Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to
the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In
Survival as Victory , Oksana Kis has produced the first
anthropological ...study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor
camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Based on the
written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150
survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding
Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women's resistance to the
brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of
customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through
the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences.
Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A
History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested
in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance
to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.
Although the Holodomor figures prominently in contemporary Ukrainian historical research, the lived experiences of the victims have attracted insufficient scholarly attention. In 1932-33, adult ...females were often left with no means of subsistence while holding full responsibility for the survival of their families. This study explores the efforts of mothers to ensure their children's sustenance and the various methods they employed to procure food in starving villages. A range of strategies deployed by mothers on behalf of their starving children is examined. This article also explores controversial aspects of maternal experiences under genocidal circumstances: some mothers were totally committed to their children's survival, some renounced their maternal duties in the hope of saving their offspring, while other mothers preferred to save their own lives at any cost. The Holodomor proved to be an extraordinary challenge to normative ideas and practices of mothering and ultimately undermined the myth of an unconditional, selfless mothering instinct. Scholarship on Jewish women's experiences of the Holocaust provides important insights and points to significant commonalities (despite obvious differences) of women's survival strategies in the context of a genocidal event.
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Scholars studying everyday life in the Gulag have observed that prisoners in the camps and colonies most often grouped themselves on an ethnic basis. Having found themselves in the Gulag, prisoners ...entered an identity matrix in which the place of each individual was determined by several factors: reason for sentencing (criminal or political activity), gender, ethnicity, and class.¹ Galina Ivanova has noted that an “imperceptible gradual consolidation of the prisoners” took place. “The basis for joining forces . . . included ethnicity—less so religion—and a sense of camaraderie.”² Anne Applebaum emphasizes these associations as a key survival strategy:
The history of Ukraine in the twentieth century contains all too many tragic pages, among the most painful of which were the massive political repressions and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of ...Ukrainians during Soviet times, for their political, national, and religious convictions. Across the entire period that the USSR existed, those in power used a variety of measures to crush any form of opposition, resistance, or criticism, mercilessly persecuting and punishing real and imaginary enemies. However, the peak of political repression, in terms of scale and severity, fell during the regime of Joseph Stalin, especially from the late 1930s
Camp zones in the Gulag were built on a standard design, either rectangular or square, with identical barracklike buildings, some for housing and others for various functional purposes: dining ...facilities, bathhouses, and so on.¹ Housing barracks were most often simply one-story buildings of varying construction, area, and volume. In the camps and colonies, prisoners generally lived in big wooden barracks that were tightly packed with bunk beds, for a very large number of people was designated to a relatively small space. Internal Gulag documents such as reports, informational memos, and resolutions unambiguously reveal the unacceptable living conditions in which the
Despite the exhausting work, hunger and cold, diseases and injuries, the abuse of guards and criminal elements, and the inhuman living conditions, the need for beauty not only did not disappear but ...sometimes even grew stronger among Ukrainian women who were incarcerated as political prisoners. Iaroslava Kryzhanivs´kaHasiuk, who spent time in a camp in Inta, explains:
In the harsh north, the spirit of freedom did not die, nor did the desire to create and to live. . . . Thousands of women and girls, the flower of Ukraine, were held there, behind barbed wire, and after a heavy day being
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