Eulalie Piccard

Eulalie Piccard, sometimes called Eulalie Piccard Guée, was a Russian-Swiss novelist, translator and teacher, writing in French. She was one of the first literary writers to explore the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union and the police state that was constructed there under Joseph Stalin. While her work does not approach the literary force of Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov and didn't reach major public attention, it represented an early sustained effort to expose legal and penal developments in the Soviet Union that, in the 1930s and 1940s, were little discussed outside Russian emigrant circles. When show trials and labour camps were referred to in newspapers and books at the time, the tone was generally sensational and made little attempt to connect them to Soviet political culture or to everyday life.