Gulag Letters

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.