Authors

Discussion

Drawing on local newspapers and prisoner memoirs, this paper considers the cultural impact of theatre professionals who were forced to remain in the Gulag capitals of Vorkuta and Magadan after their release. The successful musician Vladimir Mikosho, whose life and career was abruptly halted by his arrest in 1943, proved pivotal to the local music and drama theatre in subarctic Vorkuta. Released in 1951 but barred from leaving the city, he continued his work with the theatre and local music education. Mikosho was later permitted to move to the Komi capital, where he organized a children’s musical studio, gave lectures, mentored young musicians, and stewarded the ASSR’s branch of the Soviet Union of Composers. But only in 1958, after Stalin was dead and the Gulag largely dismantled, was Mikosho rehabilitated and free to return to Moscow. Such are the stories of many creative professionals turned political prisoners. Residency restrictions bound former inmates to the peripheral zones of their confinement, where they then applied an expertise once reserved for the Soviet arts capitals. As a result, creative life in these regions was shaped by students of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, and veterans of the country’s foremost conservatories, theatres, and studios. The Gulag proved an engine of displacement that left many leading artists trapped on the edge of Soviet Empire.