The Gulag Calls

My great-grandfather with my great-grandmother, camera right, some time in the 1940's.

There he is, the Old Tulek, my great-grandfather. Poised elegantly between good and bad, right and wrong. He was indeed a player. A gangster. A statesman. An engineer. A smuggler. A lover. Ready to take advantage of anyone who would dare to trust him, and vanquish anyone who would tempt to beat him.

He's not someone you'd want to do business with, nor someone you'd introduce your wife to. If he knew your secret, he'd own you. But, he is the exact type of person you'd want right next to you if you were being pushed into a heated cattle car on a train bound for the Siberian Gulag. You might not have faith in your own ability to survive, but you would have complete confidence that if one person could make it, it would be Tulek.

Why he was sent to the Gulag, no one knows. Rumors run wild. It's said he had a stash of diamonds in a bag the size of a man's fist which tempted a local KGB chief to bust him on false charges and take the diamonds. Some say it was his political involvement a Western Ukrainian splinter Republic that had been ousted by an invading Hungarian army. But the most likely story is that he messed around with one too many women, and for the sake of revenge, was ratted out as some kind of political dissident to the KGB. That's all it took in those days to try and kill a man's soul.

My interest goes far beyond anthologizing, romanticizing, or factualizing my great-grandfather and his time in the Gulag. I have always wanted to go there myself. See it. Smell it. Call it my home for awhile, too. That's why I'm in Vorkuta now, to write my own story.

Vorkuta is one hundred miles north of the arctic circle situated on flat tundra plains. It began as a prison town, using slave labor to extract coal during the Stalinist era. Vorkuta is no longer a prison, but still a coal town.

As a photographer and visual story-teller, I find myself in a strategically important position as next in line, to receive, interpret, and output family tales, like my great grandfather in the Gulag. However, my position is complicated by the fact that I realize some of the stories are inaccurate. This leaves me wondering why memory and perceptions change over time? And, how will I compensate for inaccuracy, and construct a personal narrative that accurately connects me to the past, while placing me firmly in the present. 

From Moscow I took a forty-eight hour train ride to Vorkuta.

 

I feel drawn to my great grandfather's story because he was presented to me as the patriarch of my family. His stories of difficulty, travail, and tragedy resonate within the lives of much of my family. In a sense, all of our stories are an extended version of his.

As traumatic events fall further back into time and lose their context, I believe that it becomes necessary to compensate for this factor by seriously dramatizing, re-working, and re-thinking the manner of representing these events. This ensures that the past will still resonate with the power by which it was initially felt.