ABSTRACT

Many documents produced by the Soviet authorities echo deportees' testimonies – from a very different point of view and in very different terms. They describe a world of misery and total shortage, where stores remained empty for several weeks, collective farms paid their members just 100 g of flour for an entire day's work, and logging enterprises did not complete production plans in the winter because of a lack of shoes and warm clothes among the workers. Behind the deportees' rudimentary and apparently self-sufficient existence emerges a world of relationships, exchanges, and circulations. As time passed, these came to play an increasingly important role in the lives of deportees, especially following Stalin's death in 1953, when new post-Stalinist socio-economic policies began to bring some improvements in their living. The simplicity and the rarity of the everyday objects of exile contrast with the multiplicity of their meanings and functions.