Abstract
The forced labour camp system in the former Soviet Union has been well researched. However, until now the scale of repression in the Gulag during the 1930s has been documented, by both western and Soviet historians alike, for the most part in numerical terms. More recently, historians have been able to use declassified archival material in their research, but still a cold, numerical approach has tended to overshadow the individual and personal horror of internment. This chapter uses archival reports, published memoirs and the personal testimonies collected by the Russian voluntary organisation Memorial to examine the living conditions and everyday life of women prisoners.2 From this perspective, a new dimension is added to our knowledge of the camp system.
1. This chapter was prepared with the help of Melanie Ilič.
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Notes
S. Vilensky (ed.), Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag (Bloomington, Indiana, 1999). This is a rich source of accounts of women’s lives in the labour camps, but, unfortunately, there is not room to detail these memoirs here.
A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 (London, 1975),
and J. Rossi, The GULag Handbook (New York, 1989)
These data obviously do not reflect the sex structure of the Soviet Union’s free population. In 1937 women constituted the majority, 52.6 per cent, of the population. J. Arch Getty, G.T. Rittersporn and V.N. Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence’, American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, 1993, p. 1025.
For details of Article 58 see, R. Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London, 1968) appendix G, pp. 741–6.
M. Buber-Neumann, Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (Munich, 1962) p. 65.
E. Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (London, 1950) pp. 124–31.
R. Conquest, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps (London, 1978) p. 192.
E. Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (London, 1967) pp. 306–9.
O. Dmitrievna, Red Gaols: a Woman’s Experiences in Russia’s Prisons (London, 1935) p. 41.
D.J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia (London, 1947) p. 156.
Z. Zajdlerowa, The Dark Side of the Moon (Hemel Hempstead, 1989) p. 122.
A. Pim and E. Bateson, Report on Russian Timber Camps (London, 13 May 1931) p. 40.
G. Herling, A World Apart (London, 1986) p. 34.
For the concessions granted to pregnant women and nursing mothers in free society, see M. Ilič, Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy: from ‘Protection’ to ‘Equality’ (London, 1999) especially ch. 5.
On urban expansion and housing conditions, see S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999) pp. 41–2, 46–50.
S. Wheatcroft, ‘The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45’, Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 48, no. 8, 1996, pp. 1346–8.
On living conditions at Magnitogorsk, see S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (London, 1995) pp. 157–97.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Mason, E. (2001). Women in the Gulag in the 1930s. In: Ilič, M. (eds) Women in the Stalin Era. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523425_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523425_8
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