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Gulag boss : a Soviet memoir / Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky ; translated and edited by Deborah Kaple.

Title: Gulag boss : a Soviet memoir / Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky ; translated and edited by Deborah Kaple.
Author: Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilevich, 1919-1999
Publication: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DK268.M59 A3 2011	Off-site

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Details

Additional Authors

Kaple, Deborah A.

Description

xxxvii, 229 pages : illustrations; 22 cm

Summary

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counter-revolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Mochulsky remained a communist party member his entire life--he would later become a diplomat--but was deeply troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. This unprecedented memoir takes readers into that reality and sheds new light on one of the most harrowing tragedies of the 20th century.

Subject

Genre/Form

Autobiography
Autobiographies
Biographies
History
Autobiographies.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-225) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

pt. 1. Gulag from the outside -- The NKVD : villain or protector? -- First acquaintance with Gulag NKVD : meeting at the Central Committee of the CPSU -- Meeting in the Cadres Department of Gulag NKVD -- Forty-five days to Pechorlag -- pt. 2. Gulag from the inside -- At the camp administration -- Unit foreman, first contingent of prisoners : Soviet volunteer ski troops from the Finnish War -- The unit bosses -- A change in leadership at Pechorlag -- Transferred to the 93rd Unit, labor force : hardened criminals -- Attempted prisoner revolt in the 93rd Unit -- Boss and foreman at the 95th Unit, labor force : political prisoners -- Threat of arrest -- The war -- Illness -- Recovery and return to work in the southern part of the camp -- Boss of a militarized section, labor force : captured German prisoners of war -- Boss of a railway division, labor force : professional railwaymen -- The "liberated" secretary of the Communist Youth Organization -- Fascist military landing force -- Deputy boss in the Political Department for Komsomol work at the NKVD's Road-Building Camp No. 3 -- pt. 3. Interesting asides -- Some railroad recollections -- Peschanka, a village of dekulakized people on the River Pechora -- The countryside of Komi on the River Usa -- Women at Pechorlag -- A fellow traveler from Abez to Pechora -- pt. 4. Final words -- The end of my story -- The real essence of the Gulag -- Afterword: The nature of memoir -- Appendix 1: Pretexts for arrest under Lenin and Stalin period -- Appendix 2: Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code -- Appendix 3: Glossary.

ISBN

9780199742660
0199742669

LCCN

2010007440

OCLC

551196878
SCSB-12071935

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library