Resources

Scholars and other interested readers are encouraged to explore the following resources to learn more about the Gulag system, including the work of the renowned Memorial Foundation and Stepan Cernousek’s Gulag.cz.

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.
• “Sound Archives: European Memories of the Gulag“
• MemSearch: Memory of Repression—a research platform that connects multiple databases on Soviet political repression, providing essential biographical information on individuals who experienced state terror.
• “Memories of the Gulag and Their Authors ” (Воспоминания о Гулаге и их авторы)—a digital database developed by the virtual “museum in exile” Perm-36, created after the Russian authorities seized the physical museum. The project currently contains information on 3,846 memoir authors, 7,292 bibliographic records, and 1,689 texts of Gulag memoirs.

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

Scholars, journalists, and writers continue to produce important works on the Gulag, addressing various audiences and approaches. Among the most notable recent  publications are the following: 

• Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Polly Jones examines Soviet, samizdat, and post-Soviet prose about the Gulag. Through close analysis, Jones revisits core themes of survival, identity, carceral experience, and memory, offering a novel interpretation of how the Gulag system has been reflected in literature. 
• Tyler C. Kirk, in his recent After the Gulag: A History of Memory in Russia’s Far North (Indiana University Press, 2023), explores how former prisoners released from camps in the Komi Republic rebuilt their lives after incarceration, navigating alienation, establishing informal support networks, and managing regimes of commemoration in the late Soviet and post-Soviet times. 
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• Alexander Etkind, in his Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press, 2013), investigates the mechanisms of memory construction and mourning for the victims of Soviet repression, tracing how these processes influenced the cultural memory of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.