The Representation of Political Repressions in Public History through the Lens of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales

This study examines the role of literary fiction about Gulag in shaping historical memory of the Soviet political repressions. At its centre are Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, analysed as a distinctive instrument of public history. The study operates across three interrelated levels of analysis. The first chapter addresses the theoretical foundations of the research: it examines the concepts of public history and memory studies, as well as the evolution of commemorative policy toward the repressions from the Stalinist period through to the 2010s. The second chapter offers a comparative analysis of the narrative strategies of Gulag prose — Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg, and Dombrovsky — and establishes the exceptional position of Shalamov, whose "new prose" refuses the narrative of endurance and consolation, preserving traumatic experience in its unresolved form. The third chapter examines the contemporary state of public memory of the repressions: the liquidation of the Gulag History Museum and the Memorial society, the displacement of memory into the digital environment, and the conflict between Shalamov's narrative and official historical policy. The study demonstrates that the structural incompatibility of Shalamov's testimony with conciliatory interpretations of the past renders it simultaneously the most vulnerable and the most indispensable resource of public history under conditions of contemporary Russia.