Resources

Scholars and other interested parties are encouraged to consult the following resources in learning more about the Gulag system including efforts of the renowned Memorial Foundation, Stepan Cernousek’s Gulag.cz, and Gulag. Online projects, as well as those of the GULAG History Museum, operated by the Moscow Department of Culture.

Bibliographies

• Three volumes published in the journal Gulag Studies (available at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, George Mason University’s Fenwick Library, the Library of Congress, and by Interlibrary Loan):
  • Bell, Wilson T., and Marc Elie. “Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag.” Gulag Studies 1 (2008). 143-60.
  • Bell, Wilson T. “A Supplement to the Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag.” Gulag Studies 4 (2011). 121-26.
  • Bell, Wilson T. “A Supplement to the Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag.” Gulag Studies 4 (2011). 121-26.
• A bibliography of works with particular strengths in Czech-language literature and multimedia.
• A list of primarily Russian-language memoirs by Elen Kaplan.

Online Exhibits

• “Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom,” by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
• A high-definition virtual tour of a camp among other novelties at Gulag Online.
• “Virtual Museum of the Gulag,” an online exhibit of artifacts and more collected by the St. Petersburg branch of the Memorial Foundation.
• “Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag“
• “Sound Archives: European Memories of the Gulag“

Maps

• Highly interactive maps by the GULAG History Museum and Gulag Online of the reach and development of the Gulag apparatus.
• An interactive map including the frequently overlooked special settlements of the “unknown” Gulag within Perm Krai, maintained by the Perm Krai Branch of the Memorial Foundation.
• A series of static maps created under the leadership of Judith Pallot aimed to capture various demographic dimensions of the Gulag population including gender and state of health.

Primary Sources

• An invaluable collection of Gulag memoirs maintained by the Sakharov Foundation.
• Relevant documents published online by the Alexander Yakovlev Foundation.
• Recorded interviews of the GULAG History Museum’s My Gulag initiative.
• Databases of victims, memoirs, and other relevant resources – many of them digital – are maintained by the Memorial Foundation.
• Photographs are published more widely but disparately and are captured in James Kapaló’s “Hidden Galleries” project tracing primarily religious persecution in the European Socialist states, various albums including one by Tomasz Kizny, informal online collections such as one devoted to themes like women prisoners, as well as recent jaunts to crumbling Gulag sites by reporters from Novaya Gazeta and Meduza.io.

Notable Recent Publications

Writers continue to publish work on the Gulag catering to various audiences:

• Monika Zgustová offers Dressed for a Dance in the Snow (Penguin Random House, 2020), a highly readable account of nine women’s experiences building lives in the Gulag (translated by Julie Jones).
• In Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (Yale University Press, 2017), Golfo Alexopoulos continues her quest to preserve and bolster the lens of annihilation in the study of the Gulag.
• Emigre journalist Masha Gessen alongside photographer Misha Friedman captures the problems of memory around the Gulag in contemporary Russia in Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2018 and Random House Audio, 2019).
• In Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923-1930: The Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps (Legenda, 2018), Andrea Gullota tackles the prison on the Solovki islands that housed inmates both remarkable and ordinary and served as a prototype for subsequent efforts in the ever fraught and ever-changing intertwining of penal labor and cultural “reforging” previously studied by Wilson Bell and Julie Draskoczy.