Comparative content analysis of the memoirs of the repressed: gender aspect

One of the most important sources on the history of repression in the USSR is the memoirs of GULAG prisoners. The relevance of this kind of historical materials is due to the fact that memories are supplemented by dry and sometimes incomplete data from official sources, for example, investigation documents.   

         Of particular interest among other materials are collections of memoirs of the repressed, the largest of which is the database "Memories of the Gulag and their authors" ^[15] compiled by the Sakharov Center. The collection of memoirs includes memoirs of such famous people as Varlam Shalamov, Pyotr Velyaminov, Georgy Zhzhenov, Evgenia Ginzburg, Nina Hagen-Thorn and others. At the time of writing, the resource contains 1679 texts, while the collection is regularly updated.

At the previous stage of the study, on the basis of brief references published for each of the authors of memories of the GULAG on the above-mentioned resource, the author built and filled in a biographical database, on the basis of which a comparative analysis of the social characteristics of the repressed was carried out ^[18], including in the gender aspect. The main question that the author poses now is to determine whether the perception and translation on the pages of memoirs of the camp stage of life of male and female prisoners differed, and if so, how and why?

Memoirs are the most difficult type of sources of personal origin to analyze due to the many nuances that the researcher has to take into account when working with them. N.L. Pushkareva writes that "the obvious "suspicion" of researchers towards such sources of personal origin as memoirs, memoirs, memoirs was expressed in the fact that legal, regulatory, statistical documents created chronologically simultaneously with the events described in the memoirs have always been preferred as more objective and necessary for a scientist" ^{[39, p. 216]}. Nevertheless, since the 1970s, there has been an increase in the interest of researchers in memoir sources associated with the spread of memoir literature, the beginning of the formation of complexes of memoir sources and the development of computer research methods that allow processing large arrays of texts.

One of the first works on the history of Russian memoiristics is A.G. Tartakovsky's monograph "1812 and Russian memoiristics", published in 1983 ^[43]. The author notes the growing relevance of the study of memoirs "in the light of the increased role of memoirs, as well as other "documentary" genres, in the spiritual life of our era in recent decades" ^{[43, p. 9]}. In addition, he notes that "it seems certain that in a broad historical perspective, the development of the heritage of the Russian memoir culture of past eras can provide a lot of useful for a scientifically based understanding of its current state" ^{[43, p. 10]}. According to Tartakovsky, the memoir genre "always acts as a phenomenon not only of the artistic, but of the spiritual culture of society as a whole, as a result of the method of spiritual development of reality by a person arising at a certain historical stage" ^{[43, p. 15]}.

Even more difficult is the analysis of complexes or thematic collections of memoirs and the question facing researchers in this regard, the possibility of studying memories as mass sources. Despite the fact that there is no consensus among historians about the mass nature of memoirs, a number of researchers support this point of view and hold the opinion that thematic complexes of memoirs are mass sources. Let us note, for example, the work of L.A. Kolesnikova "Historical and revolutionary memoiristics (1917-1935) as a mass source on the history of Russian revolutions (quantitative analysis methodology)" ^[28][29], which studies a collection of memoirs on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, created in the 20-30s of the XX century. The author believes that the studied collection of texts belongs to mass sources and can be analyzed using quantitative methods of analysis.

The development of quantitative methods of processing and analyzing historical sources really makes it possible to neutralize the "suspicion" of historians towards memories and extract valuable objective evidence about the period, phenomenon or historical personality from memoirs and memoir collections. Modern software provides new opportunities for analysis, including large collections of memoirs. One of the key methods of working with memoir collections is content analysis, which will be discussed below.

The first experience of content-analytical research of memoirs using quantitative methods is the book by M.A. Davydov "His Majesty's Opposition" ^[20] and the article "Contemporaries through the eyes of A.P. Ermolov" ^[21]. Studying the worldview and character of Ermolov, his attitude to events, to himself and to his contemporaries, the author systematizes the information contained in the source with the help of content analysis. The author considers the advantage of the source to be that "... complexes of letters, numbering dozens of correspondence over a number of years" are being studied ^{[20, p. 5]}.

         In recent years, the emergence of new computer programs for conducting content analysis has aroused interest in research in the field of content analysis, including on the basis of voluminous collections of memoirs. For example, the study of I.V. Grebenchenko ^[19] aims to study the interaction of the members of the "Council of the Main" and their interpersonal relations on the basis of the extensive memoir heritage of the founders of the Russian cosmonautics. The results of the content analysis of the memoirs of the members of the "Council of the Main" allow us to identify the degree of their interaction with each other, as well as to determine the role of the communicative factor in this process.

         The work of K.A. Zingis is closer to the topic of this study, as it concerns the difficult fate of GULAG prisoners. As part of his research ^[24], K.A. Zingis aims to compare the results of content analysis of the camp press (the newspaper "New Solovki" ^[25]) and the memoirs of prisoners of the Solovetsky camp. Much attention is paid to the underestimated role of memoirs in the study of such a difficult period in the history of our country. In addition, the successful application of content analysis is noted in order to systematize heterogeneous memoir material for "comprehensive study and identification of the fundamental factors of prisoners' life" ^{[25, p. 131]}.

Note, however, that the above-mentioned content-analytical studies do not consider the gender aspect, that is, memoirs are studied without taking into account the gender characteristics of their authors, and, accordingly, historians do not set themselves the task of investigating the peculiarities of perception of the surrounding reality in this aspect.

         It should be noted that this direction has been gaining popularity among researchers since the second half of the 2000s. The main generalizing work on this issue is N.L. Pushkareva's monograph "Gender theory and Historical Knowledge" ^[38]. According to N.L. Pushkareva, "... gender studies have become a well-known direction of the development of humanitarian knowledge" ^{[38, p. 5]}.

         N.L. Pushkareva also considers the theory of "genderlects", that is, the differentiation of male and female languages, as well as their features ^[37]. She notes that "personal stories told more logically and consistently than actually lived lives in the text of the autobiographies of most women looked more emotionally saturated than similar and contemporary male autobiographies" ^{[37, p. 32]}.

Analyzing in another work ^[39] the features of "female" and "male" memory, the author comes to the conclusion that "female memory turned out to be both more complete and more accurate, more saturated with details" ^{[39, p. 222]} than male. Among other important aspects of the study of memories, N.L. Pushkareva draws attention to the possibility of combining separate male and female autobiographical narratives to study the perception of past events, but notes that in this case it is the features of common or "collective" memory, "a set of similar individual episodes of life" that will come to the fore ^{[39, p. 225]}, which "after the passage of time were firmly imprinted in the memory" ^{[39, p. 225]}.

A brief review of historiography shows that large collections of prisoners' memoirs rarely become a full-fledged source for content analysis and gender studies. Previously, the author has already investigated the full-text database of memoirs of female prisoners ^[17], which confirms the conclusion about the effectiveness of the content analysis method when working with heterogeneous mass sources, which include memories.  At this stage of the research, the author expands the source base with "male" texts and sets the task of comparing the gender aspects of perception and translation of experience in memories based on the collection of memories of GULAG prisoners.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The type of source we are working with has necessitated the use of a wide range of methodological tools for its processing and analysis. It is a set of methods that allows for a correct analysis of the texts of memoirs, as well as to give a balanced interpretation of the results of the study.

         First of all, it is necessary to pay attention to the volume of sources – the study uses more than 700 texts of memoirs, which in total amount to more than 95 thousand pages. Of course, traditional research methods do not allow processing the entire complex of selected sources in aggregate and seem ineffective in working with extensive collections of memoirs.

         To solve the problem of complex analysis of a collection of memoirs, only quantitative methods allow, among which content analysis seems to be the most suitable for analyzing texts. At the stage of content analysis, the texts of the memoirs were uploaded to the MAXQDA program, a specialized software of the German company VERBI Software GmbH, offering researchers ample opportunities to analyze qualitative data using quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods, primarily content analysis. Then a dictionary of the frequency of occurrence of individual words was compiled, and a system of categories and indicators was developed on its basis.

Table 1.

System of categories and indicators

As can be seen from the table above, the indicators for most categories were not whole words, but roots or parts of words, which is typical for lexical search and is marked in the table with the symbols "*". The search condition for only whole words was set only for the categories "family" and "love" due to the fact that if such a condition is not set, a large number of words that do not belong to this category appear in the lexical search.

All the texts of memories were indexed based on this system of categories and indicators in the MAXQDA program, as a result of which 808582 fragments (in our case, sentences) of the text were marked up. The total volume of the full-text database was 1.32 GB.

Due to the significant volume of the materials studied, it was decided to conduct a content analysis not of the entire source database simultaneously, but by dividing it into sufficiently large semantic groups. In addition, this approach expands research opportunities, as an element of comparison is added to the study: it becomes possible to trace similarities and differences between these groups, as well as analyze the probable causes of these differences.

The texts were divided into "female" and "male", that is, referring to female authors and male authors. Also, some characteristics (attributes) were assigned to the texts of memoirs of prisoners in the MAXQDA program using the variable editor: the occupation of the prisoners, their age at the time of arrest, as well as the time they served in prison. Within these large semantic groups, smaller subgroups were identified. For example, in the group "Occupation" there are subgroups "Exact Sciences", "Medicine", "Teaching", "Art", and others. In total, 378 documents out of 758 were combined into the "Occupation" group, which is 49% of all documents. The authors of the remaining documents either did not indicate their occupation, or their professions and occupations did not fit into the chosen classification (for example, "nun", "princess", "stove maker").  

In the group "Age at the time of arrest" 9 subgroups were allocated: 15-19 years, 20-24 years, 25-29 years, 30-34 years, 35-39 years, 40-44 years, 45-49 years, 50-54 years, 55-59 years. They included 97% of all documents, that is, 737 memoirs. Information about the date of birth or the date of arrest of the authors of the remaining 3% of the documents is unknown, so they find themselves outside this group.

The last group – "Sentence" – allowed us to distinguish the following subgroups: 10 years of ITL, 5 years of ITL, 8 years of ITL, 3 years of ITL, 25 years of ITL, 7 years of ITL, 6 years of ITL, 15 years of ITL. In total, 61% of the documents were included in the group.

The division of documents into subgroups is necessary for several reasons. Firstly, a significant volume of memoir texts makes it almost impossible to work in the MAXQDA program - it is not designed for such volumes of text, and each request to build the frequencies of joint occurrence of categories when analyzing the database entirely takes from 5 to 24 hours. When divided into subgroups, this problem is not so acute - it takes from 5 to 45 minutes for the program to build occurrence tables, depending on the volume of the subgroup and the number of documents included in it.

Secondly, the division into subgroups in some cases makes it possible to identify the peculiarities of the perception of the camp stage of prisoners' life depending on their personal characteristics, as well as to compare the results obtained by subgroups in the gender aspect.

Thirdly, conducting content analysis in subgroups allows us to test the hypothesis of how exactly the number of documents included in the group, the number of marked fragments in the group, as well as the volume of text affect the results of content analysis. The main hypothesis is that the smaller the group, the more clearly individual features of perception and translation of the experience of camp life appear in it according to the results of content analysis, that is, the more clearly the unique perception of the authors is seen against the background of common mass features.

         The studied collection of sources and the method of content analysis allows us to identify common features of the perception of camps by representatives of a single community of people, or the so-called "common, "recollected" memory (similar episodes of biographies of representatives of the same social stratum, generation, etc.)" ^{[39, p. 225]}.

RESEARCH RESULTS

         One of the main questions facing us in this study is the question – is the perception of the camp stage of life different between men and women? And if it is different, then what exactly and for what reason?

         The task of comparing the results of content analysis of memoirs of male and female prisoners can be carried out correctly for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sources that were used in the content analysis are homogeneous - both the documents of women and the documents of men were presented exclusively with texts of memoirs, and other documentary sources of personal origin of the camp period (for example, diaries or interviews) were not used at this stage of the study. Of course, memories are an unstructured form of fixing thoughts, but the content analysis technique allows you to formalize the study of unstructured texts and translate them into a quantitative plane, which means that it is possible to make a correct comparison.

         Secondly, both women and men mainly wrote about twelve major topics – life, work, power, war, friendship, family, children, love, religion, art, death, prison. Based on these topics, a system of categories and indicators was formed, which was used both in the content analysis of memoirs of male prisoners and in the content analysis of memoirs of female prisoners. This ensures the unity of the methodology of working with sources, which, in turn, allows for a correct interpretation of the similarities and differences in the results of the analysis of the frequency of occurrence of semantic categories in male and female subgroups.

         Thirdly, the division of documents into the same subgroups among both women and men allows for a more subtle comparison in smaller groups, when the common features do not overlap the individual features of the perception of camps by representatives of certain professions, age groups or groups of prisoners sentenced to the same terms of serving their sentences.

         Fourth, one of the stages of this study, the results of which are given in the article ^[18], namely, the creation of a database and a description of the social portrait of prisoners, allows us to talk about the similarity of the individual traits of the authors whose memoirs became the source of this work. A significant part of them, of course, were literate, and even more – educated, so in their memoirs they expressed the point of view of a single social group. Their texts are full of emotions, personal perception of camp existence and the hardships that they encountered on this difficult path, but their view of many things and phenomena of camp life was similar for these people.

Fifthly, the previous paragraph causes another important similarity between male and female prisoners - the purpose of writing memoirs. First of all, the former GULAG prisoners sought to record in detail the hardships that happened to them, so that future generations would not allow such a tragedy – this thought runs like a red thread through both "male" and "female" texts. Thus, N.I. Hagen-Thorn writes: "I ask you to believe: I keep records as a historical document for future generations, there are no embellishments or distortions in them. This is not propaganda, not fiction, this is a record of the experience, this is an observer's attempt to accurately record what he saw. The way we, ethnographers, are used to during field work" ^[16].  In turn, A. Zhigulin notes that he is "the last poet of Stalin's Kolyma": "If I don't tell, no one will tell. If I don't write, no one will write anymore" ^[23].

         Comparing the frequency of occurrence of categories in the texts of men and women allows us to identify a number of common trends, as well as differences in the perception and translation of the camp stage of life.

Fig. 1. Frequency of occurrence of categories in the texts of female prisoners

Fig. 2. Frequency of occurrence of categories in the texts of male prisoners

         First of all, it can be noted that the categories of "life", "work" and "power" are most often found in the texts of both men and women. This, of course, is due to the fact that the issues of daily survival in the camps were the most important for the authors and therefore vividly reflected on the pages of memories. For example, M. Maksimovich, talking about the variety of camp work, writes: "What kind of hard labor existed in my time? What and how did we, the great "political criminals", thrown into this infernal meat grinder for nothing, for nothing?" ^[32]. In addition, talking about the working conditions in the camps, the author notes that refusing to work will lead to "exhaustion and certain death, everyone understood this, even beginners. Yes, that's what Soviet hard labor is designed for..." ^[32]. "Barracks, bunks... Work is already only behind the zone, but, in general, all days are the same - work, feeding, checking, sleeping and waiting, waiting... The work was, of course, very hard, and there was even less strength. But the norm must be fulfilled" ^[13] - Nina writes about labor in the camp Vaishvillene.

         However, consideration of these categories allows us to see some differences in memories. If in men's texts these categories occur in approximately equal proportions, then the absolute leader in occurrence in women's texts is precisely the category of "everyday life". Women, by nature more accustomed to comfort and coziness, were struck first of all by the conditions in which they were destined to spend a significant part of their lives. The constant cold, the need to huddle in the same barracks with many other prisoners, the inability to observe basic hygiene rules, hunger and illness – all this is most vividly reflected in women's texts.

The appalling living conditions in the camp left an indelible impression on the souls of female prisoners and brought a lot of suffering, the memories of which were on the pages of memoirs. According to V.M. Mukhina-Petrinskaya, the prisoners "suffered greatly from the meager prison rations" ^[35], and G.I. Serebryakova noted that "the slimy, cold black corridor of the prison, smelling of mold and ammonia, built in Catherine's time, was another suffering for sight, smell and humiliated human dignity" ^[41].

Women, regardless of age, experienced humiliation and suffered from camp life. For example, E.N. Taratuta tells about the oppressive feeling of loneliness in the camp: "Often, suffering from loneliness, she stood somewhere between the barracks (walking from barracks to barracks was not encouraged) or she went to a place where it was possible to communicate - to an individual kitchen, where it was allowed to boil tea sent from home, to the library - to talk to someone" ^{[42, p. 79]}.

In turn, men, apparently, were much more concerned about working conditions. It was men who were most often sent to unbearable, hard labor, it was they who were required to work out and it was they who were subjected to constant coercion to work, as well as the most terrible penalties for ineffective work.

According to many male prisoners, logging was the hardest work: "Such logging work is one of the oldest and hardest in the camp life of Kolyma. They worked in any weather, for 12-14 hours a day, the norms are high: several cubic meters per prisoner. Cut off, saw the forest, choose the size and scale, and then carry 3-4 km on your own shoulders. Few people have endured this hellish work for a long time" ^[6]. Reflecting on the working conditions, the authors note that in many camps, the bosses did not care about the efficiency of labor: "At the excavation pits, the work was carried out using the most grandfather-like methods, wheelbarrows were rolled sixty meters along a narrow boardwalk, ladders. To get a daily ration of food, it is necessary to develop, load, take to the ground, level at least eight cubic meters of land. In the evenings, if they had enough strength, they remembered the "Nekrasov Railway..." ^[1].

         Another general trend can be considered the average occurrence of the category "death". Both men and women mention death with the same relative frequency – in the list of categories ranked by the number of mentions, "death" is in 7th place, and accounts for 5-6% of all marked elements of texts whose authors are both men and women. Death was an integral companion of the camps – every now and then news came of executions, death from hunger and disease, death at hard labor. The authors draw readers' attention to the fact that the Soviet government actually had the right to dispose of the lives (and, most importantly, the death) of people – "in the freest country in the world, where millions of innocent citizens rotted in prisons, in penal servitude, where hundreds of thousands were killed annually, no one dared himself, on his own the will to die. Murder has become a monopoly of the state, like a monopoly on vodka, tobacco and bread..." ^[4]. And the prisoners learned to perceive death as a given, an ordinary event, which was reflected in their memories.