2017/12/04 by Jeffrey S. Hardy · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Soviet and Russian History #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration #Linguistic and Cultural Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/00085006.2017.1396837
openalex publication_date 2017/12/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/21
The Soviet penal system, commonly referred to by its Stalin-era acronym, Gulag, exposed millions to conditions of imprisonment from 1917 to 1991. Penal institutions were located throughout the Soviet Union, but were concentrated especially in remote and sparsely populated areas such as the Far North, Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. They were typically camps instead of prisons, with inmates sleeping in communal barracks and performing labour at outdoor work sites. This arrangement brought inmates and their jailers in close contact with the natural world. The richly varied avifauna of the Soviet Union made a particular impression on residents of the Gulag. Administrators employed birds as part of their re-education programs, using them to inculcate in the inmates scientific literacy, but the interactions between inmates and birds were more diverse. Some inmates fed them while others ate them. Some found in birds powerful symbols of springtime, freedom, and home, while others saw them as harbingers of death. Birds were also used by gang members in the Gulag as status symbols tattooed onto their own bodies and the bodies of their victims. Ultimately, birds helped Gulag inmates negotiate and make sense of a world that often seemed devoid of meaning.