"The language of [not] freedom"

The exhibition invites you to think about what it means to use words from the world of the Gulag today, how they affect our speech and our lives.

The exhibition is based on the camp vocabulary, which the former GULAG prisoner Leonid Gorodin had been compiling for twenty years. Gorodin’s work was highly appreciated by linguists and philologists, including D.S.Likhachev, but was never published during the author’s lifetime. In 2021, the Museum of the History of the Gulag and the Memory Fund published a dictionary in the author’s edition.

In addition to words, the exhibition will feature items from the collection of the Museum of the History of the Gulag: personal belongings, household items and tools of prisoners’ labor, as well as a typewritten version of the dictionary of Leonid Gorodin of the 1960s.

“Gorodin’s dictionary allows us to start a discussion about the phenomenon of camp vocabulary as an important fact of culture, one of the sources of the formation of the modern spoken Russian language,” says Roman Romanov, director of the Museum of the History of the Gulag.

“Criminal jargon began to form in the conditions of the tsarist penal servitude, but it became widespread because of the GULAG, the system of forced labor camps that existed in the USSR. From 1930 to 1956, about 20 million people passed through camps, colonies and prisons. During these 27 years, politically motivated prisoners existed side by side with the underworld in a special linguistic environment, of which the camp jargon was an integral part. Once released, the former prisoners continued to use words and expressions of the camp vocabulary in their speech, some of which eventually became the norm of the spoken Russian language. So in our speech there were the words "tusovka", "work hard", "sharashka", "kemarit" and many others, "Romanov notes.

The exhibition will run until May 10, 2021 and is available with an entrance ticket to the Museum.

For reference:

Leonid Moiseevich Gorodin (1907-1994) lived in Kiev, worked as a newspaper correspondent. The first time he was arrested in 1928 for distributing the "will of Lenin". As a participant in the "Trotskyist organization" fabricated by investigators, he was convicted under Article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (anti-Soviet agitation) and sent into exile for 3 years.

In 1936, Gorodin was arrested again on charges of counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities and sentenced to 5 years in labor camps. He served his punishment in the Ukhta-Pechora ITL, then in the Vorkuta camp.

In 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree "On the direction of especially dangerous state criminals after serving their sentences in exile to a settlement in remote areas of the USSR." Re-arrests began of all political prisoners who have already served their sentences and left the camps. In February 1950, L. M. Gorodin, who at that time was living in Vorkuta, was arrested again in the 1936 case as a Trotskyist. A special meeting at the USSR Ministry of State Security sentenced him to exile to a settlement in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

In 1954, after almost 30 years of exile and camps, Leonid Gorodin was released and after 4 years he was able to leave Vorkuta and leave with his family to Sverdlovsk. Working as a correspondent for the Uralsky Rabochiy newspaper, he begins to write a series of stories about life in the camp called "One-Stage". Later he wrote: “Since in these stories many camp words were used, which were not always clear to the reader, I made a small dictionary. This is how my lexicographical work began, which stretched out over two decades and filled my whole life with meaning. "

Understanding the origin of some words, Leonid Moiseevich studied linguistic literature, worked in libraries in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa. Realizing the need for consultations of writers and writers, he began a correspondence with A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Kaverin, L. Uspensky. Invaluable assistance in the linguistic work on the Dictionary was provided by the philologist, associate professor of the Chelyabinsk University V.I. Zhitnikov. The dictionary was composed of 4 typed volumes and, on the recommendation of Academician D.S.Likhachev, was accepted for storage and study at the Institute of the Russian Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The Museum of the History of the GULAG is a center for the study, reflection and open discussion of the history of mass repressions in the USSR. The mission of the Museum is to tell about mass repressions and thereby encourage reflection on human rights and freedoms.

The museum collects and studies materials from state and family archives; memories of the participants in the events and their personal belongings; items found at the locations of the camps. The permanent exhibition of the Museum shows the stages of the formation of the punitive system in 1918-1956. and its influence on the fate of individuals; temporary exhibitions allow you to plunge into individual episodes of history and comprehensively consider the phenomenon of mass repressions.

Educational programs and publications of the Museum help to understand complex historical events, performances and creative events - to get an emotional experience of perceiving a topic, discussions - to form a personal attitude towards mass repressions. The museum offers to support victims of mass repression, learn the history of their families and share knowledge, preserving the memory for future generations.

The Memory Fund was established in 2016 as part of the implementation of the Concept of State Policy on Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression, approved by the Government of the Russian Federation on August 15, 2015. The fund accumulates private and corporate donations to support educational and educational programs, research projects and events aimed at perpetuating the memory of victims of repression. The first project of the Memory Fund was the erection of the first nationwide monument to victims of mass repressions "The Wall of Sorrow". The monument was opened in Moscow at the intersection of Akademika Sakharov Avenue and the Garden Ring on October 30, 2017 in accordance with the decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated 09.30.2015 No. 487 "On the construction of a memorial to the victims of political repression."