Review: Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir

Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of memoirist Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, ‎Deborah Kaple says in some introductory material here: "Not until nearly the end of my year in Moscow did he tell me about his Gulag memoir. He had written the memoir after he had retired from the USSR Foreign Ministry in 1988. His family says that he often spoke about the Gulag and his work there because the experience deeply troubled him all his life." Thus during Glasnost and Gorbachev, Mochulsky looked back over the decades and described his experiences as one of the low-level Gulag functionaries. Is it self-serving and selective? Maybe, probably, yet still fascinating and a rarity among Gulag memoirs. Kaple reports in afterword on the research she did including comparison to prisoner memoirs that failed to find any material contradiction to the recollections here. The recollections point to running the camp had much of the same restrictions and privations suffered by those imprisoned. Sidelined from a promising mining career out of university, Mochulsky was dropped off north Arctic Circle with little supplies and many people to build a railway undersupplied and under threat. His ways to enable that with POWs, political prisoners, and common criminals is fascinating about the day-to-day operations while Mochulsky does not go very far into the lack of justice, as if that needed underscoring.

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