Tamara Petkevich: Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg. Foreword by Joshua Rubenstein. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. XIV, 481 S. ISBN: 978-0-87580-428-6

Tamara Petkevich: Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg. Foreword by Joshua Rubenstein. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. XIV, 481 S. ISBN: 978-0-87580-428-6.

Nearly a century ago the very first testimonies on Soviet camp life have been published outside of (Soviet) Russia. And in the 21st Century the Gulag memoir still seems to be a matter of interest beyond scholarship. Just in 2010 the reprint of Tamara Petkevich’s memoirs became available for the English-speaking audience.

Born in Petrograd in 1920 Tamara Vladimirovna Petkevich lived her early years at ease. Then her father was arrested in 1937. During her various visits to the transit prison, where she was sleuthing her father’s destiny in the Stalinist bureaucracy, she met her first husband Eric who also was in search of his father. When Eric and his mother were deported, Petkevich decided to follow him to Frunze in Central Asia. There she was imprisoned and forced to pass several labour camps, first in Kirghizia and then in the Komi Republic. The acquaintance with Doctor Filipp Bakharev saved her from physical breakdown but brought her into dependence. In between her work at several infirmaries and the occasional journeys with the travelling theatre she gave birth to her son with Bakharev. Eventually he took the child with him and seven years of camp imprisonment were followed by seven years of banishment, wandering in search for her child, her only surviving sister, and a place to live.

“Memoir of a Gulag Actress” is the compilation of Petkevichs two volume memoirs, published originally in Russia in the early 1990s. Ten years later a German edition was released. After “Zhizn’ – sapožok neparnyj” (“Life Is an Unpaired Boot”) and “Na fone zvezd i stracha” (“In the Face of the Stars and the Fear”) and the German edition “Die Liebe gab mir Hoffnung” (“Love gave me Hope”), Petkevich’s memoir has been published under its fourth title. The Translator’s decision for the “Gulag Actress” surely had literary as well as commercial reasons. Tough, mounting five decades of Soviet life experiences aggravated by terror, imprisonment and exile, this book is neither focussing on the camps nor on ‘acting’ in a narrower sense.

On the one hand it unfolds an emotional progress. Describing life in exile Petkevich extensively deals with her feelings towards her husband, the mother-in-law or her general emotional incertitude. This psychological ostentation even extends to prison, camp or interrogation. There it reveals to the reader the emotional abyss of physical and mental incarceration. But where Solzhenizyn led us through the torture chambers, cynically showcasing the crossroads of terror, Petkevich depicts different stadiums of self-encouragement and collapse, though uncovering perpetrators as human beings.

On the other hand it assembles dozens of biographical short stories, hearsay and anecdotes. For example did she burst into a conversation of former OGPU-officials and promptly adopted their accounts in her book. In this way every one of Petkevich’s encounters contributed to her book, both broadening and breaking up her narration. However, this emotional variety tends to exhaust even the most attentive reader.

The literary achievement of “Memoir of a Gulag Actress” is rooted in the composition of these two subjects. The author creates an emotional framework of herself and depicts dozens of experiences at the same time. Yet as a matter of scholarly interest this diversity is problematic.

Petkevich gave us neither any bibliographical reference nor explanations about the exact time this book was written down. The amount of additional information (like on her father’s destiny in the camps) implies that the book was a long-term project; she probably started in the late Brezhnev era. Additionally both her sentimental history and the biographical mosaic are hardly satisfying research interests in the traditional sense. She surely gives insights into rarely attended topics of Gulag history: such as working conditions in camp infirmary structures and cultural brigades. Yet these accounts occur every now and then. Especially the author’s accounts on camp theatres hardly justify the title of the book. The interior views are taking precedence over the camp world. This emotive retrospective is less based on enquiries than on pure memory, primarily unearthing events of strong emotional impressions. Thus the whole account appears to be erratic.

Though, in the framework of Gulag memoir literature, this book definitely stands out. One has to agree with Joshua Rubenstein acknowledging in his foreword that “her story relates how Stalinism, whether you were a prisoner or ‘at liberty’, subverted human relations”. Moreover the psychological details concerning herself are astonishing. The author provides her history of emotivity. She reveals a diverging picture of everyday life in Stalinism, in the camps and in exile, focussing on her insights and her friends’ destinies rather than on political ideas or on the historical context.

Primarily “Memoir of a Gulag Actress” contributes to our interests in memoir writing as self-therapy: how could one, after all those tragedies, still reach an emotional consensus with oneself? In addition this book holds the capacity of inspiring research interests in all directions. One example is Petkevich’s battle for her child’s custody which raises interesting questions on social behaviour in a late Stalinist society. Therefore the book’s contribution lies in its diversity and here less in a documentary sense, but rather in a sense of stimulating research interests on a broader scale.

Maximilian Immo Rebitschek, Jena