Complex reflections on oppression

Soviet-born artists take on legacy of gulags

January 07, 2007|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

Millions of people were imprisoned in the Soviet Union's forced-labor camps, known collectively as the gulag. Many of them died in the camps, where criminals and others perceived as a threat to the government were banished between 1918 and 1960. One such threat was Ivan Burylov , a beekeeper who in 1949 wrote the Russian word for "comedy" across his voting ballot. He was sentenced to eight years of hard labor.

Svetlana Boym cites Burylov's story in her catalog for "Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art," an exhibition at the Boston University Art Gallery. Years after Alexander Solzhenitsyn's legendary memoir "The Gulag Archipelago" was published, Boym, a professor of Slavic language and literature at Harvard, frames the gulag as the national equivalent of a terrible family secret, even generations on.

She has invited several contemporary artists to contemplate the gulag and its legacy. The resulting show, both provocative and problematic, runs in tandem with a traveling educational exhibition presented by the National Park Service and several other organizations, "GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom," which is on view across the street at BU's 808 Gallery. Lingering questions about the gulag can be seen in an apparent discrepancy between the two exhibits: While the website for the "GULAG" show states that "some 18 million passed through the prisons and camps" and "an unknown number well into the millions died," Boym writes in the "Territories" catalog of "the Gulag zone, where about 18 million perished."

Boym portrays the gulag as rife with contradictions. "It was represented as paradise and hell, an ideal socialist construction site and a camp of slave labor," she writes. The artists in "Territories of Terror" wrestle with the gulag's contradictions or , more often , those of the Soviet state. Indeed, not much of the work specifically addresses the gulag.