Everyday Life and (re)Defining Identity in the Gulag: A Study Based on Autobiographical Texts Belonging to People from Bessarabia and Bukovina Deported to Kazakhstan

This project falls within the following fields of scholarly research: recent history, oral history, alltagsgeschichte and anthropology of memory. The author aims to reconstruct the image of everyday life in the Soviet Gulag, as it emerges from the memoirs and autobiographical texts of deportees from Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Hertza region. The project will try to clarify how the new living conditions and social circumstances have influenced the subjects’ socio-cultural framework of values, their vision of the world and of the self, and, conversely, in what way their prior identity helped them in their efforts to survive. Given the fact that in today’s world massive forced population displacements, accompanied by humanitarian tragedies, suspicion and culturally motivated hostility, occur systematically, it is important to identify factors that enable physical survival in extreme conditions and foster coexistence in ethno-culturally and religiously heterogeneous environments.

A full length study is available here.

A full-length study is available here.