Editing Gulag (section)

=== Culture ===
<!-- this section is for the general influence on the Soviet culture of **Gulag itself**, not a list of publications about Gulag -->

The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous.

The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern [[Russian folklore]]. Many songs by the authors-performers known as the [[Bard (Soviet Union)|''bards'']], most notably [[Vladimir Vysotsky]] and [[Alexander Galich (writer)|Alexander Galich]], neither of whom ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and glorified the life of "[[wiktionary:zek|zeks]]". Words and phrases which originated in the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the 1960s and 1970s.
The memoirs of [[Alexander Dolgun]], [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], [[Varlam Shalamov]] and [[Yevgenia Ginzburg]], among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned.

Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in places like [[Magadan]], where, for example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to Moscow's and [[Eddie Rosner]] played jazz.

==== Literature ====
Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners have been published:
* [[Varlam Shalamov]]'s ''[[The Kolyma Tales|Kolyma Tales]]'' is a short-story collection, cited by most major works on the Gulag, and widely considered one of the main Soviet accounts.
* [[Victor Kravchenko (defector)|Victor Kravchenko]] wrote ''[[I Chose Freedom (book)|I Chose Freedom]]'' after defecting to the United States in 1944. As a leader of industrial plants he had encountered forced labor camps in across the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1941. He describes a visit to one camp at [[Kemerovo]] on the [[Tom River]] in Siberia. Factories paid a fixed sum to the [[KGB]] for every convict they employed.
* [[Anatoli Granovsky]] wrote ''I Was an NKVD Agent'' after [[Defection|defecting]] to Sweden in 1946 and included his experiences seeing gulag prisoners as a young boy, as well as his experiences as a prisoner himself in 1939. Granovsky's father was sent to the gulag in 1937.
* [[Julius Margolin]]'s book ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'' was finished in 1947, but it was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the time, immediately after World War II.
* [[Gustaw Herling-Grudziński]] wrote ''A World Apart'', which was translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an introduction by [[Bertrand Russell]] in 1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet communist system.
* [[Victor Herman]]'s book ''Coming out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life''. Herman experienced firsthand many places, prisons, and experiences that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was able to reference in only passing or through brief second hand accounts.
* [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]'s book ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' was not the first literary work about labor camps. His previous book on the subject, "[[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]", about a typical day in the life of a Gulag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, ''[[Novy Mir]]'' (''New World''), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. ''[[The First Circle]]'', an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the ''[[Marfino]]'' ''[[sharashka]]'' or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968.
* [[Slavomir Rawicz]]'s book "[[The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom]]": In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk.
* [[János Rózsás]], a Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn,<ref>{{Cite book | url=https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/one-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich-inscribed-first-edition-alexander-solzhenitsyn-signed/ | title=One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich}}</ref> wrote many books and articles on the issue of the Gulag.
*[[Zoltan Szalkai]], a Hungarian documentary filmmaker, made several films about gulag camps.
* [[Karlo Štajner]], a Croatian communist who was active in the former [[Kingdom of Yugoslavia]] and the manager of the [[Comintern Publishing House]] in Moscow 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home after being accused of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the next 20 years in camps from Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–[[Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia|Yugoslavia]]n political normalization he was re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in 1956 and spent the rest of his life in [[Zagreb]], [[Croatia]]. He wrote an impressive book titled ''7000 days in Siberia''.
* ''Dancing Under the Red Star'' by [[Karl Tobien]] ({{ISBN|1-4000-7078-3}}) tells the story of Margaret Werner, an athletic girl who moves to Russia right before Stalin came to power. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who was held in the Gulag to tell about it.
* ''Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag'' ({{ISBN|0-394-49497-0}}), by a member of the US Embassy, and ''I Was a Slave in Russia'' {{awrap|({{ISBN|0-8159-5800-5}}),}} an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. They were interned due to their American citizenship for about eight years c. 1946–55.
* [[Yevgenia Ginzburg]] wrote two famous books about her remembrances, ''Journey Into the Whirlwind'' and ''Within the Whirlwind''.
*[[Savić Marković Štedimlija]], a pro-[[Croatia]]n Montenegrin ideologist. Caught in Austria by the [[Red Army]] in 1945, he was sent to the USSR and spent ten years in the Gulag. After his release, Marković wrote his autobiographical account in two volumes titled ''Ten years in Gulag'' (''Deset godina u Gulagu'', Matica crnogorska, Podgorica, Montenegro 2004).
* [[Anița Nandriș-Cudla]]'s book, ''20 Years in Siberia [20 de ani în Siberia]'' is the own life's account written by a Romanian peasant woman from Bucovina (Mahala village near Cernăuți) who managed to survive the harsh, forced labor system together with her three sons. Together with her husband and her three underage children, she was deported from Mahala village to the Soviet Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the Polar Circle, without a trial or even a communicated accusation. The same night of June 12 to 13, 1941, (that is, just before Germany's invasion of the USSR), overall 602 fellow villagers were arrested and deported, without any prior notice. Her mother received the same sentence but was spared from deportation after the fact that she was a paraplegic was acknowledged by the authorities. It was later discovered that the reason for her deportation and forced labor was the fake and nonsensical claim that, allegedly, her husband had been a mayor in the Romanian administration, a politician and a rich peasant, none of the latter of which was true. Separated from her husband, she brought up the three boys, overcame [[typhus]], [[scorbutus]], [[malnutrition]], extreme cold and harsh toils, to later return to Bucovina after rehabilitation. Her manuscript was written toward the end of her life, in the simple and direct language of a peasant with three years of public school education, and was secretly brought to Romania before the fall of Romanian communism, in 1982. Her manuscript was first published in 1991. Her deportation was shared mainly with Romanians from Bucovina and Basarabia, Finnish and Polish prisoners, as token proof to show that Gulag labor camps had also been used for the shattering/ extermination of the natives in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
* [[Frantsishak Alyakhnovich]] – Solovki prisoner
* [[Blagoy Popov]], a Bulgarian communist and a defendant in the [[Reichstag fire|Leipzig trial]], along with [[Georgi Dimitrov]] and [[Vasil Tanev]], was arrested in 1937 during the [[Stalinist purges]] and spent seventeen years in [[Norillag]]. Popov was released in 1954, after the death of Stalin, and returned to [[Bulgaria]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери |last=Попов |first=Благой |publisher=Издателство "Изток-Запад" |year=2012 |isbn=978-619-152-025-1 |location=София |pages=37, 57}}</ref> He wrote his autobiographical account in the book ''From the Leipzig trial to the Siberia camps'' (''От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери'', Изток-Запад, София, България, 2012 {{ISBN|978-619-152-025-1}}).
* [[Mkrtich Armen]], an Armenian writer who was imprisoned in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1945, published a collection of his memories under the title "They Ordered to Give You" in 1964.
* [[Gurgen Mahari]], an Armenian writer and poet, who was arrested in 1936, released in 1947, arrested again in 1948 and sent into Siberian exile as an "unreliable type" until 1954, wrote "Barbed Wires in Blossom", a novella based largely on his personal experiences in a Soviet gulag.
* [[Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir]] is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918–1999), a Soviet Engineer and eventual head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946.