By Julianna Parker
July 06, 2008 12:46 am
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By Julianna Parker
Transcript Staff Writer
She found the letters unintentionally.
“I stumbled on the first one almost by accident when I was working on another project,” said Emily Johnson, associate professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
The letters between a husband and wife covered a year and a half while the man was a prisoner in one of the Soviet forced labor camps.
Johnson said she was surprised that the collection was almost perfectly intact. The 432 letters were kept by the couple even after he was liberated.
“I’d never really heard of anything like this dating to the late 1930s at all,” Johnson said.
Johnson looked further, though, and realized that there is a lot of similar correspondence between family members while one was in the Soviet Gulag.
She recently received a $40,000 National Research Competition grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.
The money will go toward funding her project, “Private Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag: Intimate Communication and Family Relationships in a Time of Terror.” It will focus on the Gulag forced labor camps, which were started in 1919 and continued until the democratization of Russia.
Most people believed those imprisoned in the gulag were lost to their families forever, but Johnson said there is evidence that many families stayed together through letters.
Surprisingly, however, almost no research has been done on this correspondence, Johnson said.
So she will travel to Russia for eight months in 2009 to collect material studying the gulag mail system and the private correspondence of labor camp inmates, focusing on the Stalin Period of the Soviet Union.
Within a year of her return, she will complete policy papers from her findings that will be given to U.S. policymakers.
From the letters, Johnson hopes to learn about how family structures function under oppressive regimes.
“We regularly deal with repressive governments in our foreign policy,” she said, and her research can be used to understand relationships in those countries.
The Soviet government tried to remake individuals, changing them into an ideal, Johnson said. Recently, scholars have asserted that the Soviet government succeeded. But Johnson said the letters she’s studied show the opposite.
“I think it does really forcibly reveal to you that people are people,” she said.
Julianna Parker366-3541jparker@normantranscript.com
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