Dear reader,
Welcome back.
I would like to extend my sincerest apologies for my prolonged absence to those who have regularly engaged with my articles. A considerable amount has transpired since my last contribution, including the completion of my master’s degree. I am now pursuing my PhD, which presents both an exciting opportunity and considerable demands on my time. Nevertheless, I am committed to re-establishing a writing routine in order to revitalise this magazine.
For my first article following my return, I consulted my fiancé regarding potential topics of interest. He suggested exploring the subject of The Gulag. This piqued my curiosity, as it is a topic that remains relatively underexplored in contemporary discourse, yet it offers a profound insight into themes of crime, war, and political repression.
A Brief History
Gulags were a system of concentration and correctional labour camps, which began in the Soviet Union in 1919, but became way more popular during Stalin’s reign. The word itself is an acronym for “Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey”, or “Main Camp Administration”, a special division of the secret police and the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labour of prisoners. The majority of Gulag prisoners were innocent people locked up for a variety of political reasons, alongside criminals and recidivists. These are also the prisoners that suffered the most. On top of brutal hard labour conditions and guard despotism, they were terrorised by the criminal prisoners. Historians have estimated the total number of Gulag prisoners at 20 million, of whom 2 million did not survive their incarceration. Victims of the Soviet Gulag were not only individuals from the USSR but were also citizens of other countries, such as Hungarians, Czechoslovaks, Poles, Americans and others.
Gulags were a network of camps which were dotted around the entire territory of the USSR and consisted of almost 500 camp administrations which ran hundreds of individual camps (estimates of the total number are as high as 30,000). The prisoner’s labour was mainly used in timber production and mining on gigantic construction projects such as dams, motorways, railways and the White Sea Canal. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the numbers of prisoners considerably declined, and the Gulag was officially done in 1960. Even so, a number of labour colonies continued to exist and were used to inter Soviet dissidents and political prisoners, but in less numbers and slightly better conditions than the Gulag under Stalin’s reign.
Horrors on the Nazino Island
The Nazino Island Gulag stands as one of the most horrific episodes in Soviet history, where prisoners, sent to work on the island, turned to cannibalism to survive. In 1933, as part of Stalin’s plan to use prisoners for labour in Siberia and Kazakhstan, thousands of people, including political enemies and individuals caught without papers, were deported to Nazino Island. Due to a shortage of tools, food, and proper planning, chaos erupted. Prisoners, crammed onto barges and fed meagre rations, arrived on the island only to find no resources for survival. The flour they received was mixed with river water, leading to dysentery, and the guards allowed violence and gangs to thrive.
As conditions worsened, desperate prisoners attempted to escape, only to drown or be hunted by guards. Within a week, cannibalism began, with gangs killing fellow inmates for food. Despite reports of the dire situation, more prisoners were sent to the island without additional resources. Guards acted with cruelty, taunting prisoners with food, trading bread for sex, and shooting them for sport. Eventually, the camp was closed following an investigation, but by that time, around 2,000 people had died.
After decades of silence, the tragedy was exposed during the Soviet Union’s Glasnost era in 1988. Investigations revealed the full extent of the horrors, and the Russian Memorial Society brought the story of Nazino Island to public attention. Memorials were erected, including a wooden cross in honour of the victims, and each year, pilgrims travel to the island to remember those who perished in this forgotten chapter of Soviet history.
The Gulag and Kafka’s work
In daily experience, we do not typically perceive our body as a distinct object; rather, it operates as a lived-body or body-as-subject, facilitating our interaction with the world. When healthy and not requiring focused attention, the body and world merge fluidly, with no distinct boundary between them. As Fuchs and Schlimme (2009) emphasise, the overall experience of being-in-the-world is inseparable from how the body feels in its environment, creating a sense of belonging where the world is perceived as within reach.
This inseparability between bodily sensation and world perception reflects a unitary self-world relation. Any shift in how the body is experienced influences how the world is perceived and vice versa. Ratcliffe (2008) argues that changes in the sense of belonging emerge from this dynamic interplay, where the increasingly conspicuous body signifies a withdrawal from immersive world activity and signals a disruption in the foundational sense of belonging. Thus, the body acts as both the medium through which we engage with the world and the context within which our purposive activities are embedded.
Our sense of belonging to the world is so ingrained in daily life that we often forget we are inherently part of it, not only in relation to our surroundings but also as members of the human race. Power becomes absolute when it strips individuals from this sense of belonging, effectively turning them into nonhumans and removing them from their familiar world. This transformation shifts a person from being a living subject, actively engaged with the world, into a detached, lifeless object—marking the transition from belonging to nonbelonging.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis serves as an illustration of how an individual, once connected to the world, is dehumanised and isolated, embodying the shift from a being engaged with life to one that no longer belongs. This metaphor reflects the extreme consequence of power that alienates a person from their essential human condition.
The dehumanisation experienced on Nazino Island and in the Soviet gulags reflects a more profound disintegration of identity, belonging, and the relationship between body and world, aligning with existential and phenomenological ideas of being-in-the-world. In normal circumstances, people feel connected to their environment, existing as both subjects within a shared world and members of a collective humanity. On Nazino Island, the deportees were violently severed from these foundational elements of existence, transforming them not only into nonhumans but also into beings estranged from their very sense of self and world.
Phenomenologically, the prisoners’ experience can be understood as a collapse of what philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty call the lived-body. In everyday life, the body is not an object but the medium through which we engage with and belong to the world. On Nazino Island, however, the body was transformed from a vehicle of agency and perception into an object of survival, hunger, and suffering. This objectification, forced by extreme conditions, mirrors the existential alienation Kafka describes in Metamorphosis—a being is rendered not just physically but existentially detached, as survival reduces their world to one of violence, decay, and degradation.
This shift from subject to object is also reflected in the loss of social structures. The gulag system not only removed individuals from their physical world but also disintegrated their relational world—the sense of belonging to a community or shared humanity. The guards’ cruelty, the formation of gangs, and the pervasive violence replaced social norms with a brutal struggle for existence. Cannibalism, the ultimate violation of social and human boundaries, further exemplifies the breakdown of the body-world relationship. The very boundaries that distinguish human from animal, self from other, and subject from object dissolved, resulting in an extreme form of alienation and nonbelonging that goes beyond physical survival, reflecting a deeper loss of meaning and identity.
In this sense, Nazino Island is not just a place of physical suffering but a site where the human condition itself was undone. The prisoners, once part of a collective world and society, were cast into an existential void where they no longer belonged either to their world or to their own humanity. This echoes the philosophical idea that to belong is to be human, and the severing of that connection—to be turned into an object—represents a profound form of existential death.
Gulags can be considered Kafkaesque due to their embodiment of absurdity, alienation, and the dehumanising effects of oppressive bureaucratic systems—central themes in Kafka’s works that resonate deeply with the experiences of those imprisoned. In these brutal environments, inmates faced surreal and illogical conditions governed by arbitrary rules, mirroring the absurd situations encountered by Kafka’s protagonists. The profound isolation they experienced stripped them of their identities and severed their social ties, much like Kafka’s characters grappling with existential despair. The bureaucratic oppression of the gulag system rendered individuals powerless against an indifferent authority, treating them as mere objects of the state. This reduction of human beings to mere survival instincts, combined with a pervasive sense of futility, encapsulates the Kafkaesque vision of a nightmarish reality devoid of meaning or justice, reflecting the ultimate loss of self and belonging.
