Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment Rhiannon Dowling (bio) Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag. 328 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300179415. $65.00. Jonathan Daly, Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. 258 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1474224369. $88.00. Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters, ed. and trans. Emily D. Johnson. 304 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300209310. $85.00. Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953–1964. 280 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1501702792. $45.00. Ever since I got into contact with you, I have been in a remarkably serene, tranquil, cheerful mood. I am more good-humored than I have ever been ... I pay absolutely no heed to all the surrounding trivialities and rubbish. Physically I now feel my condition is completely satisfactory: recently we had our latest quarterly medical inspection, and they found absolutely nothing wrong with my health (except for my heart, but whose heart is in good shape nowadays?) —Arsenii Formakov (1900–83) to his wife, 1 January 1945 (Gulag Letters, 87–88) Arsenii Formakov was most definitely lying. At least he was not telling the whole truth. When he finally got in touch with his wife, Anna, Formakov had been incarcerated for three and a half years. Most of this time he spent in the Kraslag labor camp in Krasnoiarsk krai, over 5,000 kilometers from where he [End Page 173] was arrested in his home of Daugavpils, Latvia. He was a prominent member of a community of Latvian Old Believers arrested for anti-Soviet activity after the Soviet army occupied and annexed Latvia in 1940. His correspondences with Anna and other close friends and family members from 1944–55 are translated and interpreted by Emily Johnson in the absorbing new volume Gulag Letters. In them, he boasted of the simple comforts he enjoyed in the camp, as well as the tremendous good fortune and privilege that insulated him from the horrors that Anna no doubt imagined he suffered as a forced laborer. He continued this way until his release in 1947. His actions, however, belied his cheerful words. When he was rearrested 19 months after release, he tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in his isolation cell. After his release from his second sentence in 1955 thanks to reforms that eliminated the most brutal camps and practices, his health never fully recovered, although he lived a long and full life. Both his religious faith and his relationship with Anna remained strong, and the two lived together until their deaths in 1983 and 1985 (9, 47, 89, 149, 261). Over half a century since the first stories from the Stalinist Gulag became available to readers worldwide, historians still disagree about how to comprehend this institution and how to use the testimonies of its victims. Memoir literature from writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling has made the most profound impressions on a wide range of readers, detailing depths of deprivation and inhumanity inflicted on prisoners by feckless guards, senseless regulations, and vicious fellow-prisoners.1 Since then, the fall of the Soviet Union has opened archives containing official records from the Soviet justice system and a flood of memoir literature has brought new survivors into the discussion.2 Historians have since drawn from both the official records and the testimonies of survivors to produce a more complex picture of the world of the Stalinist Gulag. In recent decades, [End Page 174] scholars like Oleg Khlevniuk, Galina Ivanova, and Anne Applebaum have used a variety of official documents and survivor literature to develop a broad overview of the Gulag system's functioning. They all emphasized the repressive and economic functions of the institution, portraying the Gulag as an integral part of Stalin's regime of societal control and echoing insights that Solzhenitsyn offered in his Gulag Archipelago.3 The picture of oppressive centralized control has been complicated by studies like those of Alan Barenberg and Steven...