Social Profile of Gulag Prisoners - Authors of Memoirs

Abstract

Political repressions affected representatives of all social strata and groups. This period left a bulk of documents, including memoirs, where the most intimate and difficult thoughts and recollections of their authors are reflected. One of valuable sets of memoirs of political repressions history is collected by the Sakharov Center website. The electronic resource "Memories of the Gulag and their authors" is valuable not only because it exhibits memoirs of more than one and a half thousand people who suffered from repressions but also because of the biographical information about the authors of these memoirs compiled on the basis of information from the memoirs. Biographical data on the victims of the Gulag system became the main source of this study. They allow us to describe and analyze the social portrait of Gulag victims who left memories. Biographical data became a source for creating the database "Gulag prisoners-authors of memoirs". The social portrait of the repressed and its characteristic features were described, as well as a comparison of the social portrait of male and female prisoners was made. Males and females were analyzed separately to pursue the goal set. The analysis suggests that there is a certain similarity of biographical characteristics among the authors of the memoirs which is probably due to the fact that the educated, intelligent segments of the population were one of the objects of a purposeful repressive policy followed in the Soviet state. .