Category: Gulag Boss

Mochulsky comes across fairly positively in his account, even if today’s reader is frequently frustrated by his lack of introspection and personal accountability. He is remarkably resourceful at problem solving, and seems genuinely concerned with the physical well being of the prisoners. As Deborah writes in her afterward, perhaps Mochulsky “was a man who want[s] to show us that even in an evil system there were people who tried to do their best”.[1. Deborah Kaple, “Afterward,” Fyodor Visilevich Mochulsky, Gulag Boss, trans. and edited Deborah Kaple (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 181.] I’m very curious about the issue of the “good boss”—the boss who, in other words, treats the prisoners humanely, while continuing to maintain a position of power and responsibility within this incredibly cruel and inhumane system. In my own research, I’ve come across one possible “good boss” candidate, who, like Mochulsky, commanded a sub-camp within a much larger camp complex.

This man, Filip Ivanovich Kazachenko (pictured), presided over the Antibess and then the Orlovo-Rozovo subdivisions of Siblag, in present day Kemerovo Oblast’.[2. For more, see Wilson T. Bell, “The Gulag and Soviet Society in Western Siberia, 1929-1953,” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2011) 87-88, and 242-243: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/29921] In any case, I’d like to explore (very briefly) two questions regarding the “good boss.”

1. How possible/common was the “good boss”?
2. What do we make of some of the silences in Mochulsky’s memoir?

Thank you Steve, for organizing this incredible blog, and for choosing to begin with Gulag Boss. It’s an honor to have so many scholars I admire read this book and comment on it. You are right: this is so much better than waiting for the random review to come out 15 months from now. And thank you all for taking the time to do this.  I’m sorry to be so late in responding. I guess I temporarily forgot that handing out a take-home midterm exam yesterday to my Freshman Seminar students might cause them to become crazed and needy! What can I say? It’s what we do.

One thing that made me happy about many of your comments was seeing that Mochulsky inadvertently answered some questions that have puzzled us. For instance, it thrilled me to see that Alan could finally find a reason for this rail line to be built, of all the myriad of projects in Komi that were started and abandoned. Jeff mentioned that seeing the political prisoners behave badly was unusual (I was also surprised), as well as seeing that the Germans actually landed near the camp during the war (this really surprised me, too).  I, too, felt that the Selektor was an important part of camp boss life, and yet I’d not seen much about it in the literature.  The Selektor is an excellent symbol of Lynne’s point about the sheer isolation and desolation of the camps, so far from Moscow.

Like Golfo, I was on the edge of my seat as well when Mochulsky’s horse got stuck in the mud, and shocked at the callousness of the other “free” employees in leaving the 3 boys there to fend for themselves. Already, before they even arrived at the camp, they had to worry about being arrested for the “plundering of State property.” It was, as nearly everyone mentioned, a stark reminder to us of that very fuzzy line between perpetrator and prisoner, as well as the blurred boundaries between the archipelago and the mainland, the famous “little camp” and “big camp.” Mochulsky’s memoir, for me, has made it much harder  to simply dismiss the Gulag administrators as perpetrators.  He has put a very real face on the challenges and choices they faced every day on the job.

Thanks, Steve, for pulling this conversation together. And thanks, Deborah, for bringing Mochulsky’s memoir to a broad audience.  There’s just nothing like it out there.

As I was reading Mochulsky’s fascinating and gripping memoir, I kept returning to a line from Leona Toker’s wonderful book, Return from the Archipelago.  Toker writes that for each gulag memoirist, there is a “terror gap” or “untidy spot” where he or she fears to tread, an Orwellian Room 101: “Each author is reluctant to face some special type of suffering, depravity, horror.”  I think that Mochulsky’s memoir is especially interesting for what it says about trauma and memory.

First of all, thanks to Steve for including me in this remarkable forum, and thanks to all the other participants for their insightful comments about the book.  Clearly the blog provides an opportunity for a different kind of scholarly interchange than the usual book publication and book review cycle.

Gulag Boss is a fascinating memoir that I read with great interest, both as a scholar and as a teacher.  It raises a number of fascinating issues and questions, many of which I will address in my forthcoming book review in the journal Gulag Studies.  But in the interest of not duplicating that review or my colleagues’ posts, I will focus here on the book’s relevance to the study of one region of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Far North, in particular the territory of the Komi Republic.  I have more than an abiding interest in this region, as I am currently finishing a book on the history of Vorkuta, the camp complex turned company town located on the site of the largest coal basin in European Russia.  Mochulsky’s camp, Sevpechlag, was created to build a railroad to connect the coal coming from Vorkuta’s mines to the transportation network of Northwestern Russia.

Gulag Boss is clearly a valuable contribution to the growing body of Gulag literature.  For decades our understanding of the Gulag was informed almost exclusively by prisoner memoirs.  Then in the 1990s and 2000s came the archival revolution, which provided a wealth of information about the internal workings of the Soviet penal system.  But although they have taught us much over the past two decades, archival documents will never present the full picture of how the administration of punishment worked in the Soviet Union; they lack, for the most part, the candid voices of the actual administrators explaining how to properly interpret the documents.  Which orders were important?  Which orders were ignored?  How were promotions and disciplinary actions really decided?  What personal intrigues stood behind such actions?  Were some commands given orally rather than in written form?  Were there motivations behind certain decisions that were not printed on paper, or which among the given motivations carried the most weight?  What did Gulag commanders and guards really think of their work and of the prisoners?  These are questions that are sometimes answered in investigatory reports and petitions, but often the historian is left guessing.  And it is precisely these sorts of questions that memoirs or oral histories of Gulag personnel can help answer.  They can provide a sort of bridge between the prisoner accounts and the official documents.  Unfortunately, historians have at their disposal very few such sources and this is where Gulag Boss is particular valuable.  One only wishes it were three times as long and detailed as it is.

So what do we learn from Gulag Boss?  Or, what do we already know about the Gulag that is reinforced by this memoir?