Where We Buried the Sun: One Woman's Gulag Story

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

What a thrill it was to read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s—to discover a
Nobel-certified heir to the great, bearded, serious Russian novelists of
the 19th century, who, with Old Testament fervor, invited us to take a
vicarious part in the great political struggle of the 20th century. How
wonderful it would have been for Alla Tumanov had she been able to
publish her memoir of the Soviet penal system in the decade when she
wrote it (in the years 1975–76). Back then, it would have been a
revelation. Today, much has been published on the Gulag; few
Solzhenitsyn fans remain comfortable with their idol and his nationalist
pronouncements; and the complex and depressing state of post–Soviet
Russia threatens to extinguish our former Cold War fascination with this
enigmatic country altogether. Yet whatever the political fashion, the
story told in Where We Buried the Sun is still one that we need to know.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who emerged as a dissident only after his years of
incarceration, Alla Tumanov was one of the small minority of political
prisoners in the late Stalinist USSR who actually belonged to an
organization dedicated to opposing the Soviet regime. Like that of
Solzhenitsyn and so many other dissidents, her opposition paradoxically
grew out of a strong sense of Soviet morality and enthusiasm for the
original aims of the revolution. But hers is fundamentally not a
political memoir—after all, she and the other 15 arrested in 1950–51
for their membership in the “Union of Struggle for the Cause of the
Revolution” were all teenagers at the time, and their naive rebellion
didn’t go much further than the writing of a grandiose manifesto and
the critical underlining of certain passages in the works of Lenin and
Stalin. Tumanov’s work is much more valuable as the intimate record of
how an ordinary girl, who had hitherto led a relatively cosseted
existence as the daughter of a high-ranking Moscow bureaucrat, had to
grow up in a hurry. Her memoir is full of all sorts of details—the
fear evoked by hearing the elevator in one’s apartment building in the
middle of the night, the arcane rituals employed by prison guards to
make sure that prisoners in transit never came into contact with one
another—that make her experience authentic to the reader, even if they
add little to the overall historical record.