page_title: Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Shows existing lines, lines with second track planned/newly in service, new lines built/nearing completion, electrified lines, and lines being electrified. Does not cover USSR east of Novosibirsk/Alma-Ata. Includes notes and 4 regional insets "10763." Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as a raster image.
context_page_description: Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, a Soviet Engineer and eventual Head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946. Under the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mochulsky oversaw the construction of a 500 km-long rail line from the Pechorlag camps, bordering the Arctic Circle, to central Russia, with a goal to connect "remote Pechora Camps to the outside world". The book was published posthumously by the Oxford University Press in 2011. It is introduced as well as translated and edited by sociology scholar, Deborah A. Kaple.
context_section_description: Mochulsky attended school in Minsk during the 1930s, before graduating as an Engineer from the Moscow-based Railroad Transport Engineering Institute in 1940. Within the same year, 22 year old Mochulsky was Ordered by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to work as a foreman at a Gulag camp, known as Pechorlag. Kaple describes Pechorlag as being within the Komi ASSR, "northeast of St.Petersburg and west of the Ural Mountains".  Mochulsky's primary task was to manage the construction of a 500 km railway line over Russia's permafrost, and into urban USSR zones.
  The memoir captures Mochulsky's anecdotes and personal encounters as camp boss, as well as the experiences of camp employees and prisoners. Mochulsky makes reference throughout the text on his ongoing relationship with the USSR regime; where he once offered ardent Soviet support in 1940, Mochulsky began questioning the intents and purposes of the Soviet government after his time at the Gulag ended in 1946.
caption: USSR Map (1950) detailing the network of railroads connecting desolate regions to central Moscow (Russian: Moskva)
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