Can the Gulag Be Fun?: Video Games Remediate Soviet Camp Literature

• In Event: Victims, Complicity, and Games in Gulag and Prison Culture

Abstract

Gulag literature has long offered a context for writers to explore the traumatic legacies of political violence and the excesses of Soviet power. Many of the most famous writers of Gulag literature, including figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, were themselves once incarcerated in gulag camps. Their texts, even when fictional, demonstrated these writers’ firsthand knowledge of camp social structures, labor conditions, and linguistic paradigms, and offered models for how the gulag would enter and become ossified in global cultural imaginaries. But what happens when the aesthetic paradigms of gulag literature are remediated by video games that, for economic and cultural reasons, place little emphasis on the gulag as a site of personal and historical trauma? What happens when the gulag becomes fun? This paper explores how two video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Gulag (2025), remediate Soviet gulag literature, importing the aesthetic and linguistic paradigms of gulag writing to a new medium for a radically different purpose. The relationship between video games and literature expands our understanding of the centrality of form in the production of politics, and it establishes a paradoxical, yet ultimately logical throughline from socialist literature to neoliberal digital media.

Author

• Spencer Small, U of Pennsylvania