Gulag Voices

The first collection of oral histories of Gulag survivors to appear in English, Gulag Voices is a groundbreaking and long-overdue addition to the history of the Stalin era. The interviews assembled here represent a wide range of Gulag experiences, including prisons, labor camps and colonies, and deportation settlements. They include among them a so-called kulak who was deported in 1930, as well as an interviewee who obtained his release from a political camp only in 1986. Taken together, these accounts form a powerful picture of incarceration, forced labor, and exile in the USSR, and demonstrate the profound disruptions suffered by everyday citizens. They also reveal the long-term effects of the Gulag, demonstrating how these experiences extended beyond the fall of the Soviet Empire and into the next generation.