Sacred Springs in the Camps

Former Gulag sites—operating theaters of terror during the Stalinist period—are scattered across western Siberia, where memories of the purges run deep. The camps represent some of the most horrific events of the Soviet past, and yet their current role is complicated. Focusing on three former prison camps, folklorist Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby untangles a surprising nexus of memory, legend, and vernacular religious practice afforded by the existence of sacred springs at these sites.
Grounded by detailed ethnography, Sacred Springs in the Camps explores how legend creates, negotiates, and challenges collective memory; how lived religious practices intersect with the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church; how politics intertwine with belief; and how the social construction of sacred places affects folk narratives, faith, and local identity. These unlikely holy waters thus reflect important facets of contemporary Russian religion, politics, and society, refracting and reframing memories of the socialist past even as they offer important lessons for the present moment.

Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby is a professor in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Village Values: Negotiating Identity, Gender, and Resistance in Contemporary Urban Russian Life-Cycle Rituals.