ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the critiques by using an exploratory case study of a profoundly unhealthy place in historical perspective: the Soviet Gulag during Stalin's reign. It focuses on a limited sample of various personal memoirs of survivors to see whether therapeutic landscapes could be usefully created and sustained within the Gulag as part of broader physical and mental survival strategies. The chapter discusses the evidence of any intersections between survival strategies and therapeutic landscapes within such an unpromising environment. It also discusses the perspective of those who directly experienced the Gulag, using memoirs. The reading of memoirs counterbalances the state's accounts of its own actions, as well as dry statistical and historical studies that ignore individual survival techniques. As a system of prisons, forced labor camps and places of exile, the Gulag was the most prominent and enduring symbol of the Stalinist terror machinery.
