Soviet Family Code and Women During the Stalinist Regime

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...

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