Presentations by Streams

The sprawling Soviet forced-labour system transformed the lives of tens of millions of people throughout more than three decades of terror, exploitation, and displacement. Life in the Gulag camps and colonies has been the subject of a growing field of study that includes the seminal work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, scholarship on Gulag economics, re-education, and internal colonization, and surprising discoveries about medicine, art, and even football in the camps. This panel will explore the impact of the Gulag on prisoners after their “release,” focusing on the residency restrictions that faced former inmates, often either forcing them to remain in their place of incarceration or barring them from the urban centres of the Soviet Union. These restrictions compelled former prisoners to build their lives on the periphery, engaging with local formal institutions as well as unofficial subcultures, shaping them, and being shaped by them. Communities of dissidents, writers, and theatre professionals made an indelible mark on their places of confinement, all the while maneouvering to stay connected to cultural and political life in the Soviet metropoles. A better understanding of the complex lives of former prisoners on the Soviet periphery will further illuminate the multifaceted interaction between the Gulag and Soviet life long after the camps were left to rust in the taiga.