Sonic Terror: Music, Murder, and Migration in the USSR

• Main Author: Birch, Alexandra
• Other Authors: Edgar, Adrienne
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2024
• Subjects: Russian history; Holocaust studies; Music; Gulag; Holocaust; Kazakhstan; Sound; Soviet; Kolyma; Pivot; Solovetsky; White Sea; saami; Solovetsky Islands
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65h2r1nq; https://escholarship.org/content/qt65h2r1nq/qt65h2r1nq.pdf

The history of the Soviet Union can be defined by periods of atrocity, genocide, and warfare. The Soviet Gulag, the Holocaust, and the civilian and military engagement in World War Two produced unfathomable mass death in sites across the entire USSR for a half-century. To gain an instant, immersive, and humanizing understanding of these atrocities, this dissertation presents eight case studies of music and sound from representative sites or repressed composers. Within each case study, the overlaps between Nazi and Soviet violence clarify the colonial designs of these Twentieth-Century empires where Imperial models of subjugation and conquest continued in nominally anti-Imperial regimes. Music prioritizes the experiences of repressed individuals and functions as an alternate ego document, narrating a dangerous and erased history. Sound and recordings of soundscapes creates a new archive of knowledge, immersing historians in sites as they existed rather than as documented in written documents by perpetrators. To pivot from Imperial Russia to the USSR, I begin with a study of the indigenous Saami people, their sonic knowledge and representation of space, and the first Gulag on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. An indigenous reconception of this space reveals the impacts of the Gulag on the wider regions in which they were situated, and the intersecting impacts of the Gulag and the Third Reich on indigenous communities. In Chapter 2, I discuss the infamous Gulag of the Siberian Far East – Kolyma – and the violin concerto of Vsevolod Zaderatsky I recovered from his family. In Chapter 3, I look again at sound to understand the vast space of the Gulag in Kazakhstan, an extractive enterprise run by the same Soviet companies who originated at Kolyma. Chapters 4,5, and 6 all directly address the Second World War including the fate of Soviet evacuees and those who survived the Holocaust within the Soviet Gulag, the complicated memory and commemoration of clandestine fighters (Partisans) and Soviet POWs, the blockade ...