideals are present in Russia. Women are clearly more equal in their country than in ours. In the workforce as well as in the home, women play a more equal role than in the present day United States. However, for the sake of this paper, let us just look at the infrastructure of Russia, formerly known as the Soviet Union or USSR.
This demonstrates that the prisoners are part of a system where the needs of the collective are far more important than the needs of the individual (in both communism and in the prison.) It also reveals the corruption of the Soviet Union because it while it claims that everyone should be equal, the life of the prisoners in the camp are not valued at all. This could be due to the fact that prisoners in the camps aren’t viewed as people, but rather as animals that are being worked to their death.
Bardach, Janusz, and Kathleen Gleeson. Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998. Print.
Bolsheviks entered the political world in 1917 with the ideas of deliberating women and making them equal to men as well as this idea of westernizing Russia. Based on the book, both ideas were closely associated. Women were seen as raw materials that can be used to transform. As a result, women who were already member of the Communists party were sent to the countryside to transform primitive women also known as babas and transformed them into Comrades, the free and knowledgeable women. These transformed women would then move to the city and work in factories and industrial workshop to westernize and industrialize Russia and that will symbolize women freedom and equality to men. Even though these women will have a much lower...
Solzhenitsyn believed that it was nearly impossible to have truly free thoughts under the prison camp conditions described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or in any situation where there is an authoritarian ruler. In a pris...
In 1934, Sergey Kirov a rival to Stalin was murdered. Stalin is believed to have been behind the assassination, he used it as a pretext to arrest thousands of his other opponents who in his words might have been responsible for Kirov’s murder. These purges not only affected those who openly opposed Stalin but ordinary people too. During the rule of Stain o...
During Stalin’s regime, the individual Russian was the center of his grand plan for better or worse. Stalin wanted all of his people to be treated the same. In the factory the top producer and the worst producer made the same pay. He wanted everyone to be treated as equals. His goal to bring the Soviet Union into the industrial age put tremendous pressure on his people. Through violence and oppression Stalin tried to maintain an absurd vision that he saw for the Soviet Union. Even as individuals were looked at as being equals, they also were viewed as equals in other ways. There was no one who could be exempt when the system wanted someone imprisoned, killed, or vanished. From the poorest of the poor, to the riches of the rich, everyone was at the mercy of the regime. Millions of individuals had fake trumped up charges brought upon them, either by the government or by others who had called them o...
Rueschemeyer, M. (1998) Women in the politics of postcommunist Eastern Europe. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
Ryan, Barbara. 1990. “Integrating Feminist and Sociological Thought: The Life and Work of Helena Znaniecka Lopata.” The American Sociologist 21:164-178.
Today, 46.9% of the employed population in Russia is made up of women. Most women in the work-force (85%) are in public health service. Women in the country are reduced to few jobs and forced to accept low wages. Women make up 74.2% of the unemployed
xvi Solzhenitsyn, A. I. The Gulag Archipelago, (I-II). Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973, 436.