'A Nightmare Parallel World': Memoirs of a Chekist-doctor in the Gulag?

• In Event: The Doctor as Hero in Soviet and Russian Literature and Cinema

Abstract

Nikolai Glazov was a physician and medical bureaucrat sentenced in 1936 to five years in the Gulag for counterrevolutionary activity. His service in the OGPU in the early 1930s enabled him to relate to camp commandants and facilitated his survival; he died in 1989. Reading his glasnost-era Gulag memoir against the grain, this paper asks how far the categories of victim and perpetrator help us to understand his experience.

Author

• Dan D.B. Healey, U of Oxford (UK)