Abstract
Abstract After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet state launched major reforms of the Gulag. Millions of prisoners and exiles were released. Prisons and prison camps were reformed, and the Soviet system of mass incarceration became much smaller. Former prisoners and exiles struggled to re-establish lives for themselves on the “outside” as they navigated state policies and popular prejudices. At the same time, former inmates worked to process their experiences in the Gulag, leading to the development of a small but growing corpus of Gulag memoir literature. This chapter examines major developments in the evolution of such literature, from early works like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the flood of new publications during Perestroika and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It closes with a survey of efforts to memorialize the Gulag in Russia and other Soviet successor states.
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