Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag 9780674258341

Citation preview

Survival as Victory

Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies 79

HURI Editorial Board Michael S. Flier George G. Grabowicz Serhii Plokhy, Chairman Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications

Cambridge, Massachusetts

OKSANA KIS

SURVIVAL AS VICTORY UKRAINIAN WOMEN IN THE GULAG

Translated by Lidia Wolanskyj

Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was established in 1973 as an integral part of Harvard University. It supports research associates and visiting scholars who are engaged in projects concerned with all aspects of Ukrainian studies. The Institute also works in close cooperation with the Committee on Ukrainian Studies, which supervises and coordinates the teaching of Ukrainian history, language, and literature at Harvard University.

Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the Translate Ukraine Translation Grant Program of the Ukrainian Book Institute, and by the Stefan and Iwanna Rozankowskyj and the John Ivan Tymkiw Ukrainian Studies Funds at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the U.S. on acid-­free paper ISBN 9780674258280 (hardcover), 9780674258327 (epub), 9780674258334 (Kindle), 9780674258341 (PDF) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945626 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020945626 Front cover illustration: Two Ukrainian women clasping hands. Photo: Mykola Leonovych, 2020. Oksana Kis photo by Olena Anhelova. Used with permission. Cover and book design by Mykola Leonovych, https://smalta.pro

CONTENTS

vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, NAMES, AND CERTAIN TERMS 1 INTRODUCTION 36 CHAPTER 1. THE DAILY LIFE OF WOMEN IN THE GULAG IN RESEARCH AND PERSONAL MEMOIRS

100

CHAPTER 2. LIVING CONDITIONS IN PRISONS AND CAMPS

172

CHAPTER 3. NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH

IN THE 1940S AND 1950S DURING IMPRISONMENT

248 CHAPTER 4. CREATIVITY AND FREE TIME 324 CHAPTER 5. HUMANITY AND FEMININITY IN CAPTIVITY 404 CHAPTER 6. BODY, SEXUALITY, AND LOVE 452 CHAPTER 7. MOTHERHOOD BEHIND BARS: A CURSED BLESSING 501 CONCLUSIONS 511 APPENDICES 529 NOTES 593 BIBLIOGRAPHY 616 INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is twice born: first published in Ukrainian in 2017, it has been reborn in this English version. But without the many people who helped along the way, this study might never have seen the light of day. The drafts of the chapters were read by many colleagues—historians, social anthropologists, ethnologists, folklorists, literary critics, as well as specialists in memory studies, oral history, women’s and gender studies, and Ukrainian studies—all of whom offered thoughtful comments and useful feedback. Their constructive criticism, professional suggestions, and readiness to discuss specific issues were instrumental in my rendering of this difficult topic. These colleagues also helped to expand the study’s source base, to clarify the main ideas, to strengthen the arguments, to improve the structure, and to polish the language of the final manuscript. I offer special thanks to those who brought important academic works from outside Ukraine to my attention and helped me gain access to them. Much of my work on the theoretical aspects of this study was made possible by a research grant from Fulbright Ukraine during my academic internship with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University over 2011–2012. The Ukrainian edition of this book was published with the help of a small publications grant from the Ukrainian Fulbright Circle and the financial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Kyiv Office. These two organizations also supported a series of lectures that I later gave as part of a book tour, making it possible for me to reach readers across Ukraine.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

viii

I would like to separately thank those colleagues who were directly involved in the making of the English edition. First, I am deeply indebted to Professor Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who, after reading a draft of the Ukrainian manuscript in the fall of 2016, immediately declared that this research had to be made available to English-language readers as well. It was her confidence that spurred me to apply to the publications office of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (HURI), for the translation and publication of this book—an application she supported with a letter of recommendation. This project also owes its success to the endorsements of colleagues like Professor Frank E. Sysyn (University of Alberta and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), Prof. Veronica Shapovalov (San Diego State University), and Professor Tetiana Zhurzhenko (Vienna University), who strongly recommended my work in their letters in support of the publication of this book. I am also very grateful to the members of the HURI editorial board, who gave my work a chance to reach a wider audience. The anonymous reviewer played a special role in this, as the reviewer’s positive response to my study included a series of very valuable suggestions and raised some important issues that helped me to reassess my work, rewrite the manuscript, and discover an entire series of topics that I had previously touched upon only superficially. The greatest value of this review lay in showing me how to adapt the structure and presentation of the book for both the Anglophone specialists and the general audience, ensuring that readers would navigate the book more easily and be more receptive to its main theses. The translator, Lidia Wolanskyj, merits special thanks: she immersed herself deeply in the text and not only translated it very eloquently, but also became absorbed in the subject matter, carefully observing where my thoughts were going, clarifying details, checking facts, and, in general, helping me eliminate any number of weaknesses in the text. I am particularly grateful for her exceptional sensitivity to the difficult testimony of women

Acknowledgments

ix

who were once political prisoners. Lidia sensed the subtleties of their words and conveyed the meaning very accurately, rendering these women’s voices in a way that sounded natural, true, and convincing in English. Throughout this past year, my constant guide in the process of preparing this book for publication was Dr. Oleh Kotsyuba. He took charge of absolutely every aspect, coordinating the efforts of all the specialists involved. And yet, he was exceptionally flexible and understanding the entire time. He listened carefully to my thoughts and shared his own experience, patiently smoothing out any tensions and finding a compromise on issues that were ambiguous. Thanks to his personal efforts, the process of preparing the manuscript was well planned and free of unnecessary stress. Every reader who picks up this book will first notice the cover. I am eternally grateful to Dr. Oleh Kotsyuba, who came up with the concept, and to Mykola Leonovych, who created the design. They captured one of the key notions in my book—the power of female solidarity. To my mind, the image of two women’s clasped hands readily and beautifully conveys this idea to the reader. Further thanks go to my copy editor Dr. Jessica Hinds-Bond, for her wonderful work on ironing out any remaining inconsistencies in the manuscript and giving the text the necessary final touch. Finally, I am very grateful to Dr. Michelle Viise for shepherding the manuscript to the finish line and resolving any final issues before going to print. Lastly, I would like to thank the Ukrainian Book Institute, which partially supported the translation with a grant. I am grateful, as well, to HURI, its faculty and staff for publishing a book on women’s history—a heartfelt thanks to all who were involved in this process. Thanks to the coordinated efforts of an entire team of caring specialists, this book has come to life in the English language, giving the world a chance, possibly for the first time ever, to hear the voices of Ukrainian women who were political prisoners as they bear witness to their experience in Stalin’s Gulag.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, NAMES, AND CERTAIN TERMS Personal names have been transliterated in accordance with the Library of Congress transliteration systems for Ukrainian and Russian. Well-known personal names appear in spellings widely adopted in English-language texts. For names of memoir authors with an alternative spelling in published works that use Latin script, the alternative spelling is provided in parentheses. Place-names appear in the Library of Congress transliteration (without primes in the body of the text) or in the form sanctioned by the countries in whose political borders they are found today. English-language forms of long standing are used for the most well-known cities, including Moscow (rather than Moskva), Warsaw (rather than Warszawa), and Vienna (rather than Wien). Following the memoirists’ accounts, some people mentioned in this book have several names associated with them. The memoirists occasionally use terms of endearment for first names (e. g. Orysia instead of Iryna, or Lesia instead of Larysa) and diminutive versions of the names given at birth (e. g. Mariika for Mariia; Ania, Hania or Hannusia for Hanna or Anna, and so on). Maiden names are provided in parentheses in the cases where women were incarcerated before they were married. Terms pertaining to a person’s ethnicity and nationality present a particular challenge. In most cases, conventions of the time blurred the boundaries between one’s ethnic identity and

their belonging as citizens to an existing state, as the borders of many states were under constant revision in the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore, where appropriate, the terms “ethnicity” and “ethnic” have been used instead of the then commonly used terms “nationality” and “national.” Additionally, since most women whose memoirs are analyzed in this book were political prisoners who fought for Ukraine’s independence and statehood, their concept of national identity was defined exclusively by notions of ethnicity, language, and Christian faith, in conformity with the prevalent ideas of the time. For this reason, hybrid identities that are broadly recognized in scholarship today—such as Ukrainian Poles, Ukrainian Russians, or Ukrainian Jews—are not represented in the memoirists’ accounts. An additional level of difficulty concerns the designation of many political prisoners as nationalists in its broad meaning. The use in the Ukrainian context of the time, especially as a self-­ designation, emphasized the patriotism and self-­sacrifice of those who fought for Ukraine’s independence against various imperial forces. In the Soviet Union, the term was used both as a slur in public discourse and as a charge against those who resisted the subjugation of the former provinces of the Russian Empire and the newly established Soviet republics. After World War II, in Soviet propaganda the term “nationalist” was usually conflated with the term “fascist” and used against ideological opponents within the Soviet Union. In this book, following the memoirists themselves, the term is used merely to denote those who embraced or fought for Ukraine’s statehood and independence, either as members of the Ukrainian nationalist underground—including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)—or not.

INTRODUCTION

The idea that led to this book was born nearly twenty years ago, thanks to a Ukrainian woman by the name of Mariia Shanhutova (b. 1923), from the village of Denyshi in Zhytomyr Oblast. In 2002, I was recording her recollections about being an Ostarbeiter doing forced labor in Nazi Germany, for an international oral history project. After the interview was over, and as we were chatting over tea, she told me that, after she returned home, she was accused of collaboration, tried, and sentenced to a Gulag camp. All because she had basically volunteered to go to Germany in order to follow her husband, who had been forcibly taken, because she was pregnant at the time. I no longer remember all the details, because I was young and inexperienced and didn’t think of recording this part of her recollections. Still, her brief account of the years she had spent in the Gulag left a profound impression on me. Mariia’s story was a true revelation for me and made me think, for the first time, about the ambiguity of women’s experience as political prisoners. This stooped, elderly woman remembered her captivity not as a browbeaten victim, but with pride and dignity: she spoke about how she successfully resisted a powerful, soul-­crushing system. For Mariia herself, the fact that she managed to survive the camps despite all their horrors was her personal victory over the regime. Despite all that she had endured, she did not feel like a victim. Hers was the story not of someone who had suffered, but of an individual who had overcome. For years afterward, I kept thinking about the widespread perception of female political prisoners as simply powerless

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

2

victims of political repression who had no rights and whose experience was mainly a litany of suffering and loss, and how this was such a one-­sided and probably flawed way of seeing the situation. Some ten years ago, when I finally began to immerse myself in the personal recollections of women who survived the Gulag, I not only found numerous affirmations of my doubts, but also discovered that the lives of the women in these camps were filled with everyday, minor, almost imperceptible, but very effective acts of resistance to the dehumanizing impact of the regime. The recollections of Ukrainian “politicals” testified to the fact that they had not just submitted meekly to their fates but—in the face of total control, disenfranchisement, and violence—had created their own secret world, one that was not governed by the harsh laws of the internment zone. Despite strict prohibitions and punishments, these women sang and wrote poetry, prayed and marked Christian feast days, embroidered and painted, and kept their barracks and clothing in order. What’s more, in contrast to the law of the jungle that reigned in the zone, they took care of one another and supported those who were having the hardest time. Every time that they found a way to remain human in the face of inhuman conditions—to remain women, Ukrainians, and Christians, to preserve their identities and values—they beat the system. THE TIME AND THE PLACE In 1929, Josef Stalin issued a decree to establish a special agency to carry out sentences, called the Main Administration of Labor Camps and Colonies, or GULAG.1 Over the years, there were approximately thirty thousand institutions of various kinds where Soviet citizens were incarcerated. The Gulag system covered the entire territory of the Soviet Union, with a significant proportion of its sites under especially severe conditions of confinement in Siberia, Central Asia, the northern regions of the USSR, and the Far East.2

Introduction

3

The penitentiaries in the Gulag system were differentiated according to the severity of confinement. Correctional labor colonies, called ITKs, were for individuals sentenced to less than three years for minor crimes, and conditions in ITKs were the most liberal. Correctional labor camps, or ITLs, were for individuals sentenced for serious crimes for more than three years, and the conditions were harsher. For especially dangerous crimes, most of which were political ones, separate sections of regular ITLs, labeled katorga, were set up in 1943. These sections distinguished themselves for their extreme conditions: hard labor, barred windows and locked barracks, numbers on uniforms, restrictions on correspondence, more severe punishments for violating rules, and so on. In 1948, katorga sections were replaced with “special” camps where the hard labor regimen was retained. Moreover, the scale of this form of punishment was expanded.3 Those whom the system judged as hopelessly incorrigible criminals who could have an undesirable impact on other prisoners, meaning primarily those who were active in anti-­Soviet movements, were isolated in cellular prisons where they were often kept in solitary confinement.4 Between the 1920s and 1953, when Stalin died, the total number of Soviet citizens who were repressed through incarceration or other serious restrictions on their freedom for substantial periods of time was, by some estimates, twenty to twenty-­five million individuals.5 Although the exact number of victims of the Gulag is not known, complex demographic calculations have allowed researchers to estimate that the number of those who died in the camps and colonies may have been between 1.75 and 13.2 million.6 Ukrainian political prisoners could be found in every single camp, and the share of Ukrainians was very high in some of them. Indeed, in the special camps, the proportion of Ukrainians ranged from a third to a half.7 For example, in June 1954, the Steplag near Karaganda in Kazakhstan held 16,667 prisoners, of whom 4,021 were women, and 46.3 percent of all those incarcerated were Ukrainian.8

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

4

The repressive Soviet system, of which the Gulag was the most extreme manifestation, was designed to remove from society, to punish, to reeducate, and to exploit those who dared resist the Soviet regime.9 Systematic, all-­encompassing violence against prisoners was pervasive in the Gulag, determined by the very rules and structures of this institution.10 The purpose of these camps was to make sure the prisoners felt how insignificant and powerless they were, so that they would repent, stop resisting, submit, and accept the totalitarian regime as the only possible form of existence. The objective of the system was to crush individuality in the prisoners and to turn them into a homogenous, amorphous human mass with no recognizable social identity—be that gender, nationality, religion, political persuasion, or other—and no values, principles, moral compass, or social norms. By depriving prisoners of any opportunity to satisfy their basic needs, denying them human rights, and restricting their access to resources as much as possible, the system was intended to degrade them to the level of a basic instinct to survive. Women in the Gulag were isolated from the rest of society through prohibitions on correspondence, given no access to newspapers and other sources of information, depersonalized through the use of numbers instead of names, dressed in ill-­fitting uniforms and prevented from having personal items of any kind, and totally controlled by the severe prison regimen and rigid daily schedules. Prohibitions on ordinary activities, endless searches, a complete lack of privacy, constant violence both physical and psychological (on the part of both the administration and other prisoners), widespread sexual abuse, and pervasive demoralization through constant feelings of anguish, hopelessness, despair, behavioral degradation, moral decline, and eroded social norms undermined the mental health of the women at least as much as did the unbearable physical conditions that slowly destroyed their bodies, leading to serious mental disorders.

Introduction

5

Survival as Victory mainly examines the Gulag system during the late Stalinist period, from 1939 to 1956, when this penal and repressive entity was at its peak of expansion, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This focus is also a response to substantive changes in the demographic profile of the prisoners along three separate parameters. First, this period saw the proportion of individuals incarcerated for “political crimes” grow substantially. After the incorporation of western Ukraine and Bukovyna into the Ukrainian SSR, especially after the German occupying army was driven out of Ukraine and Nazi Germany was defeated, the stream of repressed individuals accused of anti-­Soviet activities (typically “nationalism”), collaboration, treason, and other kinds of “political crimes” skyrocketed. Such crimes were defined in Article 54 of the 1934 Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR or in Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR. All told, the share of “politicals” in the Gulag grew from 18.6 percent in 1938 to 40.7 percent by 1944,11 and just two years later, 60.0 percent of prisoners were incarcerated for “political crimes.” 12 Second, the gender composition of the prisoners began to shift during this period. Where, in 1930, the proportion of women among prisoners in the Gulag was relatively small, during the war it more than tripled, from 7.6 percent in 1941 to 26.0 percent by summer 1944. By 1 January 1945, 30.6 percent of all Gulag inmates were female.13 Female convicts included onetime forced laborers or Ostarbeiters who had been in Nazi Germany, residents of occupied territories, and so on. But also, at the end of the war, when the Soviet penal system launched a massive attack on the Ukrainian nationalist underground, the Gulag absorbed a huge number of girls and women who were accused of cooperating with nationalist insurgents.14 From the mid‑1930s on, the Stalin regime had a clear tendency to “ethnicize” the official interpretation of the term enemy: enemies were no longer judged so much on class as on ethnicity.15 Indeed, ethnicity also began to be treated as the primary ­category for

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

6

identifying convicts in the internal policies of the Gulag, where the national component had changed significantly by then. Before the war, Ukrainians accounted for about 14 percent of the Gulag population, with their numbers fluctuating from around 182,000 to over 196,000.16 From 1944 to 1947, the number of Ukrainians in the camps grew about 140 percent, and from then on, Ukrainians remained the second largest ethnic group among Gulag inmates.17 By 1 January 1955, every fifth prisoner in the Gulag was a Ukrainian,18 while one-­third to one-­half of those sentenced to katorga were Ukrainians.19 Meanwhile, other ethnic minorities constituted no more than 4.0 percent of the Gulag population.20 Because World War II and the postwar decade marked such a big shift in the profile of inmates of the Gulag—a simultaneous rise in the sheer numbers, in the proportion of Ukrainians, and in the proportion of women—we must consider the particular experience of political imprisonment for Ukrainian women when we focus on this period. The regimen for incarcerating women and men was not consistent during the entire time that the Gulag was in operation: while prisoners were incarcerated in mixed zones and camps in the 1930s, the Gulag administration had, by 1945, decided to “completely isolate imprisoned women from men.” 21 At that point, prisoners were living in common zones but gender-­specific barracks, so the Rules for the Internal Regimen for Prisoners in Gulag Camps and Colonies, dated 16 May 1945, included a separate prohibition on “men visiting the women’s barracks, or women the men’s, with the exception of those individuals carrying out tasks assigned by the administration.” 22 In 1947, measures were taken to increase the isolation of men from women: separate camp sections were set up for women, while, in mixed camps, the men’s and women’s zones were strictly separated, in accordance with the 1939 NKVD instruction titled On the Regimen for Holding Prisoners and a 1947 MVD instruction titled On the Regimen for Keeping Prisoners in Forced Labor Camps and Colonies.23

Introduction

7

Clearly, these measures weren’t sufficient because, by May 1949, the Gulag administration declared: “To date, there is not enough isolation of incarcerated women from the men,” 24 while the MVD order On the Proper Organization of Supervision of Prisoners and Measures to Fight Violations of Camp Regimens at MVD Correctional Labor Camps and Colonies, dated 13 February 1950, instructed unit supervisors to “strictly control the prohibition on contacts between men and women in the living quarters and on work sites” and to “prohibit the use of women to provide camp services to male camp units.” 25 The objectives of such measures were clearly stated in the Note from the Gulag Orgotdel Regarding Shortcomings in the Work of the Gulag Administrations and Organizational Departments, dated 9 March 1951: “As a result of gross violations of MVD demands regarding the isolation of incarcerated women from men, there is much evidence of cohabitation. Of the total number of pregnant female convicts, 90 percent were impregnated in camps, and 40 percent in the colonies.” 26 Despite all its efforts, the Gulag administration was never able to completely separate and isolate women from men in the penal system.27 Nevertheless, these gender separation measures among prisoners meant that from the late 1940s until the Gulag system was shut down, female prisoners generally found themselves gender segregated. This situation gives further reason to look in depth at the behaviors, norms, and practices that became widespread in this environment. In 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR exposed and condemned the personality cult of Stalin. As a consequence, the cases of a substantial portion of the political prisoners were reviewed, and many prisoners, including women, were subsequently released and rehabilitated. Although the USSR continued to incarcerate many prisoners of conscience until the very end, a system-­wide reorganization of the Gulag system of prisons and forced labor camps took place after 1956. This occurrence changed their structure significantly,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

8

as well as the conditions under which prisoners were kept, the labor regimen, and so on. A study of this period (1939–56) is not only justified but made possible by the plentitude of sources that exist: in addition to the archival materials to which researchers have access, these sources include the many personal memoirs by women prisoners who were in the Gulag during the 1940s and early to mid‑1950s. CONTEMPORARY GULAG STUDIES AND SOURCES Although the Gulag was in operation from the 1930s on, Gulag studies only emerged as a relatively independent field quite late—in the 1990s. The operation of the Gulag was top secret. For several decades, the conditions under which Soviet politicals were detained were very rarely spoken of outside the penitentiary system: even those who had been released were forced under threat of punishment to refrain from revealing anything about the places where they were held.28 Camp censors intercepted and reviewed all letters from the prisoners, both male and female, and camp guards made sure that no personal records about the conditions of the prisoners or the functioning of the camps were kept. The Gulag administration periodically reminded camp and colony heads about these practices. In a 16 May 1950 instruction issued by the MVD, a number of points were raised, including the following: Strictly prohibit prisoners from collecting testimony and engaging in personal writing that describes the daily life, work activity, and other information about the camps and colonies of the MVD. Organize the work of the censorship department so as to completely prevent any leaks to the outside world of prisoner testimony describing the activities of the forced labor camps or colonies.

Introduction

9

Any literary works or other writing found among prisoners that includes testimony about the detention regimen or the guarding of prisoners, or characterizes the work carried out in the camps and colonies, as well as any other testimony, shall be immediately confiscated and a thorough investigation launched with the purpose of punishing the perpetrators.29

These measures effectively made it impossible for any information to get out. Therefore, the first real studies about the situation of political prisoners in the USSR appeared in the West only after several foreign prisoners had been released, making some details about the Gulag available to scholars.30 One of the first researchers to bring attention to the condition of women in the Gulag camps was Ukrainian Martha Chyz. She published a review in 1962 that was based to a large extent on the published individual testimonies and memoirs of political prisoners.31 Given the paucity and inaccessibility of information about the Soviet system of repression, as well as problems with verification, only a handful of reports on this subject appeared in the West during the following few decades, and just one of them directly addressed the fate of female politicals.32 In fact, these earliest publications did not offer a deep or systematic analysis. Their purpose was mostly to state the problem: they highlighted the need to more carefully study the experience of women who were held as political prisoners and to analyze the gender aspects of daily camp life. A substantial role in the dissemination of information about political repressions in the USSR, including those against women, was undertaken by civic organizations in the Ukrainian diaspora in the West. Of particular value were sporadic special publications on the subject of female politicals in the USSR, prepared and published through the efforts of women’s and human rights organizations in the Ukrainian community abroad.33 Published in the English language, these texts had political goals, which were to bring the attention of the democratic countries of the world

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

10

to the violation of political and civil rights in the Soviet Union and to repressions against Ukrainian women, and to expose the terrible truth about the inhuman conditions that political prisoners were being kept in by revealing just how harshly the Soviet regime exploited human beings. Serious attempts to start public discussion and make sense of the history of political repression in general, and the Gulag penal system in particular, especially in the territories of the former USSR, emerged only at the end of the 1980s, during the period of Soviet liberalization known as perestroika. At the start of the 1990s, the KGB and MVD archives were gradually opened up. This development made it possible for local and Western historians to access official Soviet documents for the first time, and to examine various activities of the Gulag system as a state institution.34 In post-­Soviet countries, the history of the Soviet system of repression became one of the top subjects of historical studies. Beginning in the mid‑1990s in the Russian Federation, a significant number of fundamental works on the Gulag were published, as well as several collections of important documents that are a valuable source for Gulag researchers.35 What distinguishes Russian historical writing on the Gulag is its focus on the institution: researchers study the history of the Gulag’s establishment and development, the ways that it was structured and functioned, and the social traits of prisoners and staff. They work to establish the number of victims and to evaluate the economic efficiency of a system of forced labor, and so on.36 By contrast, since the early 2000s, Westerners studying the Gulag have been paying more and more attention to the people in the camps, analyzing not just the demographics of the prisoners—their social background, ethnicity, sex, education, profession, reason for being imprisoned, and so on—but also disease and mortality rates, and the diet and medical services in the camps, colonies, and prisons. They also examine the dehumanizing nature of such a system, as well as its impact on those

Introduction

11

who were repressed, on their families, and on Soviet society in general.37 This research has been made easier by the publication of letters from political prisoners, including petitions to various government institutions in the search for justice, appeals to international human rights organizations, and private letters to families and friends—all of which made it possible to see camp life from the inside.38 This anthropological turn in Gulag studies also made it possible to examine the experiences of women and the gender aspects of imprisonment. Studies in this vein have included important data and reflections, not only about the number of female politicals, the rules and conditions under which they were kept, and their work and deaths, but also about the minutiae of daily life, their behavior, their relations with other prisoners and camp personnel, and so on. American researchers have been paying ever more attention to the human aspect of the Gulag as a phenomenon, keen to make sense of the individual and collective experience of those who came through this system.39 A good example of this approach is Anne Applebaum’s 2003 Gulag.40 The author admitted that her goal was to describe the lives of the people caught in the grip of the system,41 and she succeeded in using and combining archival materials, the latest research, and the recollections of the victims. The resulting book was both factually grounded and profoundly humanistic. What made Applebaum’s work unique was the amount of attention that she paid to the experience of women in the prisons and camps, through the themes of motherhood, sexual violence, and corporeality. However, like others who have studied the lives of women in the Gulag, Applebaum did not use any memoirs by Ukrainian women who were political prisoners—not even those that were available in English.42

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

12

THE GENDER FACTOR IN THE CAMPS In the early 2000s, scholarly and public interest noticeably increased in the gender aspects of political repression, and specifically the everyday lives of prisoners, which led to the publication of a series of English-­language translations of the memoirs of former political prisoners in the Gulag—women of different ethnicities, ages, and social origins who were all persecuted under the Stalin regime.43 However, the testimony of Ukrainian women who were politicals was nearly altogether absent, with the exception of a fragment from the memoirs of Nadiia Surovtsova (Nadezhda Surovtseva), and so the Ukrainian experience of the Gulag remains unfamiliar to researchers, and Ukrainian women prisoners continue to be invisible in Gulag studies. Despite groundbreaking publications relating to gender and the Gulag, the study of the women’s experience in prison has not yet become an integral part of Gulag studies in North America. Key publications on this subject—such as the above-­mentioned collections of women’s testimonies, or Katherine R. Jolluck’s fundamental monograph on Polish women in the camps and in exile—are absent from bibliographies of selected works on the history of the Gulag. This absence testifies to an underestimation of the gender question in the scholarly community.44 In his critical review of the main achievements and areas of focus in Gulag studies, Wilson T. Bell only in passing notes the need to study gender and sexuality in prisons—in a single sentence in which he lists the areas of Gulag studies that have been largely ignored.45 Such neglect does not reflect the personal attitude of the researcher so much as testify to the marginality of gender issues in Gulag studies in North America. For instance, during a 2017 round table in Toronto on new developments in Gulag studies, leading experts discussed in considerable detail contemporary approaches and trends as well as the potential of different sources in Gulag research, yet not one word was said about the state of, the need for, or prospects of research into the

Introduction

13

gender aspects of imprisonment.46 Yet even amid this dearth, interest in the experience of women in the Gulag remains: it shows up among historians and anthropologists from time to time in scholarly articles and student research.47 Meanwhile in Russia, studies in women’s history develop dynamically and enter the academic mainstream, and scholarly investigations into the lives of women in the Stalinist camps have begun to appear.48 Researchers who use only Russian-­language memoirs of former prisoners typically refer to a few of the most notable themes of women’s experiences in the Gulag: motherhood in captivity, women’s bodily experiences, and sexual violence.49 Similar thematic biases can be seen in Western Gulag studies as well: almost every study that touches on the gender aspects of imprisonment centers on the issue of motherhood behind bars, which is clearly associated with women.50 Although this focus is completely justified, the subject of motherhood too often overshadows all other aspects of the lives of women in the Gulag, creating a faulty impression that motherhood must have been the only evidence of gender specificity. Moreover, Russian researchers typically leave aside issues of national identity and interethnic relations, religious practices, creativity and free time among female prisoners, and communication both among the inmates and with the outside world. These aspects do not, in fact, often come out in the remembrances of Russian women who were imprisoned, most likely because they really were not very significant in these women’s experience of the camps. However, Polish women, women from the Baltics,51 and Ukrainian women, as this book will show, actually devoted a fair bit of their personal stories to these aspects of everyday life in the camps. This commonality confirms, not for the first time, that, when Gulag studies limit themselves to the testimony of Russians, the resulting picture of camp life is distorted and incomplete. An example of a thorough, well-­grounded study of the gender specifics of women’s experience of political repressions based

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

14

on a single national group is Exile and Identity, Jolluck’s book on Polish women in the Gulag and in Soviet exile. In addition to a large array of archival sources, Jolluck examined a considerable number of personal written testimonies from Polish women who had been imprisoned, in order to understand the significance and combined impact of national and gender factors on their experience of being political prisoners and exiles. Indeed, this work convincingly demonstrates that the simultaneous consideration of gender, ethnic, and class dimensions makes possible a better sense of the experiences of different groups of female prisoners in the camps and an understanding of the logic underlying their social interactions and behavior in critical situations. The work of Meinhard Stark is equally significant, analyzing as it does the prison experience of more than a hundred German women who were incarcerated in the Gulag, with an emphasis on the individuality of their survival strategies in a completely foreign, hostile environment.52 Still, it has only been published in German, making it inaccessible to most potential readers. Until now, Ukrainians researching the history of the Gulag have also paid little attention to the experience of women as political prisoners. Possibly the only exception is Tamara Vrons´ka, who was the first in Ukraine to bring attention to gender aspects of political repressions during the Great Terror of 1937–38. Vrons´ka followed the fates of women who were sentenced as the wives and family members of “traitors of the homeland.” 53 Others who have researched various aspects of the Gulag did not treat women as a category of politicals that merited separate study, although their publications have shown an awareness of gender particularities. The experience of women during the Stalin regime has, for all intents and purposes, not been the focus of attention among scholars, although large-­scale political repression, a feature of Stalinism, had an enormous impact on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women. Fear, persecution, accusations, and punishment for crimes (both real and imaginary) against

Introduction

15

the Soviet regime forced women to react in certain ways to the situation, to think outside the box, and to come up with and apply strategies of adaptation, survival, and resistance under crisis conditions. But what does this kind of knowledge offer contemporary readers? In my opinion, it’s necessary and even important for us today to know about the daily lives of the women in the camps. Between 1943 and 1957, more than two hundred thousand individuals were repressed in Ukraine, according to the most conservative estimates.54 Thousands of Ukrainian women found themselves imprisoned for years and even decades, such as Nadiia Surovtsova, who spent a total of twenty-­seven years incarcerated and was released only in 1954, after Stalin’s death. The conditions under which these women were forced to live were simply inhuman: wretched housing, hunger, cold, disease, exhaustion, isolation, backbreaking labor, unsanitary conditions, humiliation, and abuse turned the task of survival into a virtual “mission impossible.” Although a fair number of prisoners died, thousands of women managed to survive until they were released. How did they hang on, preserve their physical and mental health to such an extent that, after coming out of the prisons, they were still able to marry, have families, bring up children, and go on to live a seemingly normal life? For decades, these women kept deep inside all that they had gone through, often completely secret, even from their closest family, children, and grandchildren—everything that they had experienced behind barbed wire. Only after many, many years, those who lived to see the Soviet collapse and found the strength to publicly testify began to talk about the Gulag. Contemporary social psychologists and researchers of collective trauma who are studying the experience and the long-­term, intergenerational impact of the Holodomor and the Holocaust all agree that these and similar traumatic experiences have a profound impact on the personalities of those who lived through these events.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

16

In addition to the innumerable human losses, the experience of living through many years of imprisonment in Gulag camps and prisons radically changed the lives of a large number of Ukrainian women. Thousands of those who survived came home with the memory of the horrors they were forced to go through. How did this affect their children and grandchildren, those closest to them, their coworkers? They were silent—but did these experiences somehow speak through their daily behavior, habits, taboos, ways of interacting with other people and those in power, their attitudes toward things and people, or their reactions to events? Living among others, they brought the experience of the Gulag into their daily lives. Moreover, can Ukrainian society today, which seeks to overcome its own totalitarian past, recognize the legacy of the Gulag within itself? In order to do so, it has to, at the very least, understand what life in the Gulag was like, what it meant to be a woman in the camps and prisons, and what enabled some of these prisoners to survive it all. As a researcher, I found myself especially interested in what these women did, in terms of practices, ways of adapting to, surviving, and resisting the dehumanizing regime, that proved effective and saved their lives. The fact that women were kept in gender-­segregated conditions—women’s zones, camps, and sections—makes it possible to study these environments as unique social laboratories where normative femininity functioned in relatively pure form. Without an in-­depth study of how Ukrainian women—half the population—survived Stalinism, the modern history of Ukraine cannot be complete, comprehensive, or accurate. Today, accessibility to once-­locked archival resources and the publication of solid research based on them make it possible to put together a fairly complete picture of the Gulag as an institution. Now it is time for studies that not only shed light on the circumstances and conditions of everyday life in the situation of imprisonment, but that also show how the women made sense of what they went through, what exactly helped them

Introduction

17

survive the inhuman conditions and withstand the most critical moments (all of which helped them preserve their physical health and sanity), and how this experience influenced their lives, world views, values, and life trajectories. Without a comprehensive analysis of the broadest range of personal testimonies of former prisoners, it will be impossible to grasp all this. WOMEN’S VOICES In one fashion or another, the voices of 150 women sound in Survival as Victory: women who were sentenced for so-­called political crimes to the camps and prisons of the Gulag between 1939 and 1956 under Article 54 of the 1934 Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR or Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR. The vast majority of them were ethnic Ukrainians from western and central Ukraine, and most were very young at the time of their arrest, born in the 1920s. Most of them were also connected somehow to the nationalist underground, ranging from iconic female leaders, like Kateryna Zaryts´ka from Galicia, to ordinary “sympathizers” who only occasionally carried out minor tasks for the insurgents, such as Oksana Khrashchevs´ka from Kyiv. That the main body of accessible Ukrainian memoirs of the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s comes from women who at the time of their arrest had firm political convictions (were confirmed nationalists) and had a certain track record of underground activities makes their experience of political imprisonment and their remembrances very special, compared to the experience and memoirs of women from Russia who were political prisoners, or of those who were sentenced during the previous period, including during the Great Terror. The memoirists whose testimony forms the primary source material for this book were conscious opponents of the communist regime and maintained an unwavering anti-­Soviet view at the time of their arrest, while they carried out their penal sentence, and throughout their lives after they were released.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

18

They invariably accentuated this fact in their memoirs, not just as the reason for which they were repressed, but also as a key factor in their ability to more effectively resist the dehumanizing regime of the Gulag in the course of their years of incarceration. Either directly or indirectly, they talked about their experience of imprisonment as a continuation or variation of their battle with what they saw as a criminal Soviet system. Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991 was the event of a lifetime for these women. Their willingness to share what they had experienced in the Gulag was driven not only by freedom of speech and the opportunity to finally speak openly, but also by the desire to tell others what kind of battle this had been and how persevering the people were who fought for Ukrainian statehood for many decades. For these former politicals, survival in the camps and prisons became a fight to the death with the totalitarian regime that the Gulag embodied, in its desire to destroy the nationalist resistance by destroying its members. As Viktor E. Frankl wrote in his famed work Man’s Search for Meaning, about the psychology of those who were incarcerated, an understanding of the meaning of their suffering as a test of their own convictions pushes the prisoners to fight for life and increases their chances of survival under the most horrific conditions.55 In her memoirs, Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk) wrote about the hard times in the detention facility, where women suffered unbearable conditions in their cells and were tortured during interrogation: “There was no crying, no complaining. We all knew what we were being punished for, what we were suffering for. . . . We believed . . . that our struggle, our sacrifice would not be in vain.” 56 Survival became a means of resisting the enemy—the Soviet system. One of the prisoners wrote about such moments of despair: “A certain stubbornness kept us going, faith in the inevitable end to our suffering, and so we overcame our exhaustion and never gave in. We withstood and survived, to spite the enemy.” 57 It is this precise idea, whose refrain echoes in the Gulag narratives, that is reflected in the title of this book.

Introduction

19

The memoirists themselves most often explain their reasons for producing a memoir by the felt need to testify about the crimes of the Stalin regime and to provide an example of steadfast ideology and patriotic sacrifice to young people. Yet, paradoxically, each of these individual stories is, first and foremost, the story of the female author’s life, her personal experience, the twists and turns of her fate, and her experience of being a woman in captivity, with just a very small amount of reflection on matters political or ideological. The women justify the publishing of their life stories, which—as they believe—have little value in and of themselves, precisely because they serve as evidence of crimes and can potentially help raise young patriots. The voices of women of other ethnicities also sound in this book, such as those of ethnic Russian and Jewish women who were born in Ukraine or other parts of the USSR, as well as a number of foreigners—Polish and German women—who had spent time incarcerated with Ukrainian women and describe this experience in their memoirs.58 The remembrances of the non-­ Ukrainian women are important because this kind of “view from the side” can help reach a clearer and unbiased understanding of the Ukrainian politicals, their behavior, and their relations among themselves and with others. For instance, the well-­known memoirs of Eugenia Ginzburg, a Jewish woman, contain a vivid story about the arrival of a new group of young Galician women at the camp after the war, and the transformation that this event wrought in the camp barracks: Girls from Western Ukraine, women from recently incorporated territories. Young women who were the very picture of health. The transformation that their industrious hands wrought in Hut Number 2, to which they had been assigned, was simply miraculous. The floor planking was polished to a gleaming yellow. The crazy windows, made of bits of broken glass glued together, sparkled like crystals. Green branches of dwarf pine embellished the corner

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

20

posts of bunks, and straw pillows were touchingly draped with embroidered hand towels.59

Barbara Skarga, a Polish woman who had belonged to the Polish Home Army, lived in the camps next to Ukrainian women for a long time. At the beginning, she was openly hostile toward them, unable to accept them at all, but she finally remembered them very positively from the camps: I got along well with the Ukrainian women. I loved them. They were neat and diligent, they sang and embroidered nicely, and their obstinacy and hatred for the Russians prevented them from having any dealings with the latter. Nor were there any stool pigeons among them.60

Walli Schliess, a German woman who spent from April 1950 to December 1954 in the same barrack with Ukrainian women at the Predshakhtnaia camp in Vorkuta, promised that she would tell the world about what they had all gone through. She wrote down her testimony immediately after returning home and described the daily lives of the women in great detail. She sent this manuscript to the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, where it was translated into Ukrainian and published serially in several issues of the magazine Nashe Zhyttia (Our Life) in 1956–57.61 Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, a former Bessarabian noblewoman born in Odesa, put together an unusual book of her personal memories as a woman prisoner in the Gulag: she presented episodes in the camp life that had left the deepest impressions on her, in the form of drawings accompanied by short explanations and comments.62 Such visualized memories make the reality of what the women experienced so much more concrete—even shocking. Although memoirs of male prisoners of the Gulag such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling-­ Grudziński are generally much better known, I make very little use of them in this book. This decision was driven by one of

Introduction

21

the key tenets of feminist approaches to women’s histories: research into the past of women should rely primarily on the sources themselves, meaning the women’s own memoirs and their own assessments of the events they lived through.63 I share the position of Ronit Lentin, who has researched women’s experiences during the Holocaust and insisted: “Privileging women’s lived experiences, I argue that we must consider women’s own accounts of their lives as primary documents for interpreting their lives.” 64 Such an approach makes it possible to properly reconstruct the various aspects of the everyday lives of the women, to better understand what the women themselves thought of what they went through, and to acknowledge their views of their own past. Therefore, I have made use of the testimony of men in the Gulag only when the women’s memories proved poorly informed, especially in terms of those aspects of daily life in prison that the women preferred not to talk about, omitting them from their memoirs: female bodily experiences, sexuality, and sexual violence. THE CHALLENGES OF RESEARCH AND ETHICAL ISSUES One of the challenges faced by this study and the basis for criticism from many fellow historians is that I deliberately rely on the personal remembrances of women as the primary source for studying their experience of political imprisonment. There are several reasons behind this decision, beginning with my allegiance to the feminist principles of women’s history just discussed. In the past, lack of sources often made it difficult to study the lives of women, but today we have a substantial body of personal testimony about their lives as prisoners of the Gulag by Ukrainian women who were incarcerated for political reasons. This includes large-­volume published autobiographies and memoirs, shorter written remembrances published in collections, and archival or published oral history interviews, which, if read attentively, add up to a fairly accurate picture of the everyday lives of women

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

22

prisoners in the camps, making it possible to draw some conclusions as to what kind of meaning these women found in their experiences. Despite their obvious informativeness, all these numerous memoirs by Ukrainian women have not so far been part of historical research into the Gulag, and not one attempt has been made to thoroughly analyze the camp narratives of these women, whether in Ukraine or abroad. This kind of neglect of an invaluable historical source is unacceptable because it has led to an understanding of the Gulag as a historical phenomenon that is extremely one sided. By focusing almost exclusively in this book on the personal testimonies of former prisoners, I want to show their unique heuristic potential and, in part, fill what I see as a gap in post-­Soviet Gulag studies. The reliability of personal memoirs as historical sources has been debated for many decades. Arguments and counterarguments have been presented many times in the academic literature.65 Yet, even the harshest critics agree that, when cross-­verified and combined with other types of sources, personal testimonies are a valuable resource for the historian, providing information that is often impossible to find through other means. I also make use of official regulatory documents in this book— decrees, rules and regulations, instructions and reports that regulated and described the activities of the prisons and camps of the Gulag—in order to provide a general context for how the female prisoners were kept. With this in mind, I use data about demographic, legal, economic, structural, and other aspects of the functioning of this institution, as well as the results of a slew of contemporary studies in the history of the Gulag as a state agency. Altogether, such sources provide the background, outlining the general framework for the life of a prisoner in the camps, and this framework makes it possible to more clearly see and understand the details in the portrait of the daily lives of women in captivity as depicted in their personal recollections.

Introduction

23

Of particular importance for understanding the experience of women prisoners are the personal effects that belonged to the women or were made in the camps. Today, they can be found in memorial museums dedicated to the victims of political repressions,66 or in the collections and exhibits of local history museums.67 These artifacts and documents—prison uniforms and footwear, small personal items like rosaries, crosses, eyeglass cases, and purses, souvenirs such as albums and postcards, photographs, letters, drawings, and embroidery—are exceptionally valuable for those studying everyday life in the camps. While working on this book, I realized that, at times, these personal items say more about what the women felt and experienced than their stories, because these things make tangible life and creativity in the camps and help us understand more deeply what life in captivity meant for these women. Modern technology is also making it possible to visualize the Gulag through personal effects: virtual exhibits, databases, and collections make unique documents, photographs, and images of things that belonged to the imprisoned women available to researchers the world over.68 All this, combined with the women’s testimonies about the Gulag, makes it possible to put together a fairly complete picture of what these women underwent, and it forms the foundation of this book, without which this study would have been impossible. The most valuable components in personal memoirs about the Gulag are the details of the prisoners’ daily life, real situations, and episodes that they describe, and the individual incidents in their lives, because those were the very things that their survival depended on.69 Indeed, the subjective nature of individual testimonies is their biggest advantage: the person reveals such aspects of what they went through as can be realized only through personal experience—no official document or other source can possibly convey this. I am of the same opinion as those Gulag scholars who believe that memoirs, regardless of their possible factual inaccuracies (in names, dates, or numbers),

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

24

are an irreplaceable source for the purpose of reconstructing the social interactions, behavioral patterns, and psychology of the prisoners.70 Therefore, when analyzing the recollections of victims of the Gulag, I tried not so much to reconstruct the timelines of events, to put together a list of names and places, or to establish other facts, but rather to bring out the women’s subjective perception of their pasts in retrospect, and to reveal the individual and shared sense of what they had undergone that the memoirists were trying to transmit to their descendants. A separate challenge for this study was the very process of finding women’s stories about the Gulag. Of course, the first ones that came to my attention were the best known of the memoirists: Nadiia Surovtsova, Oksana Meshko, Halyna Kokhans´ka, and a few other known political prisoners whose memoirs were published at major publishing houses and made their way into libraries. But a large number of recollections written by former prisoners at the request of their descendants have remained as manuscripts in family archives or were published by the families of the memoirists in tiny print runs for private distribution. Such publications are extremely rarely picked up by libraries, so making use of them or even just finding out about their existence is anything but straightforward. Indeed, the search for such memoirs turned into a virtual detective story. For instance, somehow Professor Frank Sysyn brought to my attention a former political prisoner at Inta by the name of Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka, whose memoir was serialized between 2002 and 2006 in several issues of the almanac Ukraïns´kyi Visnyk, a journal published by the Ukrainian community in the Republic of Komi, in the Russian Federation. My efforts to find this journal in Ukraine were predictably fruitless, and I had almost lost hope when, in November 2014, I unexpectedly came across a mention online of the presentation of Zakydal´s´ka’s book Intyns´ki snihoviï (Inta’s Snowstorms) in a local library in the town of Boryslav in Lviv Oblast. After an unsuccessful search for the book in the catalogs of other libraries, I phoned Boryslav directly

Introduction

25

to ask about a photocopy. The director of the library suddenly informed me that Zakydal´s´ka’s daughter Nataliia was still alive and worked in Lviv, where I was. She said I could easily acquire the book from her. The next day I had the memoir in my hands. There were some other similar publications, mostly in the form of modest booklets printed at various times in Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-­Frankivsk, and Lutsk, but I was unable to find them anywhere in Ukraine. By a miracle, I managed to find them in university libraries in Canada and the United States. All I had to do was to ask my colleagues there to scan the documents for me. After Survival as Victory was published in Ukrainian in fall 2017, ever-­newer memoirs of female politicals began to trickle my way. That was how the unusually detailed, informative, and professionally published memoirs of Oleksandra Blavats´ka came to me: her daughter Vira Bilevych found out about my study completely by accident when she saw my book in the hands of a relative, Canadian historian John-­Paul Himka, who stayed with her in Lviv. Himka had come to Lviv to work in the archives, and I had given him my book as a gift just the day before. A number of other, similarly rare memoirs came my way because people whom I did not know at all either sent or gave them to me after finding out about my research. Therefore, this edition of my book, compared to the first one in Ukrainian, has been expanded with more accounts, which has further enriched this work. At the same time, I’m very much aware that there is probably much more testimony that remains unknown to me and that I will possibly never find out about. The majority of memoirs of Ukrainian women about what they went through in the Gulag are not accessible to the general public in Ukraine, let alone available for people to read anywhere else in the world. Precisely because of this, I decided that my book should be the medium that allows these women’s voices to finally be heard. For this reason, I frequently and at some length quote the testimony of these incarcerated women without offering commentary and without rephrasing what they wrote:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

26

I want these women to be able speak about their experience in their own words. Of course, I then interpret their words in an effort to understand these women’s views, ideas, and motives for behavior and actions in order to grasp the meaning of what they went through, to infer more general features from their experiences, and to evaluate their common strategies for adapting, surviving, and resisting. Still, my own voice is just one among the 150 women’s voices who talk about the Gulag in this book. This study of the experience of Ukrainian women in the Gulag became also a serious ethical challenge for me as a researcher, a feminist, and a Ukrainian woman. It was very difficult, when reading these women’s stories, to establish the necessary emotional distance from the subject of my research.71 My own social identity, especially in terms of gender and ethnicity, forced me, despite myself, to feel a connection with these women, so the process of working with their memoirs required constant self-­control and self-­reflection. I found myself having to make a deliberate effort to keep my spontaneous empathy toward the fate of these women prisoners in check and to maintain a detached, unbiased researcher’s view, without which it would have been impossible to critically examine my sources. What’s more, it was not easy at all to eliminate the feeling that a cold-­blooded “dissection” of the extraordinary suffering of these women was somehow exploiting their pain and humiliation for the purpose of knowledge production. Therefore, I intentionally chose to focus less on the horrors and the darkest sides of the camp regimen, about which plenty has already been written, and more on what helped these women withstand the situation, on their survival tactics and their efforts to counter the destructive, dehumanizing impact of the Gulag. I am very aware of the limitations and risks of such an approach of shifting focus, but I nevertheless believe my choice to be justified for two reasons. First, I feel great affinity for the position of Jewish feminist scholars, which Janet L. Jacobs very aptly articulated, when she faced the same moral dilemma in her study

Introduction

27

of women’s experience of the Holocaust: “Because I am speaking for and representing dead women to whom I feel connected by both gender and ethnicity, I am especially cognizant of the ways in which my research shapes the memory of the subjects. . . . I am acutely aware of my responsibility to sustain a dignified memory of the Jewish women who died.” 72 Second, this approach was suggested by the women’s stories of the Gulag themselves. As I read or listened to the words of these Ukrainian women, it was not hard to notice that they spoke much more frequently, in greater detail and specificity about the positive moments that took place during their imprisonment: stories about help, compassion, support, solidarity, unexpected manifestations of humanity, rare moments of joy, and so on dominated over stories about the distressing, painful, and traumatic sides of daily life in the camps. The camp narrative appears to pulsate: relatively short descriptions of suffering and pain are overtaken by longer and more concrete stories in a positive vein.73 This imbalance is especially noticeable in descriptions of relations among different groups of female prisoners. For instance, it is well known that the worst conflicts among prisoners were between those sentenced for grave criminal or economic offenses—the urki (hardened criminals), blatnye (common criminals), and bytoviki (petty criminals)—and the political prisoners. The real criminals did everything they could to make life miserable for those who were being punished for so-­called political crimes: humiliating them, robbing them, abusing them physically and sexually, forcing them to work in their stead, and so on. This widespread, large-­scale violence is also reflected in the memoirs of Ukrainian women prisoners, but typically it is only mentioned in passing, as though to simply confirm that, yes, this abuse did happen, it was trying, and it had consequences. Still, in some memoirs, stories about the shock of running up against the brutal urki and bytoviki, and the abuse they meted out, are paradoxically combined with stories about a certain accommodation in relations and even mutual favors. For instance,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

28

Oksana Khrashchevs´ka, who was arrested in Kyiv as a student, initially remembers with disgust the terrible foul language coming from the mouths of urki in the detention cell, where that group openly robbed and humiliated the politicals. But further on, she writes gratefully that these same urki boldly snatched the papers containing her sentencing from the escort, on their own initiative, and passed them on to her—and she managed to keep the documents until she was released. In another part of her memoir, there’s a story about how, in the transit prison where all the prisoners were suffering from hunger, the leader of the urki bought food in the prison shop for everyone, including the politicals—with money she had stolen from other arrestees.74 It’s quite understandable that the inhuman conditions of the camps and prisons, where the inmates were on the very knife-­ edge of survival, drove many women to unworthy deeds, such as stealing from fellow prisoners, denouncing them, prostituting themselves, and so on. Fights among the women could happen over completely banal matters, as well as over ethnicity, religion, and politics. There were more than enough reasons for tension, conflicts, and enmity among the inmates. And yet, in their memoirs, the women very rarely bring up such incidents: they are either silent altogether about unpleasant situations or they just mention them in passing. This tendency is in sharp contrast to the lengthy, detailed stories about good deeds and behavior, including on the part of “enemies” like the NKVD officers, escorts, guards, camp administrations, and others. One memoirist who spent ten years in the Gulag, Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, openly explained this kind of selectiveness in her own remembrances of the past: In my modest memoirs, which I wrote at an advanced age, I tried to remember something that was at least a little pleasant. I looked for some positive character traits in my enemies. I did not bring up the pages of life that were painful, disturbing, and terrifying, in order not to traumatize my psyche again and again.75

Introduction

29

The habit of being silent about what was painful and focusing only on the positive moments may have been acquired in the camps as well. In her memoir, Barbara Skarga talked about the psychology of the prison environment, where there was a taboo on crying and, paradoxically, a cult of laughter: In the camp, you didn’t cry, lament or feel sorry for yourself. Where suffering is boundless, no one talks about it. . . . We wanted to live—this was our only hope—and to live meant to laugh whenever you could, to love when the opportunity arose, to enjoy the rays of a pale cold sun . . . better to mock to the very end, even in a hospital ward. . . . Every crybaby was the bane of camp life, breaking others down. Crying is contagious. Give it free rein once and you’ll have a hard time controlling yourself.76

Not to talk about pain was one law of the camps that the memoirists seemed to have taken to heart for the rest of their lives. Quite possibly, the emphasis on the positive, which really is a common feature in the narratives of Ukrainian women about the Gulag, has an even deeper reason than just the avoidance of painful memories. Consciously or not, the women first and foremost talk about what helped them survive, what helped them maintain their physical and mental health, what saved them from despondency, despair, and collapse—for staying alive was the most important under the circumstances. Overall, their remembrances are not so much about how the Gulag was a death-­ dealing machine, as about how life overcame death in the Gulag. For this reason, all the elements of the women’s narratives were subordinated to this objective. In the end, I am convinced that by researching and presenting the adaptive practices of these women, their resistance and survival under the inhuman conditions of the Gulag, we will be able to show that these women were not submissive, helpless victims who passively bowed to their fates. On the contrary, this book confirms that they sought—and found—the means to fight,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

30

to confront death with all they had, and to vanquish it, as these women all did. This study shows the fundamental capacity of these women, who were driven to the brink of annihilation, to act, and in this way to restore human dignity to both those who died and those who survived. THE OBJECTIVES AND EMPHASES OF THIS STUDY The purpose of Survival as Victory is not to expose the nature of the Gulag regime, the conditions in which people were incarcerated, the norms or types of labor involved, or other aspects of the daily lives of a specific camp or type of camps. My study focuses, instead, on the subjective ways that women lived through every aspect of their imprisonment in its various contexts—institutional, climatic, social, everyday, industrial, and so on. The camps and prisons varied considerably: from large camps to smaller ones that were attached to construction sites or enterprises, or the so-­called small lagpunkty and komandirovki (ranging in size from a few dozen to several hundred prisoners); from camps in the European part of the USSR to those in the most distant, unpopulated parts of Siberia, the Far East, and the North; and from the strictly regimented katorga to relatively liberal camps that were attached to small factories or sovkhozy. The authors of these accounts were imprisoned at different locations at different times and repeatedly transferred from camp to camp, and so their stories interweave memories of various places of incarceration that they invariably compare and evaluate in the light of the rest of their experiences. Often the subjective perception of camp life depended on a lucky happenstance and the human factor. Did the prisoner find herself assigned to relatively light work such as in the camp hospital or the sewing workshop or did she have to exhaust herself cutting down trees or hauling rocks in a quarry? Was the commandant of the camp a sadistic tyrant or did he have a tiny bit of compassion for the prisoners?

Introduction

31

Taken together, these memories form a certain metanarrative about women’s experience of the Gulag, a story that raises themes that are the most relevant for these women, traces clearly universal subjects and standard situations, and illustrates extremely similar experiences and concerns, regardless of the geographic context. Indeed, in many cases, my book does not specify the actual camp or time frame of the cited recollections of different women because that’s not the important point. What’s important is to understand what all the phenomena that were universal features of camp life meant to the women: hunger, cold, disease, debilitating labor, lack of clothing and footwear, filth, humiliation, violence, physical and emotional exhaustion, homesickness, faith, separation from children, informational isolation, and so on. I track how the women adapted, survived, and resisted under these circumstances in order to understand what precisely helped them save their physical health and sanity in the most critical moments of their imprisonment. One more aspect merits an explanation. From the formal point of view, remand prisons did not belong to the Gulag system but were under the control of the Main Prison Administration of the NKVD as of December 1939, and, in April 1943, some of them were further turned over to the Ministry of State Security (MGB), a precursor to the MVD. The memoirs testify that, for those who were repressed, the details of the administration of the prisons, camps, and colonies were not particularly significant, although the women were aware that shifts in subordination affected the prison regimen, the internal rules and procedures, attitudes toward the prisoners, and the changes in their status before and after sentencing. What was far more important in the women’s recollections was the contrast between freedom and captivity, and, for them, the breaking point was their arrest, the event that divided their lives into before and after: “Prison is like a threshold across which you have to cross into hell.” 77 All the memoirists clearly remember and describe in great detail their arrest, the first cell, and the first interrogation, because

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

32

these were the greatest shock and the events that broke the life of an ordinary person who had never experienced them before.78 For instance, in her autobiography, Oleksandra Blavats´ka starts the chapter called “Gulag” with the point when she was arrested, describing first all the twists and turns of remand prison.79 For former political prisoners, being held in remand prison was indivisible from their experience of loss of freedom, and so this study covers the entire period of imprisonment, from arrest to release, including detention in a remand cell for the duration of the investigation, the transit camps after being sentenced, the road to their place of imprisonment by means of convoyed prisoner transport, and the prisons or camps where the women spent the bulk of their time incarcerated. Of course, the time spent and the experiences the women lived through at each of these stages differed, but altogether they form a separate, individual period in the lives of the female politicals that is perfectly captured in the word captivity. THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK This book reveals various aspects of the daily lives of ordinary Ukrainian women who ended up in the prisons and camps of the Gulag during the 1940s and 1950s, accused of political crimes. By looking closely at the different sides of camp life, I seek to uncover what was important or even decisive to their survival, what helped these women save their lives, health, individuality, and sanity from complete disintegration. In this context, the material conditions and the confinement regimen, relations among the prisoners and with the guards, views and convictions, practical skills and creative abilities, behavior, and ways and means of communication are all equally important. Chapter 1 focuses on the current state of research into the experience of female political prisoners in contemporary Gulag studies. It considers the potential informativeness, advantages, and limitations of various types of primary sources about the

Introduction

33

daily lives of these prisoners. This chapter also acquaints the reader more closely with the former prisoners on whose testimony I rely in this book, and their motives for sharing what they had gone through. The questions considered include: What kind of genre do the memoirs of incarcerated women constitute? What makes them special? How do the recollections of Ukrainian women differ from the testimonies of other women? What themes dominate these women’s remembrances? What aspects do they tend to remain silent about and why? The chapter also outlines the conceptual framework for this study. Chapter 2 looks at the general conditions in which the women were kept in captivity: the living quarters, the food, the work, the state of health, and more. The questions it attempts to answer include: How did life in an overcrowded barrack that was barely heated, poorly ventilated and ill lit affect these women, especially given that they had no way to maintain personal hygiene, leading to incredibly unsanitary conditions? What kinds of rations were the women given? How did poor nutrition and constant hunger, exhausting labor in extremely difficult climatic and weather conditions, and the lack of proper attire and medical care affect the prisoners’ health? In chapter 3, I consider the meaning of belonging and being a stranger among the prisoners. How did national solidarity manifest itself among the women? How did correspondence with their families and loved ones outside the camps and the secret “camp mail” within the Gulag restore the sense of belonging to a nation as an imaginary and a real community for the Ukrainian women? How did the Ukrainian women rebuild their own social networks and establish relations with women of other ethnicities? The discussion then turns to the role of the Christian faith and prayer in the lives of Ukrainian politicals. How did traditional religious practices help the prisoners avoid becoming despondent? How were the Ukrainian women able, by organizing improvised liturgies, to gain a new experience of emancipation?

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

34

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the creative efforts of the women and the moments of joy they experienced despite captivity. How is it that these women, driven to the edge between life and death, were able to sing? How did they manage to create and preserve poetry? Why, despite their constant exhaustion, did they gladly participate in amateur performances at the camps? How was it that, in prisons and camps where needles were prohibited, embroidery became unbelievably widespread? How did embroidery change its significance in captivity? What did the imprisoned women draw and why? What made it so important for the women, regardless of prohibitions, to properly prepare for and celebrate Christmas and Easter? This chapter brings up reflections as to why the sense of beauty grew sharper and the need to be creative pushed the women to find the time, strength, and resources to engage in such activities. Chapter 5 begins with a discussion about whether there was room for humaneness in such inhuman circumstances. How did this humanity manifest itself and how did the women themselves resist complete dehumanization? What kind of relations developed between the politicals and common criminals? What was “camp sisterhood,” and how did female solidarity emerge in captivity? The chapter then goes on to discuss the threats that the women faced to their gender identity and the efforts they made to preserve it. What ideas of normative femininity were common among the Ukrainian prisoners—notions about how a “proper Ukrainian woman” should look, what she should do, and how she should behave—and how did these principles help them preserve their dignity and resist demoralization? How did common female duties and skills help the prisoners feel like women and maintain their established system of values and a semblance of normalcy? In chapter 6, the discussion moves to the subject of the women’s bodies in captivity and the ways in which they were treated. How did the women maintain their physical health? How did their sexuality constitute both a risk and a resource to tap into

Introduction

35

for survival in the camps? Why did the memoirists choose to remain mostly silent about sexual abuse, and how widespread was it? How much room was there for friendship and romantic relationships behind bars and barbed wire? What was “camp love” all about, and what did it tend to lead to? In the seventh and final chapter, motherhood behind bars is the topic. Where did some women find courage to bring a child into the world of the camps? What happened with infants and mothers after a woman gave birth? This chapter also discusses the conditions under which children were kept and taken care of, their sicknesses, medical treatment, and mortality. How did women and children survive separation, and what did being reunited cost them? Some of the issues that my book specifically looks at are the means of supporting and representing key social identities such as gender, nation, and religion, and value systems, both moral and political, in the daily activities and behavior of Ukrainian political prisoners. The main objective of my study is to uncover and examine little-­noticed yet effective examples of the women’s agency—adaptation, survival, and resistance practices—that allowed these women to resist the destructive impact of the system and survive under conditions where opportunities, rights, and resources were limited in the extreme.

CHAPTER 1

THE DAILY LIFE OF WOMEN IN THE GULAG IN RESEARCH AND PERSONAL MEMOIRS

Figure 1.1. “My heart is breaking free.” Embroidery by Anna Khomiak, made at a camp in Norilsk, 1948. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

THE POST-­SOVIET CONTEXT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF UKRAINIAN WOMEN WHO WERE POLITICAL PRISONERS 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 until the dictator’s death in March 1953. Although hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men and women went through the hell of the Gulag, countless numbers dying there, historians to this day have not produced a single well-­researched study about what happened with Ukrainians who were political prisoners over years of imprisonment in camps and prisons. Instead, scholars have tended to focus mainly on the process of political repression itself (its mechanisms, progress, scale, and impact) and the history of repressive agencies: their organization, operations, changes, personnel, administrative issues, and so on. In Ukrainian historical studies this has to do with the Soviet and post-Soviet tradition of focusing on political and institutional history. Even more, however, it has been defined by access to primary sources for scholars, meaning the open archives

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

40

of Soviet penal institutions. This is reflected, for instance, in the name of the main periodical on this subject, Z arkhiviv VUChK-­ GPU-­NKVD-­KGB (From the Archives of the Cheka-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB), which has been published by the Institute of History of Ukraine under the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since 1994.1 One of the most recent—and possibly the most fundamental—works on the history of political persecution in Ukraine is Tamara Vrons´ka’s 2013 monograph Upokorennia strakhom: Simeine zaruchnytstvo u karal´nii praktytsi radians´ koï vlady (1917–1953 rr.) (Submission through Fear: Families as Hostages in the Punitive Practices of the Soviet Government, 1917–1953). Vrons´ka does focus on the victims of repression who were members of the families of “enemies of the people,” and she properly illuminates the main reasons behind this repression, as well as its chains of events, forms, mechanisms, and scales. Yet, Vrons´ka dedicates a modest sixteen pages out of more than 430 to the conditions under which women and children were kept in the camps. In her book and a preceding article, Vrons´ka analyzes an enormous body of archival materials containing the official documents of the repressive agencies, which allows her to fairly accurately establish the factors and scale of repression against women, to restore the chronological line of events, and to track the fates of women who were sentenced as the wives and family members of “traitors of the homeland,” labeled ChSIR and ZhIR by the Soviet system.2 Still, without including the recollections of onetime female political prisoners, including Ukrainian women, she struggles to fully reconstruct the details of women’s daily lives in the camps. Moreover, her study concentrates on female “politicals” who were sentenced for family ties to men whom the regime had branded “traitors of the homeland” or “enemies of the people,” not women sentenced for their own political views or deeds. The study is also limited to a relatively short period, which does not permit extrapolation to the broader experience of women who were political prisoners in the Gulag.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

41

Other Ukrainian historians who have delved into certain aspects of the lives of political prisoners have also not focused on the gender dimension.3 For example, Larysa Bondaruk has written about the Ukrainian resistance movement and camp uprisings among prisoners in the Gulag, but she does not single out the involvement of women in these events in her writings, nor does she analyze the events themselves from a gender perspective, although she is aware of the distinctive aspects of the situation for women.4 The situation in Russia is similar, with a significant number of fundamental works on the Gulag only being published since the 1990s, once formerly closed archives were finally made available.5 Yet, it would be hard to find any thorough research on the daily lives of the prisoners in the camps in this relatively large body of published research. In fact, a common trait of post-­Soviet historical studies, despite substantial differences in the trajectories of its evolution in Ukraine and Russia, is a primary focus on the macrolevel of historical processes to the neglect of the human dimension in these historical events and phenomena. This myopia can be seen in the extraordinary efforts that historians put into establishing the facts and restoring the timelines of events, compared to solitary attempts to understand the meaning and sense of what the participants and witnesses of these events underwent, to analyze the motives behind their behavior, and to recognize the long-­term consequences of what they went through. This obsession with political and institutional history has another downside: an emphasis on those archives and official documents that were written precisely during the process by the political agencies and institutions involved and, at the same time, an underestimation and almost complete neglect of the heuristic potential of first-­person sources such as diaries, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, and oral histories. Although quite a few studies of significant historical figures have been written, the lives of ordinary people, especially under the ex-

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

42

traordinary historical circumstances of the twentieth century, remain a black hole in our knowledge of the recent past. In post-­Soviet Ukraine, national memory politics and commemorative practices also show little inclination to explore the social or anthropologized history of Stalinism. Despite the ongoing memory wars in Ukraine, the dominant historical discourse continues to evolve in the direction of strengthening the nation-­state narrative, with its characteristic emphasis on the heroism of national leaders and the victimhood of members of independence movements. The glorification of the leaders and the victimization of ordinary Ukrainians, which are best illustrated in the monuments that have been raised since independence, propose an extremely simplistic, black-­and-­white view of the past and make it difficult to see and evaluate other possible experiences of extremely complicated events in the history of newly independent Ukraine. Nongovernment initiatives that could, and should, produce alternative narratives—or at least expand the knowledge of Ukrainians about Stalinism as the personal experience of millions of ordinary individuals—appear not to be powerful enough to fulfill such a function. The efforts of the All-­Ukrainian Association for Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression, which was established in June 1989 and continues to be active to this day, did not live up to expectations of its impact on Ukrainian society for a slew of reasons. In the 1990s, when this organization’s membership was relatively substantial and its members, mostly former political prisoners, were still active enough in public life to make a difference, the country’s deep economic crisis made it difficult for them to roll out large-­scale activities and shape awareness among the citizens of a now independent Ukraine. In those days, the association’s events were mostly local, small-­run publications, and its primary efforts were directed at rehabilitating former political prisoners and identifying victims of repression. By the 2000s, just as the economic situation was improving considerably, the advanced age and poor health of most politicals

Figure 1.2. Poem “To my darling mother,” written by a woman prisoner for her mother on a card from a camp, n.d. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 288.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

44

made them far less active, and the association began to focus more on providing social and legal support for its members, and on honoring their contributions and their memory. This shift was reflected in the association’s periodical, Zona (The Zone),6 whose title was a colloquial name for the Gulag. As the association turned its activities inward, focusing on its own membership rather than communicating with the general public, and as natural attrition began to deplete the ranks of those members who had personally experienced political repression, it became more and more difficult to feel optimistic about the organization’s prospects. Although a fair number of Gulag memoirs have been published over the years, from lengthy autobiographies and memoirs to terse articles in Zona and from professional oral history interviews to short radio presentations, not one researcher to this day has chosen to analyze and summarize this experience based on personal testimony. For now, the scattered histories of political prisoners do not provide a complete portrait that might speak to their descendants. In Ukraine, the history of women as an area of research has been and remains on the margins of historical studies. With a few exceptions where special courses have been organized by enthusiastic scholars, women’s history is not taught at Ukrainian universities. The need to study the past of Ukrainian women was acknowledged as far back as the late nineteenth century, and this area began to evolve actively in the early twentieth century.7 Unfortunately, it went into decline during the Soviet era. When historians once again began to study women’s history in independent Ukraine, they tended to focus on the pre-­Soviet era and actively studied the biographies of famous Ukrainian women and the history of the women’s movement. And even this research was affected by the dominant political discourse, so that studies into successful women and women’s organizations of the past were often shaped to fit the framework of the national historical narrative, with their authors highlighting what was specifically Ukrainian, as opposed to specifically female, in

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

45

almost every aspect of these women’s pasts. In this way, women’s history has been transformed into an instrument for legitimizing certain political forces and ideologies, rather than a means of discovering the historical experience of women.8 The topic of women’s daily lives, especially under the Stalinist era, has been poorly developed, both quantitatively and qualitatively. A tendency to glorify famous Ukrainian women that the Ukrainian people are proud of and to bemoan the fates of millions of ordinary women who were the victims of hostile regimes can be seen in publications and in commemorative practices alike. In 2010, the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History was established, bringing together professional historians whose scholarly interests are in studying the gender aspects of the past in order to remedy this situation by turning to little-­known, controversial, and disputed issues.9 The association is trying to expand the range of topics and the methodological foundations of research into the gender aspects of history. However, the unofficial status of this association and its small membership mean that the problem of a critical lack of knowledge about the historical experiences of women in the turbulent twentieth century remains very real. Given all this, the experiences of thousands of Ukrainian women imprisoned in Stalinist camps remain somewhere at the bottom of the list of priorities in Ukrainian historical research. This marginalization of gender studies about the Gulag makes the very history of the Gulag as an area of research one sided and slows down the process of overcoming the totalitarian legacy in the consciousness of Ukrainian society. WOMEN’S CAMP MEMOIRS AS A UNIQUE SOURCE To know and understand the daily lives of Ukrainian women imprisoned for political reasons, especially in the camps and prisons of the Gulag, the most important and most informative sources are personal documents: the memoirs, autobiographies, and oral

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

46

and written recollections of onetime political prisoners. These contain more than just factual information about the working and living conditions, nutrition, daily regimen, and punishments meted out in prisons, which can be deduced from Gulag documentation such as legislation, decrees, instructions, circulars, and reports. The value of personal testimony lies primarily in the fact that it offers us the essentially human dimension of this experience: how the women perceived their situation and the conditions under which they were being held, how they organized their daily lives, how they managed to survive, how they adapted, in what ways they protected themselves against a merciless, crushing system, where they managed to find comfort, how this experience affected their physical and mental health, and in what ways this experience shaped the further trajectory of their lives. In describing the line between official documents and the personal testimony of prisoners, Irina Sherbakova notes: “It’s as if the individual disappears in these archival documents, turning into little more than the dust covering the camps. Therein lies the poison and even danger of these documents. It’s as if they are trying to finish the job that the repressive machinery failed to complete: to destroy the individual and leave behind a nameless prisoner.” 10 Anne Applebaum looks at the situation from a different angle, noting that there was little in common between the official norms, regulations, and instructions that regulated all aspects of the lives of the prisoners, without exception, and the real nature of daily life in the camps. She points to the huge gap between what those organizing the Gulag in Moscow imagined and how it was actually organized and run.11 These often enormous divergences set up conflicts between the written rules and the actual experience of the prisoners and should obligate the researcher to analyze official Gulag documents critically and compare them to the testimony of former prisoners. Indeed, in the post-­Soviet environment, where government agencies and the official documents they issued are treated with skepticism, historians who attempt to study the once-­taboo pages of the

Figure 1.3. Letter by Vasylyna Iliuk, written on the day she was released from camp to her imprisoned daughter-in-law Liuba, 20 February 1956. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 284.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

48

past often give the advantage to personal recollections as a more reliable historical source.12 Memoirs about the Gulag are even considered a separate genre of texts: they were written by nonprofessionals or by individuals for whom this was the first serious literary effort, and they focus mainly on the subject of life in the camps, while all other aspects become secondary.13 Scholars are certain that, as a genre, the memoir was and remains intimately tied to creative literature: whether consciously or otherwise, memoirists have always been oriented toward literary models and examples.14 Likewise, oral testimony largely follows the conventions of storytelling and, just as its written counterpart, can contain borrowings from other texts, such as published memoirs and journalism.15 Self-­censorship and current events tend to leave a noticeable imprint on what people say about their own past and how.16 What’s more, when writing up their recollections as a text, the authors tend to structure and edit them in accordance with their own situation at the time of writing—and their vision of the potential reader. An in-­depth analysis of large volumes of camp memoirs shows that “most of the works that belong to this corpus are, in any case, hybrid forms that incorporate and rework elements of a variety of traditional narrative genres.” 17 Given the highly secretive nature of official information about the Gulag in the USSR, the first and possibly only source of information was the recollections and stories of those who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. Occasional testimony about the inhuman conditions of life and the exploitation of prisoners in the camps began to appear in the West only in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a number of foreigners were released from the Gulag.18 It was they who first published their memoirs, which contained references to the fate of the women in the camps and even some testimony specifically about Ukrainian women. This study is based primarily on the personal memoirs of Ukrainian women who were political prisoners and who wrote about their experience in the camps and prisons of the Gulag

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

49

system. These recollections differ greatly as to form, as they were published at different times and under different circumstances. Some recollections were written at the initiative of the prisoners in secret, back in Soviet times, and were published outside Ukraine originally.19 Others were relatively voluminous and detailed stories in the form of autobiographies and memoirs written and published in the 1990s and 2000s.20 Some recollections were in the form of creative nonfiction, which makes them no less valuable as historical sources.21 Quite a few shorter recollections were published in various journals in the 1990s, when former political prisoners for the first time had the right and the opportunity to share what they had lived through in the camps. Such testimonies were scattered among local newspapers, which means that tracking them down requires considerable time and effort. Collections of the remembrances of political prisoners are another story: these were written for scholarly or community projects documenting the testimony of victims of Stalinist repressions.22 Since the early 2000s, a new wave of public interest in the experience of women who were political prisoners has arisen, which can be seen in the multiple publications of such memoirs. In 2002, a unique collection of testimony by female politicals came out, prepared and published through the efforts of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations.23 It contains fragments of recollections from more than one hundred Ukrainian women who were sentenced in various years. This publication includes short biographical notes and photographs, which helps put together a more complete picture of the course taken by the lives of these women. Organized chronologically according to the year of conviction, these materials provide a sense of the dynamic of changes in the camp regimens and, therefore, changes in the daily lives of the prisoners themselves. Especially valuable are collections edited by individuals who intentionally selected the testimony of women who were political prisoners, such as a 2009 series of stories from more than twenty women who had participated in uprisings in the camps at Norilsk,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

50

Krasnoiarsk Krai (now in the Russian Federation), in 1953.24 This project was the initiative of a former political prisoner by the name of Ivan Kryvuts´kyi, who also coordinated the work. The materials published in the collection are based on handwritten letters from former women prisoners in which the women, in response to the request of the editor, shared stories about what they had undergone. The narrative materials are complemented by many documentary photographs of those times, which provide additional material for visual analysis. As a way to learn about the recent past, oral history has been exceptionally effective with regard to the most taboo subjects in twentieth-­century Soviet history: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the nationalist underground, political persecutions, forced labor, deportations, and so on.25 It has proven a useful tool for researching the daily lives of female political prisoners. However, only after Ukraine became independent did it become possible to record the personal recollections of women who went through the Gulag system. In addition to professionals such as historians, ethnologists, and folklorists, a major role in this process has been played by local initiatives from community and human rights organizations, local historians, and museum curators. As Sherbakova has aptly observed, oral history is especially useful for recording the recollections of ordinary people: “For those who themselves could not or did not know how to write, oral narratives proved more spontaneous and natural. Experience showed that people were more likely to touch on difficult topics in conversations than they would dare to put down on paper. . . . In oral form, people are more inclined to share legends and myths from camp life.” 26 The first such recordings were published in 1993.27 Since then, women’s recollections about the Gulag have been recorded in biographical and thematic interviews through projects of varied focus, so incarceration itself has often formed only part of a broader story that includes other periods in the life of the individual—most often participation in the nationalist

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

51

underground, which was typically the reason why the woman was sentenced in the first place.28 On the one hand, such interviews reveal the entire life path of the heroine and represent her authentic story. On the other, since the researchers did not seek to study the gender aspects of the past—or did not understand their importance—the women were not encouraged to provide the details of various aspects of life in prison. Dozens of such recordings can be found today in oral history archives.29 Moreover, individual recollections about the Gulag by Ukrainian women can also be found in electronic memoir archives of special independent centers outside Ukraine for studying the history of political repression.30 In Ukraine, a number of projects in women’s oral history have been undertaken since the beginning of the 2000s, resulting in the publication of collections of women’s reminiscences.31 Most of these were recorded in the form of biographical narrative interviews, and some of the respondents’ stories contain varying degrees of detail about the Gulag. Far less common are full-­length memoirs and autobiographies of female political prisoners, from which much valuable information can be gleaned about the daily lives of the Gulag camps, about relations between the prisoners and the administrators, about work and free time, and, ultimately, about the fate of many of the women who perished without leaving behind their own memoirs. For instance, the memoirs of Nadiia Surovtsova (1896–1985), unique in their length, depth of detail, and literary quality, were originally published in the annual almanac Ukraïna: Nauka i kul´tura (Ukraine: Scholarship and Culture) in 1990.32 Later, her recollections and letters were published in separate books.33 Surovtsova was also the only Ukrainian woman whose reminiscences were included in Semen Vilenskii’s collection of women’s testimony about the Gulag, published in English and Russian.34 Although the fate and creativity of this unusual woman has drawn the attention of scholars,35 the experience of thousands of Ukrainian

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

52

Gulag prisoners remains largely unexplored and unexamined. With the exception of Surovtsova, collections of women’s testimony about the Gulag that have been translated and published in English do not include the testimony of Ukrainian women.36 More can be found about what Ukrainian women underwent in the camps in memoirs and autobiographies that were published in the 2000s, including those by former prisoners Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Halyna Kokhans´ka, Oksana Meshko, Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka, Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Ievheniia Andrusiak, Mariia Vahula, Dariia Korchak, and Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna.37 In these more expansive narratives, the authors were able to go into detail about episodes, describe incidents and situations, and talk about the fate of others, including other women—not just laconically provide a general picture or a fragmented series of facts. The memoirs of female politicals about their time in Soviet concentration camps complement the recollections of women who were imprisoned in Poland for working with Ukrainian nationalists during that same period.38 The voluminous memoirs of Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak, for example, provide more living material for comparative analysis of the daily lives of Ukrainian women in prison.39

Every type of source has its advantages and limitations. Collected memoirs have generally been edited in preparation for publication, which means they may have lost some authentic elements in a woman’s narrative. The themes of the stories that are only about the time the women spent in the Gulag may be informative about daily life in the camps, but they typically don’t give any idea about how that experience tied into the lives of these women before and after they were imprisoned. More extensive memoirs that were written over a substantial period of time with the conscious intent of publishing are obviously less spontaneous: they tend to follow the rules of the genre, they have undergone numerous revisions by the author, including self-­censorship, and they undoubtedly contain some artistic flourishes. Recollections differ greatly from one another, not just in their extensiveness and level of detail, but also in their narrative strategies, structure, style of presentation, level of openness, and thematic emphases—and their lacunae. Naturally, when

Figures 1.4 and 1.5. Camp micro-album (4 × 6 cm [1.57 × 2.36 in]), made of birch bark with a mica cover, with best wishes to friend Liuba, n.d. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 260.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

54

the initiative to leave behind recollections belongs to the memoirist herself, her story is typically longer and fuller than when the woman shares her memories in response to a specifically formulated request from someone else to talk about what she went through for a target audience, such as her family or an oral history project. Differences also arise from the fact that the prisoners themselves were very different people: among them were highly educated members of the intelligentsia with a noticeable literary bent and a tendency toward self-­reflection, like Surovtsova or Khrashchevs´ka, and ordinary women for whom thinking about the past and narrating the story of their own lives was not such a simple task. The latter often borrowed subjects, scenes, and phrasings from better known and more literary memoirs, which, nevertheless, does not mean that their testimony is fictitious, but simply that they found it difficult to formulate and express similar experiences in their own way. Last but not least, recollections were often put together under different circumstances. These broader contexts affect the structure and rhetoric of such narratives, and the impact of the dominant political discourse and official memory policy is often quite visible. This impact is especially evident in memoirs published between 1990 and 2000: prevalence of nationalist pathos, the almost complete absence of criticism of behavior, an emphasis on the moral virtues of Ukrainians in prison, and condemnation and blame aimed at the criminal Stalin regime are all typical features of recollections written since Ukraine became independent. Still, important issues about the context—political, geographic, temporal, personal, and so on—in which the remembering took place are beyond the scope of this study. Instead, I saw my task as looking for common patterns and characteristic traits in the experience of Ukrainian women in captivity, identifying the themes that were significant to them, and tracing typical survival tactics and common strategies of adaptation to the inhuman

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

55

conditions of the Gulag. This approach has made it possible to reconstruct a more-­or-­less holistic picture of the specifically female daily life in prison while, at the same time, at least partly grasping the personal significance of the experience. Regardless of how different in genre, style, or rhetoric these women’s stories are, collectively they complement and reinforce one another, painting a complex mosaic of the everyday lives of Ukrainian women who were imprisoned in the Gulag. As Applebaum has rightly noted, the memoirs available today belong to a fairly specific group of memoirists and do not reflect the experience of all the female prisoners. Most important is that all the authors of these memoirs survived, and they were physically and mentally healthy enough to sufficiently distance themselves from their suffering and to share their memories.40 Moreover, some memoirists were educated enough to fully narrate the events of the past in written memoirs, whereas oral stories or short notations by less educated women most often were terse and sketchy and did not reveal all the details of their experience. Almost no recollections exist from individuals who belonged to the upper classes of the prerevolutionary period, of villagers (despite their numerical predominance among the repressed), or of those guilty of the crimes of the Stalinist regime—that is, the upper echelons of the NKVD and the Gulag, investigators, camp superiors or guards, and so on.41 Also absent is testimony from those who perished, those whose means of survival was troubling from a moral and ethical viewpoint, those whom the system broke physically or psychologically, and those who were unable or unwilling to leave behind memories about what they had lived through in the camps. This effectively limits the range of this kind of study and makes it difficult to generalize about the experience of women who were political prisoners. Still, given the political circumstances at the time, the absolute majority of former political prisoners, willingly or unwillingly, remained silent for decades. People could neither describe their experiences in memoirs nor tell them to others because of the

Figure 1.6. Fragment of a handmade greeting card made of mica, which the prisoners were extracting, 12 July 1955. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 262.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

57

very real threat of further persecution and punishment. This fear, according to Sherbakova, is behind the huge gap between the number of erstwhile prisoners and the number of memoirs about the Gulag available today: she estimates that no more than about three thousand such texts exist.42 The combination of fear of public remembrance and the fact that nearly every family had its own vivid memories of political repression not only had political repercussions but actually corroded the individual memories of Soviet citizens.43 UKRAINIAN MEMOIRISTS: WHO THEY ARE AND WHY THEY WRITE In the 1970s and 1980s, Sherbakova recorded more than 250 oral histories of former Gulag prisoners and categorized them into two rough groups: the first was those who would have preferred to forget everything that had happened to them; the second was those who, consciously or not, had chosen to remember. Where the former never talked about their experiences with anyone, not even family members, the latter, even while still in captivity, had resolved firmly to preserve the memory and hand it down to their descendants, in the broadest sense.44 This sense of moral imperative to testify in the name of the entire group of Gulag prisoners often meshed with various personal motives that drove them to share their stories. For some prisoners, the decision to deliberately set as many details as possible in their memory became a way to resist the totalitarian control over information that ruled the camps. In this way, “one ceased being a victim and turned into a subversive intern, a witness-­in-­training. . . . Storing materials for prospective testimony enhanced the motivation for the struggle for survival; the writing of memoirs would be a natural sequel to this struggle.” 45 Veronica Shapovalov proposes very loosely dividing all women memoirists of the Gulag into several groups.46 The first group includes women for whom literary work was an integral

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

58

part of their lives prior to imprisonment. These were typically women from the higher classes of society who had obtained a good education and whose professional work was, in one way or another, connected with intellectual activities. These memoirists had a good sense of language, their recollections were expansive and detailed, and their writing was distinguished not only by its fine literary style but also by the quantity of reflections about the meaning of what they had lived through and philosophical musings on various existential themes. For this group, the camp experience became material for autobiographical writing. Among Ukrainian authors of this type, the best example is Surovtsova.47 Shapovalov’s second group consists of women who were not professionally associated with creative writing, but who had a good education and sought to leave their testimony either as a form of opposition to the Soviet regime or as a means to justify themselves, which was quite typical of wives of “traitors of the homeland,” who were labeled ZhIR in the Gulag system. The recollections of Oksana Meshko (1905–91) are a good example of this type of memoir.48 The third group, a fairly small one, is those memoirists who did not have strong political views at the time of their conviction and who quickly adopted the criminal rules of survival in the camps. Obviously, this kind of classification, based on a body of Russian recollections, does not capture all the variety of camp memoirs by Ukrainian women, where not a single recollection has been found that matches the features of this third group, and where numerous stories do not fit either of the other proposed categories. What I have in mind here are the memoirists who came from rural areas and had been active in the nationalist underground, for which they were sentenced to many years in prison. Moreover, their education was typically no higher than secondary or vocational school. Women like Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Vahula, and Zakydal´s´ka wrote relatively detailed memoirs that covered both periods—their underground activities and their time in the Gulag—and that are clearly dis-

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

59

tinguished by their anti-­Soviet political position. These memoirs may not have significant literary value, but, as personal testimony, they are immeasurably valuable for historical purposes. Another matter altogether, however, is that the political context and state policy around historical memory in the period during which these memoirs were written—the 1990s and the 2000s—are reflected in the rhetoric used by these memoirists. The media influence on former political prisoners also needs to be taken into account. Nanci Adler, who also recorded oral history about the Gulag, points out that after a huge wave of published memoirs about the Gulag in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the landscape of national memory shifted considerably. For one thing, many individuals had recollected events as their own that had actually happened to others. Adler explains: “For the victims of Stalinism, memory of repressions became so collective after 1988, that one has to diligently and critically explore the individual’s own experience.” 49 According to Shapovalov, former prisoners wrote down their recollections, whether consciously or not, in order to reaffirm themselves and to bridge the gap with the society from which they had been excluded for so long, so as to restore damaged connections.50 Moreover, given that the totalitarian regime was determined to destroy the identities of Gulag prisoners, for some of its survivors, “writing was one of the ways to preserve self-­ identity and dignity.” 51 Such observations are entirely justified when it comes to Ukrainian memoirists, too. In analyzing personal recollections, especially written ones, the personal motivations of the writer to put down on paper everything that she had gone through matter: what pushed her to share her experience, to whom was she addressing it primarily, and how all of this affected the form and content of the narrative itself. As Vladislav Pocheptsov notes, “the memoirist writes in the awareness of the objective to which his text is subordinate. He is also aware that this text will most likely be read and so he orients himself toward his potential reader.” 52

Figure 1.7. Camp album with embroidered cover belonging to Liuba BarabashBilyns´ka, n.d. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

62

Some memoirists clearly place before themselves a didactic and educational purpose, so that their recollections might serve as a lesson and provide moral guidance. Others genuinely want to document what they have lived through, to describe it, to be witness to what has taken place. Some memoirs have a clear political purpose and are effectively testimony condemning the Soviet totalitarian regime.53 For the most part, the Ukrainian women whose memoirs about the Gulag are available today explain, in one manner or another, what prompted them to record what they have undergone and what they see as the purpose behind publishing such recollections. However, the stated purpose of a given memoir does not always completely correspond to its actual content. Let us look at the motives that the authors of some of the lengthier memoirs offered for having written their recollections and the actual thematic priorities of their narratives. Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka (b. 1924) spent ten years in the Gulag and considered her memoirs, written at the turn of this century, to be a kind of lesson and testimony, as well as a historical document for future generations: I leave these recollections to my descendants, not for the purpose of vengeance, but so that they might understand that our independence did not fall from Heaven like manna but was fought for over the course of centuries. . . . We should know our own history, written by [Ukraine’s] best sons [sic], and not by those who subjugated us.54

The patriotic fervor of the last lines of this camp memoir is not accidental: the author starts her narrative with a brief recounting of her family, her education, the evolution of her Ukrainian consciousness, and her participation in the nationalist underground, by way of explaining her clear political position against the Soviet regime. During the course of her writing, the theme of national solidarity in the camps and the ideological

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

63

confrontation between Ukrainian political prisoners and representatives of the regime loom. Memoirist Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) (b. 1925), Zakydal´s´ka’s fellow member of the nationalist underground, spent eleven years in the camps. She concluded her autobiographical book in 1999 with an exhortation to the entire nation: My dear Ukrainian people! I address you and beg you to love your country, your homeland, because nothing can replace it. . . . Remember what freedom is, so that neither you nor your children will ever have to live through such a nightmare. Only brotherly love and unity will help you prevent such a tragedy! 55

This call to patriotism and national solidarity shows that she sees the mission of her recollections as didactic: her experience is intended to be a lesson for young Ukrainians. Yet her actual narrative, which starts with her arrests and ends with the moment she finally returns to Ukraine, cannot really be called politicized. She writes primarily about various aspects of the everyday life of the camp, without reflecting on the regime, ideology, totalitarianism, and so on. One might presume that her declared motive was more a tribute to the political situation, which made it possible to legitimize the public telling of her very personal history, something that even the title of the work, Meni bulo 19 (I Was 19), suggests. Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk (b. 1919) wrote her 2002 memoir under the title Zaruchnytsia imperiï (Hostage of the Empire). She begins her story with reflections about the purpose of her memories: “I did not intend to write about how I lived my long life, what I experienced and learned in my life, but maybe it’s necessary, so that some of the younger generation growing up today might understand both us and the times in which we lived, what we were trying to achieve, and why.” 56 In this way, she presents a completely different motive: the search for understanding in a society that has had no lived experience of repression, a quest

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

64

for societal acceptance of onetime political prisoners. Although the themes of patriotism, national self-­awareness, and political confrontation do occasionally come up in her narrative, there are neither excessive sentiments nor depictions of epic heroism and self-­sacrifice. The authors of the foreword and afterword to Polina Benoni’s (b. 1923) memoirs see the purpose of the publication as conveying the truth about Stalinist political repressions so that new generations might avoid a replay of such crimes. The memoirist herself, on the other hand, notes in her concluding comments that her recollections are testimony to crimes against an entire nation and reflect a moral obligation to those who died in the camps: “What am I writing this for? Do I have the right to remain silent? I was not the only one to suffer. Thousands suffered. . . . To those who have gone to eternity, I pay my last respects to their bright memory.” 57 That the author feels empowered to testify on behalf of the community of victims of the Gulag is also evident in her title: Taka nasha hirka pravda (Such Is Our Bitter Truth). Mariia Vahula (b. 1926) felt a similar mission and responsibility before God and her descendants to preserve her personal testimony about what she had lived through. She speaks about this motivation very clearly in the brief preamble to her own recollections, called Moia doroha (My Path; my emphasis here).58 Still, toward the end, the memoirist cautions that her recollections are intended only for a narrow circle of family and friends, not for a broader audience. She goes on to say that she sees her own participation in the historical struggle for an independent Ukraine as “a miniscule part that. . . does not merit special attention.” 59 As noted in the editor’s foreword, Dariia Korchak’s (b. 1933) Pobachene i perezhyte (What I Saw and What I Lived through) was written at the request of Korchak’s children and with the active participation of her family and close friends, who then “consulted, argued, carefully thought through every word.” 60 In effect, this collective process of writing casts some doubt on the authenticity of the memories. The selection of themes and

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

65

subjects, the detail level of the story, the meaningful emphases, the vocabulary, and the structure of sentences were all choices that were potentially made under outside influence, so the result might not be a truly original representation of personal experience, that is, not a proper primary source. On the other hand, this memoir is very similar to other narratives in terms of structure, contents, and style. The author of the foreword to Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna’s (b. 1924) memoir, entitled Nam duzhe treba zhyty (We Really Need to Live), tries to explain the motives behind and the meaning of Potykevych-­Zabolotna’s narrative, rather than leaving this job up to the memoirist herself: “She is convinced that prisoners of conscience need to live a long time in order to finally sincerely, openly, and truthfully tell about everything.” 61 Recognizing the impossibility of writing about everything that was experienced, the author of the foreword nevertheless declares such memoirs to be enormously valuable, as “altogether, they provide the testimony of eyewitnesses that will one day be used by the Court of History.” 62 As it turns out, this onetime prisoner wrote a significant body of poems and songs while imprisoned, some of which actually became camp folklore: other former political prisoners even mention them in their own memoirs. In this sense, treating Potykevych-­Zabolotna as the voice of the entire prison community seems quite justified. One set of recollections, by Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk (b. 1922), was published under the title Za Ukraïnu! Za ïï voliu! (For Ukraine! For Her Freedom!). Having spent ten years in the Gulag, Slobodian-­Kovaliuk wrote her memoirs bit by bit between 1998 and 2010 as a compilation of thematic sketches about episodes she had gone through, as well as individual events and people from her years in the nationalist underground and imprisonment. These do not follow a chronological story line. The book is filled with nationalistic fervor, replete with patriotic appeals and slogans, and the discourse is nicely supported by visual elements:

Figure 1.8. Fragment of a handmade Christmas card by Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, 20 December 1955. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/9.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

67

the cover contains an image of the monument to Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian flag, and the red-­and-­black flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Appealing to the younger generation, the author encourages patriotism: To posterity! I leave you my testament: Do not be tempted by wealth or by Judas’s pieces of silver to betray your homeland and your friends. . . . Protect and love Ukraine with all your heart and soul, just as she was loved by Taras Shevchenko and Lesia Ukraїnka. . . and all the known and unknown Heroes of the liberation movement.63

An erstwhile member of the nationalist underground, Ievheniia Andrusiak (b. 1919), who also spent ten years in the Gulag, was the wife of one of the legendary officers—sotnyk—of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Vasyl´ Andrusiak. She explains that she was influenced by her son to write her memoirs: I wrote my memoirs in 1990 at the request of my son, whom I had tried to find for eleven long years. I wanted people to know more about my husband, Vasyl´, as a person and not just a soldier. . . . When I told my son everything about his father in 1989, he said: “Write it all down, so that it will be there for your grandchildren.” For me, this was an enormous joy.64

In fact, the story about her husband is not the only or even the main plot line in her memoirs but is naturally woven into the autobiographical narrative. Andrusiak talks about her own life: her family, upbringing and education, the romance with her beloved, and their marriage in the underground. She describes her own participation in the nationalist movement, the travails of insurgent life, and so on. But the main part of the memoirs is not directly connected to her husband and fellow partisan: nearly one-­third of the text is about her imprisonment, and another fifth of the text is about searching for her son and getting him

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

68

back after he had been taken away from her as an infant in a remand prison. These two topics add up to a bit more than half the memoir. In short, the author’s declared motives and purpose in writing her memoirs are more nominal than actual. Not long in size, about twenty-­five pages, the memoirs of prison life by another underground member, Anna Hoshko-­Kit (b. 1926), were first published in 1990 and have been reprinted several times since then in various periodicals and collections. They provide no clue about her motives for writing and publishing.65 At the same time, this memoirist is distinguished for her active civic position and strong nationalist conviction: in the 1990s, she regularly published articles on patriotic themes in the press, wrote and published open letters to Ukraine’s political and spiritual leadership, and penned recollections about members of the nationalist underground whom fate had once connected her with. Given such a background, patriotic rhetoric might be expected in her recollections of the Gulag. Instead, the main motif in her narrative is the drama of motherhood that she witnessed behind bars, embellished with sketches of camp life and portraits of her sisterhood of the wretched. The author of one of the longest memoirs by a former political, Halyna Kokhans´ka (b. 1925), was also once involved in the underground and spent eleven years in the Gulag camps. She began writing her recollections after Ukraine had announced its independence in 1991, not long before her own death in July 1993. In the very short foreword, she explained her decision to do so: The historical events of those years are assessed by different people based on their own feelings, often without any understanding of or even any desire to understand the ideas and the reasons that forced us to act one way or another in this very difficult time in our struggle. . . . Without any doubt, some have assessed it correctly, while others will object and judge us. If I manage to properly illuminate fragments of our people’s struggle for freedom and independence, then I will feel that I have reached my objective and

Figure 1.9. “Oh Mary, Mother of God, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, pray for us!” Embroidered icon by Mariia Bereza, made at the Lviv Prison, 1946. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

70

paid at least a tiny part of my duty of honor to those who gave up their lives for this struggle.66

The nearly 150 pages of her history as a prisoner offer detailed stories about various aspects of life in the camps. Even the death of Stalin did not inspire her to reflect on political or ideological issues. Instead, she focuses on the changes in the camp regimen and the condition of the prisoners as a result of this event. This stands in stark contrast with the first, larger part of Kokhans´ka’s memoirs which is dedicated to her own participation in the activities of the armed insurgency as a convinced nationalist and the broader issues of national liberation efforts. Kyivite Oksana Khrashchevs´ka (b. 1925) was arrested in 1945, when she was still a student at the Medical Institute, because of her links to OUN. She was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. She decided to write down her recollections of life as a prisoner when she was already elderly, at the end of the 1990s. Her book distinguishes itself by its considerable literary skill, level of detail, and realistic descriptions of episodes. In contrast to other memoirists, she does not offer any reasons for her decision to write. This memoir is further unique in that, in addition to the book itself, there is an internet page in Ukrainian, English, and Russian that provides a biographical note about the author, some fragments of her recollections, a gallery of documentary photos, and reader feedback.67 This website makes clear that either the author herself or her family recognized the value of her testimony and ensured that it would reach a broader circle of readers. Born in the same year as Khrashchevs´ka, Lvivian Oleksandra Blavats´ka was a student at the conservatory in June 1946 when she was given the same sentence, although she had never personally cooperated with the OUN. She began to put down her recollections of life in prison, including the painful experience of motherhood, only in 1995, at the insistence of her own daughter, Vira Bilevych, who was born in a camp. Bilevych only published her mother’s memoir in 2010. In her foreword to the book, she explains that her mother was categorically against the

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

71

idea of publishing the testimony of what she had lived through, “explaining that she was herself never a hero and that there had been millions like her. . . . In the end, Mama gave me permission to dispose of the memoir as I saw fit—but only after her death.” 68 Unlike the memoirs of other former prisoners from western Ukraine, Blavats´ka’s writing is completely lacking in nationalist fervor, showing, instead, the ambiguous relations among Ukrainian women in the camps, including their unwillingness to get close to the Russian women. In addition, Blavats´ka is possibly the only Ukrainian memoirist who, at least briefly, mentions homosexual relations between imprisoned women. Compared to other memoirs, the recollections of Surovtsova and Meshko stand apart. Born in 1896, Surovtsova was a highly educated woman who completed her doctorate at the University of Vienna. A staunch Marxist, she deliberately returned to the USSR in 1925 to work in a series of managerial posts in the education and arts system. She was arrested in 1927 and imprisoned until 1954. Having a knack for belles lettres and some experience in literary work, Surovtsova put together possibly the longest, most detailed, and most complex memoir of the Gulag. Unlike most of the Ukrainian women who left behind written or oral recollections of the Gulag, Surovtsova did not share any nationalistic beliefs, and so there is none of that rhetoric in her memoirs. In explaining her own reason for writing down her memories, Surovtsova wrote in her foreword: In order to write, you have to understand what you are writing about. To know from personal experience and that of the broadest number of other people. Then your work will be useful. For whom? Well, if you’re not afraid of strong words, then for all of humanity, starting with those closest to you: the people of your land. Only then can you and maybe even must you write. . . . Fate granted me a long sojourn in this life, and I want it to be creative in the final analysis, so that an eyewitness and participant may record everything that will always be foreign to those who only watched

Figure 1.10. “G.J.C. [Glory to Jesus Christ] Recollections from captivity.” Embroidery by Lesia Vorobii, made at a prison in Lviv, 1947. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

73

from the sidelines. . . . I don’t philosophize in my work. I simply make note of everything that I saw and experienced. And if there is a main purpose here, then it’s only to show how, over thirty hard years, a person can still maintain a burning love for the idea, how one can remain a communist even after having suffered everything that I write about.69

At least three factors inspired Surovtsova to write down her memories: the need for creative self-­fulfillment through literary work after so many lost decades in the Gulag, the urge to bear witness before humanity and her fellow citizens to the crimes of the regime, and the desire to demonstrate her moral position and commitment to her own beliefs. Despite her denial that she is not “philosophizing,” the memoirist devotes a fair amount of space to existential ruminations about the value of her experience, about what she had seen and lived through, about a person facing extreme life circumstances, and so on. But Surovtsova extremely rarely meditates on communist ideals or other politically oriented reflections in the memoir, even in those places that are about her experience in prison. The story of Oksana Meshko, born in 1905, is especially interesting because she was first arrested in 1947 on completely fictitious grounds—preparing an assassination attempt against Nikita Khrushchev—and spent seven years in the Gulag. From the memoir, it becomes clear that, at the time of her original arrest, Meshko had no strong political convictions, but, starting in the early 1970s, she grew into a staunch human rights activist, a world-­renowned dissident, and an opponent of the totalitarian regime. As an old woman, she would cofound the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Meshko’s recollections were first published in English and in the West, in a series of issues of the Ukrainian Review in 1979 and then in a separate book.70 Only in 1991, after the author’s death, did her memoirs appear in Ukrainian.71 What makes this memoir unique is that it is not limited to the author’s first imprisonment but also retells various later periods in which she was engaged

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

74

in dissident work. In her closing words, Meshko explains her decision to tell about her life to others: I wrote my memoirs with the understanding that I had a civic duty to establish at least an outline of what I had experienced and survived in my not-­so-­long but difficult life, one in which I knew neither a happy youth nor a peaceful old age. I have neither the skill nor the strength, and probably never would have dared to write, out of sheer self-­respect and self-­deprecation—and that feeling of abashment that people should never, ever lose. . . . My plan is one to which I was pushed by the endless attacks and repressions of those in power and, most of all, the KGB. The conditions under which I was forced to write determined the speed and weakness of this work. I write everything from my own memory and the memory of people who had a similar fate. . . . I was determined to write the pure truth and genuine feelings of people whose fate was the same as mine and to spite our dreadful misfortune.72

Critical of her own writerly skills, Meshko explained her intentions to write down what she had gone through as a desire to leave her own trustworthy—something she emphasizes—testimony against a regime that she was in open confrontation with. In this way, her autobiographical story takes on the features of a public political act. The memoirist’s political convictions and a civic position held during the period in which she wrote her memoir, the 1980s, left their imprint on her discursive strategy: time and again in her narration, criticism of the Soviet regime comes up and condemnations of its punitive agencies are illustrated through specific situations, incidents, and individuals. Against the backdrop of other women’s recollections about the Soviet Gulag, the memoirs of Ukrainian Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak (b. 1924) differ dramatically. Karwańska-­Bajlak was involved in the nationalist underground on Polish territory, where she was sentenced for political crimes and spent time in Polish prisons. She divided her memoir into three parts: youth and involvement in the

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

75

Ukrainian nationalist underground, imprisonment, and life after her release. Unlike most memoirists, she writes in considerable detail, not just about what she experienced in the underground and in prison, but also about her fate afterward. In her foreword, Karwańska-­Bajlak explains that she was urged and inspired to record her recollections by friends who also helped restore the memory of forgotten episodes and facts, but she does not state any clear goal or purpose to her memoirs: “Perhaps I will dare, after all: Now I step onto that trail of recollection, fragile as a person’s memory. I return and go forward, as I once did, in Your name, Ukraine!” 73 The author writes as though she is dedicating her memoirs to Ukraine. Still, her narrative does not stand out as having an excess of patriotic rhetoric, but rather contains primarily autobiographical details about the life path of the woman, with only snippets of reflection on the national theme. To summarize, some common features exist among the Ukrainian women who were political prisoners and later wrote memoirs of the Gulag. First of all, their stated motives and goals for transcribing their recollections are generally political or ideological, but in most cases these goals are not supported by the content of their narratives. On the contrary, regardless of the authors’ political convictions, the texts tend to be autobiographical recountings of their lives, the circumstances that they personally lived through, their fate, and impressions of those whom they met on their life path, detailed and reflective to greater or lesser degrees. At the same time, they consider their personal experience to be representative of their entire generation: “When I talk about myself, I mean my generation, although each of us had her own fate.” 74 Second, just about every one of the memoirists, in one way or another, sees her recollections as a personal testimony, as documentary confirmation of that which she had to keep silent about for decades, a history about which the average person was unaware. At the same time, the memoir is a means of coming to

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

76

terms with her social environment, of restoring ties with the society from which she was torn and to which it was extremely hard to return—precisely because the general public had no idea what she had to endure. Third, the memoirists, whether consciously or not, tend to consider the literary value of their work as less important than its value as a historical document, separately emphasizing the truth of their testimony, their own reliability as witnesses to the events being depicted, and their writing as a historical record, often with reference to “the duty to leave my descendants the story of my generation, not in theory, but as it was in real life.” 75 Whatever the motives, methods, and conditions under which the women wrote down their recollections of life as political prisoners, the memoirs have all gained the status of personal testimony by survivors, addressed to posterity as a warning and a lesson. THEMATIC FOCI AND LACUNAE IN WOMEN’S NARRATIVES ABOUT THE GULAG Scholars note a certain monotypic quality to memoirs about the Gulag, because of which they, “with some variations of a geographic and temporal nature, seem to merge into a single hypertext with more additions, continuations, clarifications, and sometimes even the same heroes.” 76 What’s more, often enough “wandering plots” appear in the recollections that are fairly similar stories about extremely similar situations, sometimes retold almost word for word. Although folklorists tend to see in this kind of repetitious subjects the signs of a “folklorized” narrative, in the case of former Gulag prisoners, there’s every reason to believe that all these women really did endure the same or extremely similar situations, found themselves in the same circumstances, witnessed similar scenes, and were impressed by and remembered the same kinds of events. This pattern is especially noticeable in recollections about the details of daily life in the camps: the prisoner transport, the

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

77

transfers, the living conditions, the work, the daily routines, hygiene, searches, and food—all of this became an integral part of their lives for many years. The monotypic experience may have emerged in this way: having recognized their experience in stories of the Gulag that they read or heard, the former prisoners, knowingly or not, used the words of others to explain their own life in the Gulag, taking advantage of ready-­made (and more effective) phrases to narrate their own experience.77 Indeed, this kind of repetitiousness and high frequency of certain details create the effect of a verification, as every subsequent story confirms the ones that came before.78 Having analyzed a large number of camp memoirs, Leona Toker identified nine recurring themes in the recollections of former political prisoners. Moreover, as the researcher confirms, at least seven of them can be recognized in every memoir.79 1.

Arrest: The scene or situation around the arrest is an integral part of all memoirs by political prisoners. This theme is typically depicted through a description of the harshness of the workers of the repressive system, yet it also includes stories of goodness and humaneness, and it ends at the moment the sentence is handed down and the transfer to the place of imprisonment begins.

2. Dignity: The memoirists describe those aspects of their prison and camp experience that humiliated them, highlighting not only the physical violence, but also the intolerable conditions in which prisoners were kept and the contemptuous attitude of camp personnel, and in this way separating themselves from the ethical culture of the totalitarian regime and emphasizing the baseness of the torturers. 3. Stages: Following literary traditions, the memoirs are typically organized into chapters that encompass the various periods of being in a given location, whether prisons or camps,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

78

and the transits between one facility and another. It was common practice to move prisoners around from location to location, and every such episode was a breaking point in camp experiences: it meant a departure from friends, a long, exhausting road, intolerable conditions in transit, and painful adjustments to new conditions. Narratives in which every phase is separately reconstructed tend to be more detailed. 4. Escape: The dream of a physical escape is common among men’s memoirs and common in the memoirs of prisoners of the 1920s and early 1930s, when such attempts were realistic. Escape in the metaphorical sense—into one’s own imagination, memories, dreams, creative expression—is typical for memoirs of prisoners of both sexes. Nearly all prisoners believed that preserving their mental health and a clear mind was the true escape from the regime. For many, deliberate memory-­ making and the accumulation of facts about the topography and functioning of the camp for future testimony were the means to maintain their sanity. 5. Moments of reprieve: These are points in the story when the narrator focuses on small pleasures or joyful moments in camp life, such as an unexpected rest, a chance to wash, a piece of bread, some display of kindness, a letter from home, or an important conversation. The rhetorical function of such inclusions is to neutralize the risk that readers will become accustomed to the violence and thus encourage a continuous emotional response from the reader. “The narrative pulsates, downward to exhaustion and upward to recuperation, downward to acute suffering and upward to relief. Whether this rhetorical orientation is intuitive or deliberate, the pulsating approach stems from the very nature of the Gulag experience.” 80

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

79

6. Orwellian Room 101, or “untidy spots”: These are the most horrific experiences of camp and prison for the memoirist, such as certain kinds of suffering, baseness, and atrocities, events that the author cannot “see,” that she tends to turn away from and not describe. This kind of avoidance is most often connected to situations in which the author desperately tried to survive or was partly or indirectly complicit, and these emerge rhetorically in a silence or terseness that lets the reader sense gaps in the narrative. Sometimes the testimony of prisoners fills in such “untidy spots” in the testimonies of others, effectively adding details and providing a fuller picture of camp life. The more “successful” the camp fate of a prisoner was, the more lacunae will tend to show up in her testimony. In other words, Gulag memoirs are never self-­contained or complete. They always contain gaps between text and context, some of which will never be filled in. 7. Chance: In the eyes of the prisoners, survival depended on lucky breaks as much as it did on physical endurance or moral fortitude; whatever chance helped an individual tended to feed into their perception of themselves as a person who was fundamentally special or chosen. Unexpected help or rescue is often presented in the memoirs as a manifestation of national solidarity. 8. The zone within the larger zone: In some stories in their recollections, memoirists compare the rules and practices of the Gulag system with real life in the USSR, suggesting a general resemblance between the totalitarian regime in the camps and the regime outside them, with only one difference: in the camps everything became more concentrated and acute. Such reflections are most often about the guards at the camps and the people of nearby settlements, with flashes of humanity and kindness among the guards often

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

80

contrasted to examples of cruelty and heartlessness among both the former and the latter. 9. End-­of-­term fatigue: Many of the memoirs end with the release of the author, while the return home and reintegration are described laconically, skipped altogether, or left for another occasion. Former prisoners also tend to recollect very little about their final weeks or months prior to being released, describing them very stingily. Whereas the first months after their arrest are generally presented in great detail, the final period is marked more by impatient anticipation of freedom and anxiety over the possibility that their sentence might be extended. The written and oral recollections of Ukrainian women about the Gulag largely confirm scholars’ generalizations about how women verbalize what they have undergone.81 Shapovalov points to noticeable gender distinctions in narratives, saying that whereas recollections written by women, in her opinion, have more of a confessional nature and a certain kind of intimacy, “male memoirists are oriented to a greater degree than women to global events and link the assessment of their own lives with broader political cataclysms.” 82 This difference is the result of two factors: there were no established canons for women’s camp memoirs, and most weren’t primarily intended for publication. In addition, Sherbakova has made note of several other characteristics, including that “women memoirists tend to be more emotional.” 83 As a rule, women describe in much fuller detail the everyday routine of the prisons and concentration camps, the clothing, and the appearance and character of people; they speak more calmly and with more detachment about the tortures and agonies they had to bear; and they are franker about emotional and sexual life in the camps. . . . Men, by contrast, are more reserved. They more often

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

81

highlight a moment of personal humiliation. . . . Men also usually give more detailed and elaborate descriptions of work, occasionally illustrated by drawings; and they sometimes have a better memory of the names of people they met and of dates.84

Of course, these conclusions are based on a study of Russian recollections and would need to be carefully verified against the body of Ukrainian memoirs, especially with regard to the comparison of men’s and women’s narratives, which lies outside the scope of this study. Although all the listed themes and specifics of camp narratives, in one way or another, appear in the memoirs of Ukrainian women prisoners, these texts have a number of features that distinguish them from the Russian memoirs that are more familiar to most scholars, as will be shown in detail in subsequent chapters. One important element in the Gulag memoirs of Ukrainian women is the pervasive motif of confrontation with the Soviet system and resistance to the camp regime: in nearly every story, we can find references to separate incidents of disobedience, deliberate violations of rules, organized protests, and so on, driven by the excessive severity of the administration, the intolerable conditions, blatant violations of the pitiful rights that prisoners were granted, or various abuses. At the apogee of such recollections are stories about the camp uprisings of 1953–54, in which Ukrainian women played an active role.85 This topic significantly differentiates the Ukrainian body of women’s memoirs about the camps from the more numerous and voluminous Russian ones, in which the theme of resistance is atypical. This divide is explained by social differences between the two groups of memoirists. Whereas the Russian women who left behind memoirs about the camps were mostly sentenced in the 1920s and 1930s, and a significant proportion—as wives of “traitors of the homeland” or as members of the intelligentsia or party elite—did not act in open opposition to the Soviet government, the majority of the Ukrainian women were sentenced for anti-­Soviet activity, mainly for cooperating with the nationalist

Figure 1.11. Camp album of Ol´ha Diakovs´ka, put together at a camp in Mordovia, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

84

underground. Therefore, they often had firm political convictions and world views, and they positioned themselves accordingly in the camps. Possibly the only exception to this rule are the memoirs of Surovtsova, who was a dyed-­in-­the-­wool Marxist. Meshko’s memoirs are a special case: she was arrested on trumped-­up political charges and became an active opponent of the Soviet regime only after she came to the Gulag. Just about all the women’s recollections feature the theme of friendship among prisoners, including mutual support and help, amounting to a kind of “camp sisterhood.” Women write often and in detail about incidents when friends supported them, helped them get through the most difficult moments, and even saved their lives. In the memoirs of Ukrainian women, a typical issue is solidarity, both one based on the women’s ethnic belonging and also, in a broader way, that among women of different ethnicities. Imprisonment made female solidarity an effective way to survive and oppose the regime, and the women recall with pride how they overcame difficulties together and gained moral victories over their enemies—the convoy escorts, the camp administrators, and even the criminal element in the prison population itself. The recollections of one former resistance member, Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna (b. 1929), are full of stories about her sisters in misfortune, who, in the words of the memoirist, unfailingly supported her morally and materially from her first days in prison and surrounded her with care, worried about her health, and helped her avoid the worst situations, right up until her release. These stories glow with love and gratefulness.86 Only two stories, about unworthy women, stand in contrast to this theme: one was a provocateur, and the other betrayed Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna. This kind of disproportion is fairly typical of the memoirs of Ukrainian women and creates a lasting impression of the rareness of unworthy individuals or deeds, against a background of predominant and ubiquitous nobility, solidarity, and mutual support among the women—which probably does not reflect the reality of camp relationships.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

85

Gulag memoirs by Ukrainian women are full of stories about sister prisoners whom the memoirists met in captivity. The memoirists often describe their appearance and their social background—ethnicity, age, the reason for their arrest, their marital status, and so on. They also go into detail about their character, relations with other prisoners, creative abilities, various kinds of knowledge and skills that proved useful in the camps, and their later fates. A classic example of this theme is found in Surovtsova’s recollections, in which the former Gulag prisoner finds room even for those with whom she managed to spend only a few days in one cell. In her memoirs, she provides numerous short sketches about other imprisoned women who played no significant role in her life. Here are just two such excerpts about brief encounters in the Sverdlovsk and Irkutsk prisons: I also met a little gypsy girl. Her entire family had been arrested: her dancer mother, her traveling actor father, and, as far as I know, a brother as well. She was about seventeen. Black eyes, a slender figure, and curly hair. She was grieving, and I convinced her that she would for sure meet her mother again. “My mother is so good, she dances and sings a lot! And she wears a wide silver bracelet on her arm. If you meet, let her know I’m alive.” Then the flow of people shifted again, and the gypsy disappeared. We left the second day, if I remember correctly.87 Sofa Pauchel, a German from Königsberg, was a political immigrant. Her husband was editor of some paper in the Urals and also a communist. She was striking, unusually beautiful with a wild, black and silver head of hair. . . . Pauchel came from a wealthy family and had married a communist, breaking off relations with her family because it would not accept her world view. The two emigrated to the Soviet Union, where they were welcomed with open arms and the husband was sent to work for the Party in the Urals. There, bad luck struck the two.88

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

86

Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) even included in her book of memoirs a separate chapter of brief biographical notes and portraits of her camp friends and a bit of information about where and how they got to know each other.89 Such “portrait galleries” in women’s prison memoirs make possible a deeper understanding about the demographics of the prisoners and about the life trajectories of those who did not leave behind any memoirs. But in Toker’s estimation, the most important function of such sketches is this: “The memoirists attempt to save the images of separate individuals from oblivion—opposing the authorities’ drive towards the erasure of the names of their victims from history.” 90 Indeed, including the stories of other women in their own memoirs is yet another confirmation of female solidarity—caring about the remembrance of others. To a significant extent, the specifics of women’s experience in captivity are tied to the very nature of a woman’s body. The subject of a woman’s body and sexuality is among the most taboo in the Ukrainian women’s memoirs. It belongs to those “untidy spots” that memoirists prefer to avoid. Mentions of the loss of bodily integrity and of sexualized violence as forced nudity, body searches, voyeurism, and so on, are presented very tersely and filled with negative emotion. In contrast to Russian women, who, according to Sherbakova, are fairly open about sexual life in the camps,91 Ukrainian women extremely rarely talk about their camp experience in this area. Even when they turn to this kind of subject matter, Ukrainian memoirists tend to self-­censor substantially, most often by limiting themselves to a few short phrases, hints, and euphemisms. On the one hand, this evasiveness is partly a reflection of social conventions, with public discussion of such intimate issues by women considered de mauvais ton, which, for the memoirists, led to problems with verbalizing what they had experienced. On the other hand, it can be assumed that the camp experience of women—and of young girls, as they often were at the time of their imprisonment—as connected to their bodies was

Figure 1.12. Embroidered canvas greeting card cover on the occasion of a friend’s birthday, made at a camp in Inta, 25 July 1951. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5076.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

88

very ­painful and imbued with humiliation and feelings of shame and guilt that caused the women to avoid bringing up sexual life in the camps at all.92 Although nearly every female prisoner in a camp was at risk of being raped,93 there is not a single mention in the available memoirs of Ukrainian women that something like that might have happened to them: the memoirists limit their descriptions to incidents that they witnessed or to unsuccessful attempts to violate their bodies. It is safe to assume that quite a few Ukrainian women were, in fact, raped or subjected to sexualized violence and abuse, but this area remains a gap in their recollections of the Gulag—either because such incidents were simply repressed in their memories or because they deliberately suppressed them due to the traumatic nature of the experience. References to nontraditional sexual behavior are also rare, although lesbianism was widespread in the camps, especially among the criminal elements.94 Yet this topic is almost completely left out of the memoirs of female Ukrainian political prisoners, with the odd mention here and there void of specific details. Another problematic area in women’s recollections about the Gulag is the experience of motherhood in prison. Women who were pregnant or had infants in their arms when they were put behind bars typically describe the difficulties they lived through in considerable detail. Such stories are emotionally intense, conveying the anxieties the mothers felt for their babies and their despair over not being able to properly care for their children. Such recollections contain fairly common stories about the difficulty of transit, the intolerable living conditions for mothers and infants, the unsatisfactory nature or complete absence of medical services, and the drama of separation. By contrast, those prisoners whose children were left behind in freedom speak very little about motherhood during this period. For them, it clearly remained a painful topic because of the pangs of guilt before their children, longing for these children, worries about what would happen to them, and feelings of helplessness.

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

89

The prisoners who by force of circumstances observed mothers and children up close in the camps wrote a lot and in considerable detail in their memoirs about the conditions under which mothers kept and cared for their infants, about the rules for mothers to interact with their infants, and about the further fate of such women and their children. Childless women wrote quite copiously about the mothers and children whose paths crossed theirs while behind bars, and while their views are somewhat distanced and pragmatic, they convey a definite sense of empathy. Overall, since caring for children in the camps and prisons was solely the duty of women, women’s memoirs are effectively the only source for studying the condition of the prisoners’ children and the functioning of nurseries and children’s homes attached to penitentiary institutions. In all their memoirs, Ukrainian women present themselves as the main agents and active participants in the life of the camp: they resisted the regime in various ways and they tried to preserve their sense of dignity and to maintain an intact personality under inhuman conditions, exhausting work, hunger, cold, disease, and physical and psychological violence.95 Shapovalov notes: “In most instances, these women wrote with the goal of self-­affirmation, although not all of them may have been aware of this.” 96 The memoirs of Ukrainian women also confirm an observation by Sherbakova: “Women see themselves as generally better able to adapt to imprisonment and they much more often stress the crucial importance of friendship and human relationships in this.” 97 Consciously or not, the women write about various forms and manifestations of their agency: from individual, spontaneous acts that reestablished traditional gender roles and practices, to the development of certain common patterns of behavior or deliberate strategies that, in various ways, helped them survive and at the same time were an expression of resistance to the destructive impact of the regime. Despite being so fragmentary, women’s memoirs of the Gulag, taken together and combined with other kinds of documents—official and personal papers,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

90

statistics, and demographic data—form an invaluable source for reconstructing women’s experience of the Gulag. THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THIS STUDY The focus of my study is on the daily lives of the women prisoners, meaning primarily the habitual and the ordinary, as opposed to the extraordinary, unusual, exceptional, celebratory, ritual, or elitist.98 The focus is on examining the stories about this everyday life, seeing what is repetitive, regular, and habitual, and what constitutes the style and means of life of various social groups, including their emotional reactions to life events and the motives behind their behavior.99 Although everyday life is often defined in contrast to emergency situations, extreme circumstances can turn into the everyday when something exceptional or atypical continues for a long stretch of time, becoming the repetitive, regular, and usual context of quotidian life.100 This kind of extraordinary ordinariness can be a war, a revolution, a famine, or imprisonment—a framework within which the necessary daily routines and repetitive practices gradually take shape.101 A survey of the everyday—housing, clothing, food, activities, and so on—is just the beginning stage of research, the main purpose of which is to understand a group’s way of life and thinking (its motives and aspirations, concerns and expectations) and to comprehend the meanings with which its members filled their daily actions, behavior, and practices.102 As Sheila Fitzpatrick has observed, “Recent studies of everyday life focus on practice—that is, the forms of behavior and strategies of survival and advancement that people develop to cope with particular social and political situations.” 103 Nataliia Pushkareva, a well-­known Russian scholar of women’s histories, emphasizes that studies of the everyday need to be gender sensitive because the daily lives and related historical experience of men and women can differ substantially, even when all other social, cultural, and historical parameters and contexts

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

91

converge.104 Following in the footsteps of Anna Belova, I examine precisely what is everyday in the lives of women, such as: “the means of living and surviving in all kinds of ways, forms, and spheres, and manifestations of noninstitutionalized female experience: reflected upon, mental, verbal and physical, emotional, cultural and symbolic, economic, religious, sexual, and so on.” 105 Precisely because this study is focused on the everyday life of women who were prisoners, on those practices that were repeated from day to day or with a certain regularity and that generally formed the routine of their camp existence, it does not separately cover the camp uprisings of 1953–54, which obviously were exceptional events in the Gulag and sharply contrasted with the everyday. The central concept of my study is the idea of women’s agency, which sees women as proactive, effective subjects in the historical process, and proper participants in History whose experience happens to have a gender aspect.106 In the broader sense, agency means the capacity of an individual to act independently and to make free choices in contrast to institutions in which such factors as social status, gender, religion, age, and ethnicity will tend to restrict or determine opportunities to act.107 There is a dialectical link between institution and agency, as they mutually define each other. Thus, writes Lata Mani, “structures of domination are best understood if we can grasp how we remain agents even in the moments in which we are being intimately, viciously oppressed.” 108 Structure is understood as the set of social rules and resources that simultaneously limit the agency of individuals and provide opportunities for agency.109 Therefore, actors—the agents of acts—and their acts need to be viewed within the matching structural contexts, and the relationship between the two must be analyzed. In the present case, the Gulag is the structure. Joan W. Scott warns historians against focusing excessively on the role of those structures that assign and define the situations and status for realizing agency, saying that such an approach

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

92

makes it impossible to see in historical subjects autonomous individuals who act out of their own free will.110 And yet, scholars have also admitted that distinct physical objects and their properties affect agents and determine the direction and course of an action.111 Within the feminist approach to studying women’s historical experience, the notion of agency has proven productive and has become firmly entrenched.112 In this book, I follow the feminist approach of Scott, for whom “the central aspect of this approach is the exclusive focus on female agency, on the causal role played by women in their history, and on the qualities of women’s experience that sharply distinguish it from men’s experience.” Scott also believes that historians must “make women a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative. . . . The mission of [feminist] authors remains to construct women as historical subjects.” 113 The notion of agency is often connected to individuality, freedom, motivation, will, choice, initiative, action, creativity, purpose, intention, and more.114 However, the main characteristics of agency are intentionality, power (resources and capabilities), and rationality.115 Agency manifests itself in various action scripts, the opportunities for which are predetermined by existing structural contexts.116 Theorists emphasize that agency is a dynamic phenomenon characterized “by different temporal orientations. . ., allowing us to examine forms of action that are more oriented (respectively) toward the past, the future, and the present.” 117 The past determines agency through a set of available habitual patterns of action and scenarios that can be repeated by agents. The goals and intentions that agents aim to achieve direct their actions into the future. At the same time, agents have to constantly weigh and assess the actual context of their actions, which holds their attention in the present. The structural contexts within which individuals act also change over time, and their temporal dimension dynamically interacts with people’s

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

93

capacity to act effectively. In order to grasp agency as a complex phenomenon, we must analyze its temporal dimension as well.118 Scott emphasizes that simply accumulating historical facts to confirm the agency of women is not enough, that there needs to be deeper thinking about motives, mechanisms, and consequences.119 In seeking a comprehensive understanding of the categories of agency, we must take into account its different and mutable elements. Agency can be helpfully defined as significant action in which social and political structures interact with the personal motives and desires of individuals: “Readily articulated intentions, frequently unspoken fantasies and ordinary efforts at survival all animate their actions.” 120 Scott also underscores the importance of taking unconscious triggers of agency into account: “People are not simply rational, goal-­oriented beings, but subjects of unconscious desire. . . people aren’t mobilized according to purely objective interests, but rather according to interests created for them by collective fantasies.” 121 For this reason, Scott calls on researchers to be open to various historically conditioned motivations in studying agency, both the obvious and the not-­so-­obvious ones that determine the agent’s decisions and actions. This position is shared by Lauren Berlant, who has proposed leaving behind the normative view of agency and notions about the “hypercognitive historical actor.” She insists that “agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality.” 122 This broader definition of agency makes it possible to study its many factors, manifestations, and consequences at the level of everyday practices. Scott and Berlant agree that researchers should keep in mind all the range and variety of motives that can underpin meaningful acts. Moreover, such motives can go beyond the boundaries of a rational calculus or a well-­defined intention, containing, instead, collective beliefs, physical needs, or the desire to survive. When thinking about agency, we should also see it as a historical category: in the past it might have been

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

94

understood and applied in other, more unexpected ways than it is today.123 In terms of women’s or gender history and a feminist approach to studying women’s experience, the concept of agency has proven to be uniquely valuable in view of the need to go beyond the stereotypical presentation of women as passive objects of historical processes and overcome the equally stereotypical image of women as helpless victims in insurmountable circumstances. Such a concept is appealing and promises valuable insights because it allows the researcher to see how ordinary people, even the most marginalized and oppressed, can change their lives and make the world around them more just and less biased. According to Lynn M. Thomas, at least three factors ensured that the notion of agency was firmly and permanently entrenched in women’s history studies. First, feminist scholars have used the concept of agency to show the ingenuity, power, flexibility, and influence of women in different contexts, thereby overcoming the stereotypical images of women as victims. Second, the active use of oral histories and analysis of ego documents (personal accounts, e. g., letters or diaries) have inspired feminist scholars to see in the authors of and respondents to these sources the key agents in past events and in historical narratives about them. Third, agency has proven to be a safe and rewarding category: studies based on it are hard to criticize or question.124 Numerous anthropological studies of women’s historical experience have unambiguously confirmed that in different countries and different times, women have found ways to counter violence, overcome constraints, resist pressure, and survive under extremely difficult circumstances. By acting at the grassroots level with flexibility and outside-­the-­box thinking, and by taking advantage of extremely limited resources, they often influence situations unnoticed and extralegally, yet effectively. In particular, studies of women’s experience during the Holocaust have shown that women engaged in grassroots activities even in the most hostile environments, such as ghettos and con-

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

95

centration camps, when their rights, opportunities, and resources were down to just about nothing.125 Judith T. Baumel studied the behavior of Jewish women and men in various circumstances during the Holocaust. In the process, she identified at least four different types of agency and gender-­marked survival strategies among women. These strategies manifested themselves in specific contexts, such as during the persecution of the Jews in prewar Nazi Germany, in the ghettos during the war, in Jewish underground organizations, and in concentration camps.126 According to Baumel, gender-­specific strategies that can be observed include, among others, the apparently faster development of mutual assistance groups among women than among men, the larger size and longer life spans of these groups, and the very low level of infighting among them. Given the greater vulnerability of women, these factors clearly increased their level of safety.127 Baumel goes on to emphasize: “Today, instead of speaking about whether these [agency and survival] skills were ‘better’ among women than among men, one discusses the differences in tactics and intensity between the two groups. . . . Women’s survival strategies, as opposed to men’s, were not better or worse, but often different.” 128 It is the study of these kinds of specific features that will lead to a better understanding of women’s experience in extraordinary historical circumstances. Irish Jewish political sociologist Ronit Lentin has this to say to women researching women’s historical experience: “We must analyze the ways women are targeted by major political projects and catastrophes, natural or ‘man-­made,’ beyond women’s victimhood. . . [to] address victimhood and agency in tandem, charting the routes of resistance available to women, even when they are the most deeply jeopardized.” 129 The use of the concept of women’s agency in my study has allowed me to focus on typical survival strategies used by women, their ways of adapting and forms of resistance, and their schemes for overcoming and taking advantage of structural constraints—all of which enabled the

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

96

women to protect their own interests and reach certain goals in the extreme conditions of imprisonment in the Gulag. An important category for analyzing women’s experience in political imprisonment is the concept of normative femininity. This refers to the culturally and socially conditioned set of dominant beliefs, norms, rules, conventions, patterns of behavior, and social roles that define the desired or ideal image of a woman.130 Normative femininity is shaped and maintained through social institutions: the law, religion, traditions, families, and the political system. Women internalize it in the process of gender socialization and, to a greater or lesser degree, embody it in their everyday practices. A series of factors such as class, ethnicity, religion, education, and political views, as well as concrete sociocultural conditions, can affect the individual attitudes of different women toward normative femininity and its practical manifestations.131 In a traditional society, the gender socialization of girls takes place within the framework of normative femininity, which serves as the foundation for building women’s gender identity and guides adult women throughout their lives. Attempts to transcend the boundaries of these norms tend to draw disapproval and penalties. By putting normative femininity into practice—that is, by adhering to ingrained scripts, rules, and expectations—a woman can gain social approval and recognition and become a full and respected member of her community. To understand what key features of normative femininity were inherent among Ukrainian women who were political prisoners of the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, we must consider their social origins and previous life experience. According to statistical data on political repression in Ukraine, of the nearly two hundred thousand Ukrainians who were arrested for “political crimes” by Soviet security agencies between 1943 and 1957, 116,477 people (or 58.2 percent) lived in rural areas: independent farmers, collective farm workers, seasonal workers, agricultural workers, and officials in county and village institutions.132

1. The Daily Life of Women in the Gulag

97

Ukrainians in Soviet territories felt the impact of the Bolshevik project to forcibly modernize Soviet society, which included radical economic and social changes, and the destruction of the traditional system of values and way of life. Although these processes affected the farming technology, forms of agricultural activity, daily life, and education of villagers to varying degrees, changes in world views came far more slowly. As for gender order, the Soviet Ukrainian village still functioned largely within the framework of traditional notions, norms, scripts, and practices. In fact, a substantial share of the repressed came from western Ukraine, which had not been part of the USSR prior to 1939, and were generally convicted for cooperating with the nationalist underground or collaborating during the war. Ukrainians from Galicia, western Volhynia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia had not experienced the Bolshevik policies of militant atheism, forced collectivization, and Soviet-­style emancipation of women, but were actively developing cultural and educational organizations to raise national awareness. With their broad networks in the villages and active involvement in these territories in the interwar period, large-­scale women’s organizations had been encouraging rural women to be more civically engaged, educated, and professional, but they basically considered the emancipation of the Ukrainian nation to be their main priority. A specifically feminist agenda took second place in their activities. Martha Bohachevsky-­Chomiak aptly called this work “pragmatic feminism.” 133 Nationalist organizations, whose influence and popularity among Ukrainians under Polish rule grew especially strong in the 1930s, also did everything they could to cultivate conservative notions about the role and mission of women in the national project.134 Ukrainian farmers from western Ukraine were quite traditional in their ideas about what a Ukrainian woman ought to be like. In those days, notions of normative femininity generally required women to follow centuries-­old gender scripts and ideals: in addition to having the necessary feminine appearance,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

98

a woman was supposed to be a good housewife and a caretaker of the family, a faithful Christian, and someone adept at the basic skills of traditional female crafts.135 In feminist studies, normative femininity is generally regarded in a negative light, as a restrictive factor that limits the spheres and means of a woman’s self-­realization and reduces women’s social roles to family and household functions, reproductive labor and child-­rearing work. It also burdens women with heightened demands in terms of appearance and a double moral standard regarding behavior. In my study, I trace how normative femininity works in a situation of restricted freedom in a gender segregated environment. I demonstrate, based on the testimony of the women themselves, how normative femininity and the knowledge, skills, abilities, and practices related to it were mobilized in the Gulag and transformed into a means of resisting dehumanization by helping Ukrainian women prisoners survive. I systematically show that the seemingly trivial pursuits of the women and the traditional norms of behavior, values, and attitudes that can be considered components of Ukrainian normative femininity were effectively transformed into ways and means of surviving, helping the women preserve their gender identity and relatively effectively resist the destructive impact of the camp regimen on their mental and physical health. The exceptional rigidity, persistence, and conservative nature of gender norms, which were criticized as obstacles to social progress under ordinary circumstances, proved useful under the extreme conditions in Stalinist camps and prisons. When the women’s familiar world was under attack and falling apart, and they found themselves in the strange and hostile world of the Gulag, normative femininity became that island of stability and predictability on which Ukrainian women could rest and even restore their lifescape by nurturing the basic elements of “normal life.”

CHAPTER 2

LIVING CONDITIONS IN PRISONS AND CAMPS IN THE 1940S AND 1950S

Figure 2.1. Fragment of the picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary with angels. Embroidery by Mariia Bezdyk-Poliashets´ka, made at Lontskyi Prison in Lviv, 1948. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

HOUSING AND HYGIENE CAMPS AND PRISONS, BARRACKS AND CELLS: THE LIVING SPACE OF FEMALE PRISONERS 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 prisoners were kept.2 A barrack could house between a few dozen and a few hundred people, who arranged themselves on double or even triple bunk beds, all of them sleeping on a single, long, wooden platform that was not divided into separate units. Or it could be like a railcar, where every prisoner had her own sleeping spot.3 The furnishings of a barrack might include a table, benches, hangers, dressers, shelves or hanging closets, primitive heaters, and, more rarely, wash stands. The shortage of living space and the overpopulation of the barracks were constant problems at the camps that the Gulag administration unsuccessfully tried to resolve during the entire

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

104

existence of the system. The housing norm for the Gulag camps and colonies was officially two square meters (21 sq. ft.) per person, but even this miserable allotment was only provided in an insignificant proportion of the sites. In the early 1940s, a series of decrees, circulars, and other regulatory documents were issued for the purpose of “further improving” the conditions of detention, but the requirements established in them were chronically ignored.4 By late fall 1943, the standard of two square meters per person was actually applied in only forty-­two camps and colonies, whereas in forty-­ six similar sites, the average was between one and two square meters. In the words of the document, the provision of sleeping items—mattresses, blankets, and pillowcases—was “satisfactory” at only thirty-­nine locations. Barracks were provided with benches, tables, dressers, shelves, and cabinets to store personal belongings in only fourteen camps and colonies.5 On 29 May 1944, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) issued a decree titled On Measures to Further Improve the Physical State of Prisoners Held in NKVD Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, signed by Lavrentii Beria, which reiterated the physical space rule.6 It stated: “For the purpose of establishing normal living conditions for prisoners . . . designate the capacity (limit) of filling each camp unit or colony, based on a norm of two square meters of usable area per prisoner.” One year later, on 8 March 1945, Gulag supervisor Viktor Nasedkin sent out orders to camp and colony supervisors noting the failure to meet the norms established in the previous decree and demanding that measures be taken “to organize the housing and living conditions for detained prisoners.” The list of demands included upholding the norm of about two square meters of living space per person and setting aside an individual sleeping space for each prisoner, providing each person with a mattress and bedding, improving the lighting in the barracks, installing sinks and tanks with potable water, and ensuring the presence of furniture: tables, benches, hangers, dressers, and so on.7

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

105

The emphasis on these aspects of barrack life allows us to postulate that it was these that were in the most neglected state. Again and again, in further decrees, orders, and other Gulag documents, these same demands appear, calling for housing and living condition improvements that were obviously not being put into practice. As reported by the Gulag residential operational department, as of 1 July 1947, the average living space designated per prisoner in the camps and colonies was 1.8 square meters (19.38 sq. ft.), but at fourteen locations, this number was below 1.5 square meters (16 sq. ft.) per person.8 In addition to barracks, housing sometimes encompassed sod houses and even tents. Mariia Makohon-­Duzha describes in detail the living conditions in which she found herself in one Kolyma camp: Our camp was small: one long wooden barrack, a kitchen made of beams, a wooden bathhouse, and two very long tents. Our entire convoy found itself in these tents because the wooden barrack had already been filled with political prisoners. Each tent housed one hundred women. There were no floors, and bunks made of hewn rounds ran along the sides. We were handed out mattresses—meaning long sacks that we had to fill with dry leaves and pine needles. . . . Two hundred-­liter metal barrels were installed to heat inside the tent. Each barrel had an opening cut out of it for firewood to be tossed in and a pipe to draw the smoke outside. That was our entire “heating system,” which provided such a pathetic amount of heat that we would huddle together, cover ourselves with everything we had, and put on our hats with earflaps to keep at least a little warm. How many mornings we found our hats frozen to the side of the tent! 9

Identical memories of wintering in tents can be found in a slew of women’s recollections, which contain one of the most striking details in an eloquent refrain: “At night, our hair froze to the walls of the tent.” 10

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

106

Still, at least in some of the camps, conditions in the barracks were not significantly better than in the tents, as testified by Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka: They put us in dilapidated, dirty barracks with walls of plywood, each one meant for two hundred women. Each barrack has double bunks and, in the center, a cast-­iron wood stove. The space is lit with a small, dim lightbulb, and the windows have bars. In the entryway, there’s an iron sink with cold running water that constantly freezes up in the winter, when the temperature sometimes falls to –50°C [–58°F]. A few times I even woke up in the morning to find that my headscarf and hair had frozen to the plywood wall of the barrack.11

Although living conditions in the barracks and tents were not fundamentally different, the psychological effect of the wooden structure made it more tolerable as housing. Hanna Kyslytsia-­ Skavins´ka explains the difference: After the tents, this zone seemed a luxury. The barracks here were a lot warmer, although there were only walls and a roof without a ceiling, but they were wooden and the wind didn’t rock them. Still, the harsh regimen was the same: locks on the doors at night, the barrack parashi near the door by the bunks, and bars on the windows.12

Although a 1942 Gulag decree emphasized the “requirement to keep the temperature in the barracks no less than 12–14°C [53–57°F],” 13 it can safely be assumed that, in practice, the temperature in the living quarters was considerably lower. Obviously, proper rest and recovery were difficult under these conditions. Moreover, former political prisoners emphasize that the cold and inadequate heating caused them to suffer almost constantly because it was impossible to even dry out clothing

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

107

that had become wet in the bad weather. Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) writes: Our felt boots and heavy pants were soaked through and through, while snow and water collected in our shoes from above. And that’s how we had to work all day. At lunch, they allowed us to dry off near the fire, but this didn’t help because our clothing would just let off steam, and then it felt even colder, so that the entire body was shivering. There were dryers in the barracks, but there was a lot of clothing and it did not dry out overnight, just evaporated a bit. We would lay some of our clothing on our sheets at night and dry it off with the heat from our bodies. In the morning, we put on damp clothing once again.14

This kind of testimony is repeated nearly word for word by other former female prisoners in their memoirs of the Gulag, including the same vivid detail: they tried to dry their wet clothing at night with their own body heat, which in practice led to even more hypothermia.15 Despite all this, for women who had spent long periods in prison cells awaiting trial and then suffered through the extremely harsh conditions of transfers, the living conditions in the camps seemed substantially better at first, mainly because they were able to get outside in the fresh air, in open space and daylight, to see the grass and the wildflowers.16 Oksana Khrashchevs´ka, who, along with her sister prisoners, suffered tremendously from the cold and thirst in her freight car during the transfer, recalls: “We dreamed about the camp where they were taking us as though it was some kind of happiness. If only we could get warm and wash ourselves in a bath, the rest wouldn’t matter.” 17 Kateryna Zaryts´ka found herself at a camp after nearly twenty years in prison. In her very first letter from the camp, she describes the joy she felt in open space at last: “I stretched out on some dry timbers under a wooden wall

Figure 2.2. “For a long, unforgettable remembrance to my landswoman Mariika. When you look at it, remember the days of captivity. From your friend Hania.” Inscription on the back of a photograph by Hanna N., given as a memento to her friend from camp, 15 May 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

109

warmed by the sun. All around me were birches, pines, and all kinds of birds chirping in different ways.” 18 The conditions in the camps were inhuman, but the women always describe prison as far worse, as Anna Hoshko-­Kit states: Prison is a house of horrors. Cries, groans, humiliation. Prison is a house of grief. Huge, thick walls, windows covered in boards . . . that are intended to hide everything that goes on inside the building, and also to prevent those detained from seeing the sun or people outside.19

About the appearance of some of these prison cells and the way that prisoners felt, trapped in them for periods ranging from a few weeks to several months, a good picture is provided by Polina Benoni, who was jailed in the Chortkiv Remand Prison: The cell was about twenty square meters [215 sq. ft.]. From the ceiling hung one dim lightbulb, and the space was full of strangers who, so it seemed to me, were lying chaotically—as though they had been thrown one on top of another. An unbearable stench and airlessness. I thought I’d been tossed in with the dead, and the smell was emanating from them. . . . Suddenly someone among the bodies raised her head. . . . Terrified, I asked whether there was anyone living here. “Why, we’re all alive,” she answered. “What’s that terrible smell from?” I asked. The girl pointed toward two low latrine buckets, called parasha, that stood by the wall near the door, and lots of unwashed people. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” The air was so thick in the cell that moisture was dripping down the walls. . . . During the day, we were taken out for a walk. . . . We were driven into cages surrounded by a high fence. . . . But the prisoners were happy that they were able to breathe in at least a little fresh air . . . by evening, it was so stuffy in the cell that there was no air left, so everybody lay down on the floor while two took turns waving the blanket around.20

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

110

Hanna Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn) recollected the terrible dirt and cold in the psychiatric hospital ward where she and other young women were locked up after being arrested, commenting on the complete lack of hygienic supplies or any kind of medical assistance.21 Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya describes her prison cell similarly: I stepped over the threshold of the preliminary detention cell in Narym. There was no lock. The unimaginable stench of human misery struck my nose. The glassless window was stuffed with any old thing. Although only a few meters square, the cell was jammed with some twenty women. The odor of unwashed bodies, some kind of sour breath, crushed insects, a smoking pit, and a wooden slop bucket—that’s the real smell of human misery that followed me for many years.22

In remand prisons, smaller cells that were intended for one or a few inmates often held several times more women, as Mariia Vahula describes: “The cell was intended for a single person, but there were seven of us. We huddled together, slept on our sides at night, and switched positions on command. There was never enough air. It was crowded and stuffy.” 23 Halyna Kokhans´ka, who had an equally unpleasant memory of prison, recalls: Prison was far more terrible than the camps. . . . The tiny window was barred and hooded on the outside. The floor was full of large holes out of which hungry rats would crawl and bite your fingers and face. It was impossible to sleep at night. . . . Every day, we were taken out for a walk for half an hour. The clock ticked from the minute they opened the cell door . . . so that we were outside in the yard for no more than twenty minutes. The yard was small, covered in gravel and sand, with not a blade of grass anywhere. Tall stone walls . . . a real stone sack.24

Figure 2.3. “Mother of God, save us prisoners. Memento of the Bryhidky Prison. Ihor Nadia.” Icon of the Mother of God with Infant, embroidered by Nadiia (Anastasiia) Heleta at the Bryhidky Prison in Lviv, 25 November 1948. Collection of the Museum of the Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

112

Given this kind of experience, it is not hard to understand the comparatively positive impressions of the camp, something that the women sometimes mention. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) describes her first camp in Kharkiv, where she arrived in fall 1945, in such fashion, comparing it to conditions in the prison where she had been: They led us, all one hundred girls, to a single barrack where there were double bunks with half a meter between them. We were issued mattresses, blankets, narrow sheets, and pillows made of batting. After prison, it was like being at a resort. . . . As evening came on, we went out of the barrack, and we couldn’t believe that we could walk around here, breathe fresh air, move around without an escort, and meet with our countrywomen.25

Indirect testimony about the unsatisfactory condition of the housing in general barracks at the camps and colonies comes from the fact that, in April 1944, one measure to motivate prisoners to produce significantly more than their production quota—200 percent above the norm earned the label of “shock workers”— was the reward of a transfer to a “shock workers’ barrack,” in which there were individual beds, sheets, and furniture, better lighting, “cultural inventory” (meaning simple board games like chess), and writing implements “for cultural recreation and self-­ improvement.” 26 In general, control over the living space of the prisoners gave the administrators of camps more leverage over them. Every woman in the general barracks dreamed about the better living conditions that were a privilege for those who were higher up in the prison hierarchy, starting with the professionals such as medical personnel, engineers, accountants, and staff of various social agencies.27 Nataliia Kostenko was allowed to work in the children’s building at the camp and describes the experience thus: This was a very good spot, as well, because the kitchen had a separate little room attached to it, and I was moved from the barracks

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

113

to live there. It was quieter and cleaner. . . . I was very happy and tried to do my best at work in order to be able to stay there. And they were happy with me. . . . I was suitable because I did everything and I was reliable. They even trusted me to receive produce in the men’s zone and outside the zone.28

Although the Gulag administration periodically issued decrees exhorting camp managers to “decisively improve the internal conditions of housing barracks by ensuring the necessary quantity of inventory and ordinary household items,” 29 in reality the prisoners were always short of the most basic necessities, especially dishes.30 Barbara Skarga recalls how even in prison, women were very inventive in trying to resolve this problem somehow: A piece of glass was a treasure. With it you could file your nails, cut off a piece of salo—a slab of raw fatback—and split an onion. It had to be well hidden because at the first search they’d take it away immediately. The prisoner had no right to sharp objects, to sewing needles, scissors, or knitting needles.31

In her memoirs about the Gulag, German Elinor Lipper noted that all cups and bowls used by the prisoners were homemade, constructed out of used tin cans found in the garbage behind the camp administration building.32 Nadiia Surovtsova recollects how she “tried to get spoons, which were always lacking. People waited until their neighbor had eaten enough, or else they would burn themselves drinking over the edge of a tin bowl of hot watery soup, extraordinarily reminiscent of very hungry and very greedy animals.” 33 Under these circumstances, the women were forced to be exceptionally inventive and skilled in order to provide themselves with the most basic everyday things.34 They made many necessities by hand out of all kinds of found materials and junk, as Surovtsova writes:

Figure 2.4. Bag for personal items made and embroidered by Kateryna Zaryts´ka at the Vladimir Central Prison, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5272.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

116

The last few days I was in the handicapped brigade sorting trash. It was an engrossing task. At the camp we were always told to keep our eye out for a broken cup, a cracked plate, a bent spoon, and other invaluable treasures. Armed with this junk, we returned to the camp, where everyone was waiting impatiently for us.35

Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak takes special pride in being able to say: Prison forced us to use self-­protective ingenuity. For instance, we were forbidden to have pencils and knives. We managed to wangle a pencil somewhere, that is, we found one, while we made a knife ourselves, out of the bottom of a tin can. We broke it in half and sharpened it like a razor blade. And we used this knife to cut everything—bread, cloth, and other things.36

The main challenge was preserving heat, reducing the risk of hypothermia and the inevitable sickness that this would bring in the severe climate and constant cold of nearly unheated barracks. Skarga writes: The women were economical and could do a lot. They spun thread out of the oakum brought to insulate the walls of the building, and next thing you knew, sweaters and socks appeared on knitting needles. . . . Needles were prohibited, but nearly all of the women had them.37

The first chance they got, Ukrainian women prisoners would try to get cloth for bedding: “We gave money to Ania and she bought everything we asked for outside the zone. . . . The first thing that Ania bought me was some chintz with white flowers for a coverlet.” 38 The Ukrainian women displayed prudence and rationality in household matters that impressed a German woman called Walli Schliess, who writes in her memoirs:

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

117

In January 1952, we received a little money for the first time. . . . The sum was small, and we didn’t know how to split it up. That’s when I first recognized the vital prudence of the Ukrainian women. They did not hand the money over for food, like most would have done (because we were always hungry due to the hard work!). First of all, they made an effort to sew themselves blankets in order to cover themselves properly in the arctic nights. They helped each other sew these blankets.39

Clearly, when put at the edge between life and death, Ukrainian women looked for any opportunity to improve their circumstances. Stealing from the enterprises where the prisoners worked was not seen as an immoral act, but as one of the resources for surviving. In her memoirs, Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­ Mykhal´chuk writes admiringly about a friend who was able to quietly collect reindeer wool from the sewing factory and make herself a warm blanket.40 Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka), who also found herself working in a sewing factory, mentions this kind of practice as well: “It was possible to secretly take something out for yourself or for someone else. . . . And so the women began to sew for themselves, making blankets so that they would have something to cover themselves with.” 41 Just how important such seemingly mundane things like bedding were for Ukrainian women is also illustrated in Zakydal´s´ka’s memoir about time she spent in the camp infirmary: “They placed us on the upper bunks. Gave us sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. What luxury! God, how little a person needs to be happy!” 42 SANITARY CONDITIONS AND HYGIENE In the Rules for Internal Routines for Prisoners in Gulag Camps and Colonies, which came into effect on May 16, 1945, the list of duties of the prisoners includes, among others, the requirement to “comply with established sanitary rules and personal hygiene (cutting hair, washing in the bath, disinfecting clothing, and

Figure 2.5. Handmade case for a brush, made and decorated by Iryna Shuns´ka-Shvediuk at camp, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5076.

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

119

so on).” 43 Shortly before, on March 8, 1945, Gulag camp and colony administrators were sent instructions to organize the living and housing conditions for prisoners, which involved “equipping all housing barracks with sinks,” and also “equipping all barracks housing women with personal hygiene rooms, including all the necessary inventory.” 44 That camp administrators did not rush to carry out these instructions was clearly shown by the fact that in May 1954, among the urgent measures taken in response to the demands of prisoners who participated in the Kengir camp uprising was “organizing a hygiene room in women’s sections of camps.” 45 Obviously, such facilities had not existed before. Certain minimal sanitary and hygienic norms for prisoners in camps were also stipulated, such as trips to the baths two or three times a month along with the simultaneous prozharka of their clothing.46 The other question is to what extent camp administrators provided opportunities for all these rules and norms to be upheld. The reality of hygienic conditions can be ascertained from the memoirs of former prisoners: “We were taken to the bathhouse once in ten days. They had boilers with heated water and metal bowls in which we washed ourselves. Those were all the comforts, and that was all the hygiene.” 47 What a visit to the bathhouse meant in practice, and just how hygienic a procedure it really was, Kokhans´ka writes from personal experience: Twice a month we were taken to the bathhouse. [It was] built of logs without any plaster. Its walls, floor, benches, and small wooden buckets were all covered in sticky mold and slime. The water was heated up in boilers, and each of us was given two–three washtubs full. But there weren’t many washtubs, either. Whoever managed to grab them stood in line for the water, then, carefully stepping across slippery, moldy grates, made their way to those same benches, put their washtub on it, and, knocking elbows with their neighbors in the tight quarters, somehow managed to wash themselves. Runny, stinky brown soap was issued in a single

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

120

­tablespoon. No soap at all was provided for laundering. In fact, we were forbidden to launder. While the first lot washed themselves, the second lot stood impatiently waiting, stark naked.48

The women’s recollections are filled with horrific pictures of the living conditions in the barracks. Too many people in too small a space, heating that was inadequate in severe climatic conditions, poor ventilation, no opportunity to wash clothes or bedding—for whomever was lucky enough to have bedding—and the almost complete lack of washing supplies all made it impossible to maintain anything resembling acceptable sanitary norms and personal hygiene. In her memoirs, Kokhans´ka brings up yet another aspect of female hygiene, menstruation: “They would not allow us to wash even our underwear, although this was far more urgent for women and girls than for men—never mind providing packets, cotton batting, or gauze for menstruation. For the entire time that I was in camps, no one was ever given them.” 49 The women did what they could to deal with the lack of hygienic supplies: Sometimes a decent nurse would sneak us a bit of cotton batting. The girls would scrape the batting out of field jackets. This cotton was dirty. We would pocket bits of old bedsheets from the sewing workshop—everything that we could lay our hands on. Whoever worked in the hospital was privileged in this way, too.50

Surovtsova remembers hard times in the prison when she not only became very weak because of bleeding that lasted for days, but suffered terribly from lack of water in the cell, which left her unable to wash herself.51 In the camps, soap was seen as a real treasure, and so, in the women’s memoirs, there are bitter stories about this critical lack, alongside stories filled with gratitude to those who helped the prisoners get some of this invaluable product:

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

121

Andreev, an engineer from Mine no. 25, passed a loaf of bread and six pieces of plain but genuine soap along to me. At that time, this was an enormous treasure for us. . . . We were ideological enemies, yet he made us such a valuable gift anyway.52 The veterinarian . . . gave us a ration of bread and a piece of soap. What a royal gift this was! 53

The lack of normal ventilation meant that the first descriptions of daily life in the prison cells and barracks refer to the endless, intolerable stench of dirty bodies, of clothing hung up to dry out, of evacuations, that in the absence of toilets, all took place in slop buckets, and of festering wounds.54 For many women, the dirt and unsanitary conditions that permeated the barracks were the most unbearable aspect of everyday life in the camps. Vira-­Mariia Franko spent time in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany before ending up in Vorkuta, in the Komi Republic of the Russian SFSR, and compared the two experiences: “Where Ravensbrück was always very clean because the Germans feared infectious diseases, in Vorkuta, it was the opposite: incredibly filthy. We had to wangle some water in order to wash ourselves and our clothes.” 55 Lice and fleas were not just a normal occurrence but a mass infestation in the buildings and among the prisoners: practically every memoir about the camps mentions them.56 The scale of this problem was testified to by the fact that the Gulag administration regularly issued decrees calling on “drastic measures” to fight lice.57 However, local camp administrators simply ignored these facts and decrees, and so the prisoners, exhausted by hard labor, hunger, and cold, suffered the attacks of parasites on top of everything else. Oksana Meshko was shocked at what she saw in the camp: “White lice crawled over the boards, not bothering to hide in crevices like fleas, as they greedily sought their next host.” 58

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

122

Surovtsova compared the misery of lice and fleas to the biblical plague of locusts,59 while other former prisoners time and again mention the same vivid detail: insects constantly deprived the exhausted women of much-­needed rest and sleep.60 Something that was a mundane problem under other circumstances even became a life-­threatening issue in the camps: not only did insect bites prevent the women from sleeping and lead to further physical weakening, but constant scratching resulted in open wounds and ulcers that, once infected, could prove fatal for someone whose immunity was already undermined and who had no access to proper medical care, as Karwańska-­Bajlak testifies: This seemed like a tragedy, torture. When night came, I found myself unable to get away from them. They bit voraciously, tenaciously. My whole body was covered with welts and then with wounds. I would scratch until it bled. Tears came unbidden to my eyes.61

Sofiia Dziuban-­Holovata writes: “We got sick, we were infected. Scabies and lice would climb from one of us to the next one, exhausting us to such a degree that people would become feverish.” 62 In addition to insects, there were also rodents in the barracks that not only destroyed wretchedly small stores of food but also spread diseases: There were so many rats in the barracks that they ate absolutely everything . . . crawled all over the bunks, over sleeping bodies, stood on our breasts and sniffed our mouths. One time I woke up to see this going on and could not get back to sleep again until morning.63

The prisoners had no opportunities to even partly restore themselves because they were chronically sleep deprived, despite the government regulations for nighttime rest. In addition to all the problems already mentioned, their sleep was often disrupted

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

123

by nighttime searches that typically lasted for several hours and took away precious hours of sleep: “Often the camp overseers would come by in the middle of the night and overturn everything on our bunks. And then we’d have to stay up the rest of the night sorting through things to figure out what was whose. This went on all the time at all the camps.” 64 This problem was also acknowledged by the Gulag administration. In a directive of 10 March 1942, to all camp administrators, deputy people’s commissar for internal affairs Sergei Kruglov stated: Despite Gulag NKVD USSR Decree no. 729 dated 8 December 1941, stating that prisoners should not be sleeping less than eight hours a night, in many camps and colonies this right is clearly being violated. Prisoners are effectively getting only four–five hours of sleep. . . . As a result of the lack of normal rest, prisoners are losing the ability to work properly and end up in the category of the weak, disabled, and so on.65

The problem with rest, which was extremely important for restoring strength after exhausting work and inadequate nourishment, was exacerbated by the excessive crowding in a relatively small space, which meant that there was almost never real quiet.66 The Gulag administration was aware of this problem and even tried to resolve it by prohibiting any kind of conversation, noise, or movement around the zone after lights-­out. Although these norms were spelled out in the 1945 Rules for Internal Routines for Prisoners,67 in a situation where the barracks were catastrophically overpopulated, these prohibitions had little to no effect. Former prisoners write about this problem as pervasive: We worked in three shifts of eight hours each. . . . At the camp, all three shifts slept in the same barracks, so while one group was dressing for work, others were coming back from work, and there was never any quiet time, so it was impossible to get a proper

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

124

rest. . . . Even in the night, it was hard to find peace and quiet in the barrack. Someone would be groaning, someone else would be talking in her sleep or crying, or the overseers would come in.68

In those barracks where both criminals and political prisoners were kept together, just living in the same space was already a major challenge for the Ukrainian women, never mind finding an opportunity to rest. As Ievheniia Andrusiak recalls: “You’d come into the barracks as though into some kind of wild menagerie or a madhouse: someone would be singing dirty prison ditties in a horrible hoarse voice, others would be having a fight, and someone else would be cussing up a storm.” 69 In fact, though, living conditions and hygiene in the barracks could vary significantly from camp to camp and from period to period, depending on a number of objective and subjective factors, from the level of material support for a given Gulag unit or the geography and climate of the region, to the personality of the camp chief and guards, unwritten rules established in a particular camp, the norms in effect at a given time, and more. As one example, Dariia Koshak-­Svystel´nyts´ka was surprised by the difference between a camp in Komi and one in Norilsk to which she was transferred: My surprise knew no bounds. The barracks were clean, the floors and tables yellow, the bunks made up with sheets and even pillows, and the girls were ours, politicals. Back in Komi, we had to live with the petty criminals, who would harass us, rob us, never mind how filthy everything was. Here, though the regimen was stricter . . . it was nice and clean.70

Figure 2.6. “Oh Mother of God, please listen to little me, protect my family and bring me back home from prison with my mother. Myroslava Protskiv. Iaroslavna P.” Icon of the Mother of God with motherly prayer, embroidered by Hanna ProtskivLiven´ (b. 1923) at the Chortkiv Prison, 1949. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

126

PRODUCTION QUOTAS AND WORKING CONDITIONS PRODUCTION QUOTAS The forced labor of prisoners was one of the mainstays of the Gulag system, whose economy was sustained through the merciless exploitation of what was essentially slave labor. The work regimen of the prisoners was regulated by a series of legal acts (special decrees, resolutions, and circulars) and varied by period, region, kind of work, and so on. The war years were especially severe. In July 1942, the chief of the Gulag, Viktor Nasedkin, issued Circular no. 258, which established the workday for prisoners as eleven–twelve hours, including a one-­hour break for lunch, and ordered that prisoners have at minimum two days off per month.71 For the most part, the prisoners did get two days off—even three in some camps—but camp management was known to violate this rule, forcing the prisoners to work on their days off in order to meet production plans. Although the Gulag administration issued nearly annual instructions prohibiting any reduction in days off,72 in practice these requirements were violated often and everywhere.73 Former prisoner Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka recalls: We had days off, not every week, but every ten days, and not always even that. After work, they wouldn’t allow us to go into the zone but would give us sacks and send us off to the train station to bring back coal. When we got back to the zone, we would have to collect snow for the kitchen, the canteen, and the bakery because there wasn’t any water. By the time we got to the barracks, it was 11 p. m. . . . A twelve-­hour workday with barely any days off because they promised we would get to rest when there was a blizzard. . . . For us, the regimen was stricter, and they would drive us out to work no matter how freezing cold it was—except when there was a serious blizzard on the way.74

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

127

In addition to the excessively long workday, the situation was worsened by the fact that camp managers were determined to show high production numbers, and so they constantly raised quotas, condemning prisoners to failure from the start.75 Production quotas for prisoners were set at the same level as those throughout the USSR for ordinary workers in those same sectors of the economy. In most cases, unfortunately, the prisoners lacked the necessary professional skills and experience, and their living conditions made it impossible to fully recover between shifts. It was clearly unrealistic to think that they could produce at the same levels.76 At the camps, women were used for every kind of work, without exception, including heavy and dangerous physical labor such as logging, quarrying, excavating, building industrial facilities and railroads, mining, and more.77 The repressive system had no restrictions or reservations about women’s work because Soviet labor laws did not apply to prisoners. In their memoirs, former women prisoners include many stories about the extreme physical strain, unbearable cold, inhuman conditions, and crippling on-­the-­job injuries.78 How soon an individual prisoner would collapse in extreme exhaustion, wind up chronically sick, or be crippled, or, on the contrary, how long she would maintain a decent level of health, with access to additional resources that increased her chances of survival, depended directly on her work assignment. Those who survived in the Gulag typically point out that they were lucky enough to avoid “general labor” and were assigned instead to a hospital, the KVCh (the so-­called cultural and educational department), bookkeeping, and so on.79 As Skarga confirms, “The words ‘general labor’ terrified convicts. Because work was very different: death lurked in one, while another allowed you to survive. One job would irrevocably destroy the prisoner, while another would strengthen and add vigor. Everything depended on luck. There were no rules. Chance ruled.” 80 The kind of work that was preferred by the women was, for instance, the sewing shop: even

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

128

with very high production quotas, women here worked in warm premises, were not overextended physically, and had access to a valuable resource—cloth.81 Kateryna Andrusyshyn talks about her experience working in different conditions: I ended up working in the second brick factory. . . . We worked hard, eight hours a day in three shifts without days off, but we were happy to be in a warm facility and not in the ditches in the cold and wind like some of the girls. . . . I ended up in a team that was moved to a quarry. We worked eight hours a day in three shifts, but the work was physically hard and then we were in the freezing cold all the time, in the wind, and on starvation rations because our production quotas were the same as for the men, and we obviously could not meet them. . . . We began to grow weak. . . . After a while we were transferred to Gorstroi to dig pits and trenches in the permafrost and work with concrete. That’s how the months and the years went by. More than one of us girls ended up under Shmidtikha in a common grave that was covered over by a bulldozer come spring.82

Time and again, the women point to the fact that the production quotas were not gender diversified. Women were obligated not only to do the same type of work as men but to do so in the same volumes, regardless of any differences in body type and physical strength: We worked on an equal footing with men, which was very difficult.83 No one cared that we were women. Work was given out the same as for the men.84 We worked twelve hours in the quarry, and the women were given the same production quotas as the men.85

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

129

These unrealistic production quotas drove the participants in the Kengir camp rebellion to include a provision about “establishing reduced quotas required of women” in the list of their main demands of the Gulag management.86 The heaviness of the work assignments and the size of production quotas were related directly to the health of a given female prisoner. Kokhans´ka writes in detail about how the prisoners were assigned to do one type of work or another: The strong were in the first category. This meant working in the mines, digging rockfaces and coal with a pickaxe. . . . The second category worked on the surface of the mines. They unloaded timber from the railcars, worked on construction. . . . But at least they worked in the fresh air . . . there wasn’t any dampness or dust like in the mine shafts. Whoever was in the third category worked on cleaning the roads and railway tracks serving the camp, in the bread-­cutting shop, in the canteen, in the laundry, or in the bathhouse, or was sent to repair uniforms. . . . Others worked in the barracks as cleaners, in the drying rooms, or as hospital crew.87

Teklia Dovhoshyia also mentions these categories: “Women and girls were divided in the camp into four categories: 1 = very strong; 2 = strong; 3 = weak; 4 = dying, those who could barely walk. I belonged to the second category.” 88 Yet even the worn out and the sick were rarely left without work. Olena Iurchyts´ka’s recollection is a good example of a fairly typical scenario: Life behind barbed wire began with building an airport. . . . Because of the heavy physical labor, I soon became a “goner” and was sent off to shovel snow or clean offices. When they finished the airport, I was transferred to Norilsk. There, I worked even harder, in a sand and clay quarry. We had to break up the frozen ground and move it in wheelbarrows to trolleys and freight cars. This was forced labor and, what’s more, on miserable rations—lentil bouillon.89

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

130

The heavy physical work was especially hard on women from the intelligentsia, who were not used to this kind of labor: The older women from Eastern Ukraine and Belarus knew how to hoe from the kolkhoz and dashed ahead. . . . Our educated ladies from the Baltics killed themselves trying and just couldn’t keep up. And here you just wanted to dig up a potato, to nibble on it raw so that the stomach might feel at least some nourishment. . . . Every day, the girls were taken out to cut hay. Hardly any of us had ever held a scythe in our hands. The grass was dry and thinly scattered, plus no one had sharpened the scythes, so it was sheer agony. Every time you swung with the scythe, the grass would still be standing and the overseers would be yelling, while we were hungry and our arms were aching. In the evening, we barely stumbled back to the zone. The next day was no different.90

It was not uncommon for the physically hardier country girls to sometimes help their more fragile city friends meet their quotas: She was a very well-­educated girl and not accustomed to physical labor. . . . We country girls tried to dig at least a little deeper in the pit. . . . I would often run over to her and, if not with a pickax, then with a sledgehammer and a wedge, help her get a bit deeper. It was obvious that her arms weren’t used to this kind of work.91

WORKING CONDITIONS One of the factors leading to the low productivity of prison labor was the harsh climate in which the prisoners were forced to work, which put their health at serious risk. The decision about what temperature indicators precluded working in the open air was delegated to the camp managers, and so, as Meshko recollects: “In winter, when it was more than forty below zero [–40°F], people weren’t sent outside the zone to work. These were ‘official days off,’ and everybody was happy, like pupils when the teacher is

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

131

off sick, because it seemed like nature itself felt sorry for us.” 92 Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko’s recollections are somewhat different: “The work was hard, and the food was bad. For seven and a half years, I did hard labor in the frost. When the temperatures dropped below –47°C [–52.6°F], we didn’t go out.” 93 Under a related drawing in her graphic (visual) memoir, Kersnovskaia testifies: That year, 1951–52, even for Norilsk the winter was unprecedentedly cold. With windchill, the temperature was down to –74°C [–101°F]. Lead would shatter to smithereens when struck, and the train tracks were ripped up by the frost. The split could be as big as 35–40 cm [13.8–15.7 inches]. Our responsibilities included replacing split rails.94

If winter caused the prisoners to suffer from the bitter cold, in summer they were attacked from another quarter, as Meshko writes: “Gnats were one of the many scourges that befell us. They would crawl into your eyes, your nose, and the corners of your mouth, and gnaw at the soft tissue until it bled. Your body would swell up, and your temperature would rise from poisoning. Not everyone’s body was able to get used to it.” 95 In the camps of Kazakhstan, by contrast, the women suffered from the intense heat and the lack of water in the steppe.96 Internal Gulag documents allegedly show that the admin­ istration demanded that camp managers take steps to prevent excessive hypothermia and frostbite among the prisoners by verifying that weather-­appropriate clothing and footwear were available, providing breaks to warm up in appropriately equipped facilities, making sure that clothing and footwear were properly dried out, not taking the prisoners out to work when temperatures were too low, and so on.97 However, the memoirs of former prisoners paint a very different picture: in most cases, camp management ignored such requirements and mercilessly exploit-

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

132

ed the prisoners, damaging their health. Benoni recalls how she once froze her feet: After lunch, the frost went to –18°C [0.4°F]. Winter gear hadn’t been issued yet. I went to work in canvas shoes. . . . The shoes grew hard and froze to my foot wraps, and the foot wraps froze to my feet. When everything finally thawed and was torn off my feet, they turned white as paper. All that night, my feet were in agony and burning. By morning, huge purple blisters appeared, and I went to work with feet like that. . . . After two months, my left foot had healed, but my right foot rotted for eight months.98

The cold was second after hunger as a key factor that made life miserable for the prisoners and is a persistent theme in every woman’s memoir of the Gulag. The regimen for prisoners in different camps or, more accurately, the camp sections that constituted camps, varied considerably: severity depended on a number of objective factors (the category of prisoners, type of work, and so on) as well as subjective ones, such as the personalities of the overseer, foremen, and guards. The stories of former prisoners about their work differ in the specifics—the fields or the mines, the heat or the cold—but they are all permeated by the same basic themes. Work was tedious, exhausting, and often quite meaningless, and it was done under inhuman conditions.99 The work the prisoners did was really a ruthless exploitation of human resources: in 1949, for instance, an average of only 18 percent of logging in the Gulag was mechanized, while the rest of the work was all manual.100 The memoirs of Kostenko and Makohon-­Duzha give a good idea of how the women worked felling logs in Komi: Our women’s zone worked felling logs. We had to cut down seven cubic meters [35.3 cu. ft.] of timber by handsaw in a day—that was our quota. We had to not only cut the trees down but chop off

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

133

the knots, divide the trees into logs of a certain length, and stack everything.101 At this time, I ended up skidding logs in the taiga. Our task was to carry a huge raw log, six to seven meters [19–23 ft.] long, the 1.2 kilometers [0.75 mi.] back to the zone. It was winter, the snow was very deep, and there were no roads. Here and there lay felled trees that we had to carry on our shoulders back to the camp. We divided up into teams with four girls each, and lined up according to size so that the weight would be evenly distributed. Two in front, two in back. The replacement team walked behind us. The most we could do was 100–120 meters [110–130 yd.], after which our legs would begin to shake. So that we didn’t fall from the weight, the second foursome placed their shoulders under the log, relieving us. Then we would switch with them again, and so on, all the way to the camp.102

Because most prisoners had to walk huge distances on foot just to get to their work sites, those women whose work kept them at the camp, especially indoors, considered themselves to be extremely lucky: this allowed them to preserve their strength and stay warm. The memoirists openly acknowledge that they survived largely because, at some point during their imprisonment, they found themselves in a privileged position, in terms of the camp hierarchy: working in the infirmary, in the building for the children of female prisoners, in the kitchen, or in the sewing workshop and other shops. It was these places, where the women were able to eat relatively better, to rest more fully, to work in enclosed spaces, and so on, that they slowly recovered their strength, improved their shattered health somewhat, and became more emotionally stable. After analyzing the financial and managerial reports of the Gulag, scholars have concluded unanimously that the use of prison labor was inefficient: the production cost of those things that were made at Gulag enterprises was far higher than that produced at other enterprises.103 The Gulag economy was generally

Figure 2.7. “Oh Mary, save us in captivity. Memento of Lontskyii Prison.” Fragment of the icon of the Mother of God with Infant, embroidered by Kateryna Mel´nyts´ka at Lontskyi Prison in Lviv, 30 May 1949. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

135

unprofitable. Plagued by poor planning, widespread embezzling, mismanagement, and so on, it consumed enormous resources—human ones first among them.104 Efforts to carry out the ill-­ fated calls to “turn rivers in the other direction” were complete and utter failures, with the superhuman efforts of the prisoners simply wasted. As just one example, Ol´ha Moda-­Pokaliuk writes about the construction of a dam on the Inta River: We were building a dam to close a branch of the river and were digging a canal where the channel was supposed to be diverted. It was clear that this work was completely pointless, because with the first spring runoffs, this dam—soaked in sweat and tears, built in rain, thunder, snow, and frost—was taken down, and the river never did run into the canal.105

In addition, enormous costs went into maintenance, that is, to pay for the work of an extremely large workforce: in January 1945, more than 273,000 employees—104,000 guards alone—worked as Gulag camp staff, without even counting the prisons and the children’s colonies. By March 1953, this figure had swelled to 445,000, including 234,000 guards. Still, the Gulag was chronically short of workers.106 STIMULATING PRISONERS TO WORK Prisoner productiveness was extremely low not just because of exhaustion, but also because of a complete absence of incentives. Efforts to use not just punishment but also rewards to motivate prisoners to meet and exceed quotas were in the Gulag “guidebook” from the very early 1930s: the 1930 Provisions on Forced Labor Camps called for both moral incentives in the form of appreciation and material ones in the form of cash bonuses, improved living conditions, more food, additional family visits, unlimited correspondence, and so on. However, none of these

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

136

incentives applied to those who had been sentenced for “counterrevolutionary crimes.” 107 During the postwar years, the share of political prisoners in the Gulag was very large, and motivating them to better work performance proved impossible. By the end of the 1940s, the Gulag administration was acutely aware of how unprofitable it was to use a labor force of prisoners who were not interested in either increasing their productivity or improving their skills. And so, what began initially as a pilot project in a few camps was extended in October 1950 by a USSR Council of Ministers resolution throughout the Gulag system: remuneration for the work of prisoners, using reduced wage and salary scales.108 These changes had a noticeable impact and, as the numbers show, considerably improved productivity among prison laborers. From then on, they had the option of accumulating money on personal accounts until their release or partly using the money to buy food and basic necessities in the camp shops that had been set up in every unit.109 From the memoirs, we find out that such measures, which had already been introduced in Polish camps for political prisoners, really did have an impact. Mariia Teslia-­Pavlyk, who was placed in the Fordon women’s prison in Poland in fall 1948, recalls: We were told that, if we worked well, we could earn money for ourselves and would have it to spend once we were released. Of course, we were happy with both the work and the wages, because we could use some of the money to buy something for ourselves at the prison shop. From time to time, the unit leader would come with a list of items that could be ordered. These included butter, sugar, soap, toothpaste, and so on.110

Of course, the amounts that were paid to prisoners in the Gulag were wretchedly small, as wages were calculated at the lowest possible rate and, on top of that, the administration took out the

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

137

cost of keeping them in prison. Andrusiak explains the situation in about 1952: At this time, self-­financing had already been introduced, and I received some money. Afterward, though, when everything was deducted from our wages—for the space in the barrack, for the bunk, for the food, for the electricity, for the guards that watched over us day and night from their towers, for the dogs that barked and howled behind the fence, for the overseers who supervised and searched us when we left our work sites, for the escorts—we were given what was left.111

Nevertheless, the opportunity to make even this miserly amount of money gave the prisoners a chance to slightly improve their conditions: If there was anything left, the money was transferred to our account, and we could draw on it to buy something in the camp shop, which sold all kinds of small items. We did not get any actual cash, and if someone did not manage to spend everything, they got what was left after completing their sentence.112

Kokhans´ka also writes about the institution of regular pay for prisoners and the establishment of the first grocery shops and then shops with basic manufactured goods for prisoners as one indication of an easing in the camp regimen in the early 1950s: The zone had a food shop, and the selection of produce gradually grew broader. . . . In time, the shop began to also offer clothing and footwear while we were switched to self-­financing. This meant that they established specific rates of pay for us and took out the cost of food, clothing, and footwear, and we ended up getting much more cash in hand than before—about thirty to forty rubles, not ten to twenty as in the past.113

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

138

Sometimes, however, the cash pay was irregular or access to the camp shop was restricted, as Meshko writes: They kept promising all the time that they would pay us something and they never actually paid us anything and no one ever managed to get anything out of them. And there were no clothes at the shop, but there was a shortage of paper, pencils, soap, and toothbrushes. They taught us to live without everything and not grumble in slavish obedience.114

In May 1949, and later, the Gulag administration did try to motivate prisoners to work more intensively and kept demanding of the camp managers “to regularize the payment of cash bonuses to prisoners, issue parcels, packages, and letters, establish a standard four days off, and ensure eight hours of uninterrupted sleep daily.” 115 The camp managers most often simply ignored such demands, and, in practice, the extremely unsatisfactory living, working, and nutritional conditions made it impossible to significantly improve productivity. Nevertheless, the gradual easing of the camp regimen was perceived by the long-­suffering women prisoners as a major relief because it meant, if nothing else, that their chances of surviving and waiting out release improved considerably. Mariia Bryndzhei-­Lekhyts´ka recollects: In 1955, after numerous uprisings in the camps, the severe regimen for us political prisoners was dropped, numbers were removed, and we were allowed to walk around in civilian clothing; they began to pay us a bit cash for our work, and opened small shops selling foodstuffs in the camps. At that point, it became a little easier for us to live.116

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

139

NUTRITION, HEALTH AND MEDICAL ASSISTANCE CAMP RATIONS AND NUTRITIONAL NORMS The feeding of prisoners was regulated by various Gulag documents, based on the kind of work carried out by the prisoners and their success at meeting production quotas. During the war, the daily norm for feeding prisoners in the camps and colonies was set in an NKVD decree issued 13 October 1941, which specified the following daily rations: “ 700 g [24.7 oz] bread, 600 g [21.2 oz] potatoes and vegetables, 10 g [0.4 oz] wheat flour, 25 g [0.8 oz] meat and meat products, 100 g [3.5 oz] fish and fish products, 10 g [0.4 oz] tomato paste, 80 g [2.8 oz] groats and pasta, 15 g [0.5 oz] vegetable and animal fats, 10 g [0.4 oz] sugar, 2 g [0.07 oz] tea substitute, 0.2 g [0.007 oz] dried fruit, 0.2 g [0.007 oz] potato flour.” 117 Altogether, this volume of food, according to nutritionists, provides about 2,880 calories, which is significantly lower than the real energy expended by workers involved in heavy manual labor under severe climatic conditions.118 In November 1942, these levels were further reduced, leading to a nutritional value of only 2,600 calories per day—and in some cases 2,000 calories or lower.119 The overall situation was not changed by the fact that, for certain kinds of work, such as underground or in high country, as well as for certain camps, such as Pechorlag, Intlag, Vorkutlag, and Construction Site no. 15, these norms were higher by 15 percent.120 Moreover, in practice, food rations would be raised or lowered depending on the individual prisoner’s ability to meet production quotas and their status in the system at that specific time: doctors, bookkeepers, engineers and technicians, educational and cultural workers, those who were sick in hospital, those who were being punished for breaking rules, and so on. Daily rations were also separately established for prisoners in transit: those who were being transferred to their sentencing destination, and those who were being released from prison.121

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

140

Determining the daily rations for every prisoner required complicated calculations and involved a slew of red tape.122 Kokhans´ka writes in detail about the daily rations based on the category of work and the meeting of quotas: A ration of bread was issued for the entire day, depending on the “cauldron” (kotel), i. e., meeting daily production quotas. . . . For the first cauldron, 200 g [7 oz] of bread were issued, and at the sixth and highest quota in the mines, 700 g [24.7 oz] were issued. This also affected the food in the dining facility. “Cauldrons” were determined by how well quotas were met, but it wasn’t always fairly done. The foreman distributed as he chose, and there was no point in complaining about unfairness because afterward he would take his vengeance. The fifth and sixth “cauldrons” were given to the camp “aristocracy”: the work-­assignment clerks, the assistants, the foremen, the unit supervisors, and the mine diggers.123

Therefore, those who were able to meet their quotas and even overproduce had the right to incentive in the form of additional portions of food, as Pozniak (Skrypiuk) notes: “We didn’t know how to work Soviet-­style, so we worked quickly and conscientiously. . . . Sometimes we were able to produce 150 percent of our quota, and then we would get an additional 200 g [7 oz] of bread at the factory, but this was real bread, not at all like the bread issued at the camp.” 124 Dovhoshyia, who worked outside, breaking up rocks, describes her portion in relation to the type and volume of work executed: I worked with the girls in a quarry. We would break up big boulders, then move the smaller rocks by wheelbarrow and toss them into holes in order to even out the territory for an airport. . . . The work was hard, and the food was sparse. When the crew met its quota, we would be fed somewhat better: we got 400 g [14 oz] of bread, 500 g [17.5 oz] of oat kasha (or mogar, which is a kind of millet), and 700 g [24.7 oz] of soup. Unfortunately, we rarely were

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

141

able to meet our quota, and so our rations were mostly punitive ones. . . . We were certain that we would meet our ends in that quarry because we began to look like death, like the drawings on electric poles.125

Like many others, Pozniak (Skrypiuk), who worked at a military heavy engineering plant, received even less to eat: “For lunch, they would bring us 300 g [10.5 oz] of bran kasha each, the kind of slop that pigs and chickens are fed, and 200 g [7 oz] of bread each, if it could be called bread: it was a raw black mass baked out of Lord knows what.” 126 The situation was worsened by the fact that political prisoners were too often held together with those who had been sentenced for real crimes. These criminals not only had privileged status in the camp hierarchy and took advantage of illegal preferences, but also mistreated the politicals. As Oleksandra Veres-­Shtundak writes: Worse even than the hunger and the cold was the fact that we were forced to serve with blatnye. Many of them actually did not go to work, since they were on good terms with Nikolaev, the senior overseer, and so we were forced to work for them: blatnye made the politicals cover their quotas, while the management ignored the situation completely. Because of them, we often did not get bigger rations, and old clothing was not replaced with new. . . . Blatnye mistreated politicals physically as well . . . they took away our food and parcels.127

Indeed, the criminal elements responded to any resistance with physical violence, up to and including murder.128 Sometimes, female politicals managed to establish peaceful and even friendly relations with individual petty criminals, as was the case with Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna, who was able to get on the good side of a neighbor and petty criminal. This neighbor made sure that Potykevych-­Zabolotna was finally given medical treatment when she was ill.129

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

142

In general, rations were miserly and critically short on protein and vitamins, while the food itself was often of poor quality and not fresh.130 One thing that needs to be taken into account is the huge scale of corruption among those responsible for foodstuff provision at the camps, which was met with disruptions in supplies and outright theft of food at the lower levels of distribution.131 Among others, the Inquiry from the Gulag Organizational Department into Shortfalls in the Work of Gulag Administrations and Departments, dated 9 March 1951, states: “Across the Gulag colonies and their camps, wastage and theft are still very substantial. For 1950, losses were more than RUB 3 million. . . . In addition to this, shrinkage, wastage, and theft added up to RUB 4.5 million and were up compared to 1949.” 132 Separately, quite a bit of foodstuffs intended for the prisoners were spoiled and wasted because of the inappropriate conditions in which they were transported and stored.133 The scale of corruption and mismanagement was enormous, and the impact on the prisoners was very much felt. Most of the time, they were given insufficient, inedible, and poor-­quality food, which the Ukrainian women bring up constantly in their memoirs: The food was awful. But what can’t a person adapt to, in order to survive. Initially, we felt like throwing up and could not eat kasha in which worms were floating. We would drag them to the edge of the bowl and throw them away. At one point, Liusia Kot said: “If we get so disgusted and refuse to eat, we won’t survive. Take a newspaper, read it and eat. The worms are already cooked and they won’t hurt you.” And that’s how we got used to eating everything that was put in front of us, some more and some less so. We ate up soup made of dried cabbage with a terribly unpleasant rotten smell, rutabaga soup, some kind of fermented soup that tasted like sourdough bran, and even codfish half filled with salt—after which thirst tormented us for a long time.134

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

143

In describing the typical diet in various camps, different women use nearly the same words, constantly mentioning the lack of drinking water, the poor quality and small portions of bread, and the complete absence of vegetables, and they list the most standard elements of the prison diet: whitebait, rutabaga, fodder turnips, and porridge made of pearl barley, barley and oats, or lentils, among others.135 A permanent fixture in the daily camp menu was balanda, a watery soup that former political prisoners remember with particular distaste. As Mariia Shustakevych tells it: For lunch, balanda. None of us had ever eaten anything like it until now. It was a handful of millet and a couple of potatoes boiled in plain water. They served everyone in her own bowl. . . . At the beginning, this balanda reminded us of ordinary slop, it was so flavorless and lacking in any kind of aroma. But later people got used to it, and they ate it. We had to eat it, because we all understood that we needed to survive.136

The women were unanimous in their estimation of food portions: “There was so little of this food that a person grew exhausted very quickly.” 137 Ending up with a work assignment that was near food was something the prisoners considered an enormous bit of luck because it allowed them to shore up their strength a little by pilfering food. Examples of this are many: They began to drive us to work in the farms. Boy, did we eat our fill there. It happened to be fall, and the harvest was being taken in. Here you’d nibble on a carrot, there you’d grab a beet. We would even bring potatoes to the housing zone and cook them up.138 We were walking around like ghosts, with every second person dystrophic. The medical commission decided such cases, and we were taken to the agricultural camps. There, we made a point of eating raw potatoes, beets, and fodder turnips whenever we happened to be sent to harvest.139

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

144

In the fall, when potatoes, turnips, and cabbage were being harvested, we ate everything raw—and that, stealthily.140 It was considered very lucky when the crew was sent to the vegetable warehouse to pick through potatoes and vegetables. We would eat things raw and bake furtively in the ovens the warehouse was heated with. The only thing we stole was potatoes, even though it was hard to carry them into the zone through two shakedowns—one when leaving the warehouse and another sometimes at the guardhouse. We would slice the potatoes and lay them in our army boots as a hiding place, and a few other places that were hard to feel. In the evening, we would cook a wonderfully tasty potato potage in the barracks.141

Sometimes such attempts to feed themselves with pilfered produce turned out badly for the prisoners, as in the case of Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk: “I thought I’d be clever and cook up some potatoes. Being hungry, we ate our fill, but our guts began to burn unbearably. It was so bad that it would have been better to just go hungry. It was probably a fodder variety, meant for livestock.” 142 Anne Applebaum says that food was one of the many effective ways to control the prisoners, next to regulating their time and living space. People who were exhausted from hunger were much easier to manipulate, as their behavior would be primarily determined by the survival instinct.143 Steven A. Barnes shares this opinion, explaining the mechanism for using hunger under the label “reforging” prisoners: The provision of food served the system of both punishment and reward in the Gulag. . . . The failure to fulfill norms evidenced a failed commitment to self-­rehabilitation. . . . Reduced rations were the main cudgel to destroy that resistance . . . or if the prisoners continued to “resist” reeducation by failing to fulfill norms, their rations would [shrink and] lead to starvation and death. . . . Food

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

145

operated in such a manner that those determined irredeemable were placed on a downward spiral toward death.144

Every prisoner who experienced hunger in the camps describes it as a powerful, destructive force that affected not just the body but the very individuality of a person: “The hunger is always there, day and night, weeks and months, without a break. It doesn’t let you think, it forces you to do bad things, it nags, takes over. . . . The entire ego is reduced to a single desire: ‘To eat!’ No matter what or at what cost.” 145 In analyzing the testimony of different women in the Gulag, Martha Chyz concluded that hunger was the biggest fear of the prisoners, while the worst punishment was that involving reduced rations.146 As Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls: “It was very hard to look at people who were hungry and were thinking only of food. Their eyes grew dull, they became indifferent to absolutely everything, they avoided others, and they were always looking at their feet.” 147 In almost every memoir, the women talk about the feeling of hunger as something that accompanied them constantly in the camps: For me, the worst thing about the camps was the hunger. I really wanted to eat.148 Hunger is a terrible state for a human. I don’t even know how to describe it. Even smart, cultured people became animals.149 I would dream about bread, and it never left my thoughts those hungry Kolyma days. . . . In Khenikandzhi, I was hungry all the time. The smell of bread haunted me, and I wanted to eat even more. This feeling would keep growing until it was unbearable, sucking on my hungry stomach, especially when someone got a parcel from home.150 Political prisoners were fed abysmally: never enough and never decent quality: if you squeezed the bread, water would drip out of

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

146

it, while balanda, the watery soup, was mostly no better than slop. We always felt hunger, and we wanted to eat all the time.151 We would go to and from work like zombies, so tired and hungry we were. Hunger would nag us so much that we couldn’t think about anything else.152 We were so hungry! How hungry we all were is hard to even imagine. They would bring us produce from Magadan, and we ourselves would shovel a path in the snow for the trucks to get through. By the time they brought the bread in, it had all turned to frozen crumbs. And that’s how they would give out the ration: they would simply sprinkle the frozen crumbs into our hands. They would give it out in the evening, since we had to go to work very early in the morning, and that bread would be lying near your head on your bunk, and you would keep putting it, bit by bit, in your mouth until it was all eaten—so much for sleeping.153 I remember these past years of my decade in prison as hard physical labor, cynical humiliation of a person’s dignity . . . and constant hunger. I always just wanted to eat. It seemed like I would never get my fill of bread, because in all the years of being in the camps, I never got a single parcel.154

Sometimes exhaustion overcame hunger, and the women physically could not even walk to the dining facility to eat, as Kokhans´ka describes: “Miserable, fatigued from labor that was beyond our strength, frozen to the bone, and dirty, we barely made it to our bunks, and often we were just too weak to go to the dining facility.” 155 Those who managed to preserve some better things from home had a chance of holding up a little longer by trading those items for food, like Makohon-­Duzha: Having something of my clothes from home, I exchanged it in the kitchen for bread and a kind of salo, that is, slabs of raw fatback from the “plague beast,” meaning the walrus. This salo wasn’t

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

147

especially tasty and stank of fish, and lard rendered from it never became firm. But even this made me happy. . . . The walrus lard helped me shore up my health, for now I felt like living and getting back to my homeland.156

The constant critical lack of food made the women resort to extreme measures in order to somehow survive. For instance, Anna Marunchak remembers the exhausting work of roadbuilding and admits: “The permafrost became home for many a Ukrainian woman. It took lives on a daily basis. Maybe it was a sin, but more than once we said nothing about someone who had died in order to get her ration just once.” 157 PRISONER HEALTH AND RATES OF SICKNESS By the beginning of 1942, the situation with Gulag prisoners was catastrophic, which had to be admitted even at the highest level of government in the NKVD. A top-­secret NKVD decree issued 24 January 1942 and signed by Beria stated: It has been established that lately living conditions and the maintenance of prisoners have sharply grown worse in a number of camps and colonies. . . . Infestations of lice and colds have become common among the prisoners. The number of sick, debilitated, and emaciated has increased sharply, barracks are filthy, there is no regular washing provided for prisoners, and sanitary measures are very poor. . . . The unsatisfactory state of the prisoners is primarily due to the poor work of the camp staff.158

The situation in the camps did not improve over 1942, and the state of health of the prisoners grew sharply worse: by 8 January 1943, Beria signed another top-­secret NKVD decree, On Preserving and Improving the Physical Condition of Prisoners Being Held in NKVD Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. Among other items, it established three days off per month, reiterated the mandatory eight hours of sleeping time per day and two square meters

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

148

(twenty-­one square feet) of living space for each prisoner, and required camps to maintain a temperature of no less than 12–14°C (54–57°F) in the barracks.159 All prisoners were periodically examined by a medical commission and, depending on their state of health, were designated to a category of physical labor capability, which determined what type of work the individual prisoner would be assigned to.160 A steep decline in able-­bodied individuals among camp and colony prisoners at the beginning of the 1940s clearly indicated a worsening in the general state of their health, which the statistics in table 2.1 confirm.161 Table 2.1. Health assessments of prisoners in 1940 and 1942

Work groups

Percentage by Year 1940

1942

Able to handle heavy-duty work

35.6

19.2

Able to handle medium-duty work

25.2

17.0

Able to handle light work

15.6

38.3

Disabled and weak

23.6

25.5

In the 1940s, the general health of prisoners declined to such an extent that 50–60 percent of them were categorized as disabled or only able to handle light work.162 Because of unsatisfactory living conditions, an insufficient and unhealthy diet in harsh climatic conditions, an exhausting regimen, and the dangerous working environments, female prisoners were especially vulnerable to illnesses caused by food and water, as well as epidemic diseases.163 Among the most common diseases were pneumonia, pellagra, scurvy, malaria, infectious diseases, and tuberculosis.164 Table 2.2 below shows the share of various conditions among the prisoners at NKVD camps in 1944.165 Repeated hypothermia in the absence of proper seasonal clothing and adequate housing conditions, as well as the poor nutrition and exhausting work, led to various acute and chronic conditions, which the memoirists

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

149

Table 2.2. Common diseases among prisoners in 1944

Condition

Percentage affected

Pellagra and alimentary dystrophy

34.0

Acute gastrointestinal diseases

17.2

Flu

56.5

Pneumonia

1.2

Skin diseases

17.8

On-the-job injuries

28.5

Malaria

19.1

themselves regularly write about. Ol´ha Hodiak describes her experience working in the mines near Karaganda: I worked in the mines in water up to my knees. I still had some boots of my own, as nothing had been issued yet. . . . When evening came, my feet were soaked, and I hauled out a fistful of snow. . . . In the morning, I would put on those same wet boots and go to the same mine shaft. This went on for a few months. . . . I got really sick and had a terrible abscess. They sent me to the hospital, and they put me in the disabled group for a year.166

These same conditions doomed prisoners to various chronic illnesses as well. Clearly, maintaining the health of the prisoners was no priority for camp management. Cases like what happened to Ol´ha Stets-­Ivanchuk are echoed in the memoirs of other women: During one of these ferocious frosts, the roof in our barrack collapsed. . . . They cleared away the snow in the yard between the barracks. Then they put up a huge tent. In the middle of it they placed a temporary stove, made out of an iron barrel. But it provided little heat, the cold was so strong. It was –50°C [–58°F] outside. And then they put our sleeping mattresses on this snow.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

150

All us girls came down with terrible colds. The whole body ached so much, and terrible pain wracked our bones. We would lie down to sleep, but we couldn’t fall asleep at all.167

For the prisoners, tuberculosis was a real catastrophe. The mortality rate fluctuated during different periods of the Gulag. In 1942, 5.5 percent of prisoner deaths were due to tuberculosis; these numbers peaked in the third quarter of 1946, when 40 percent of deaths across the Gulag were due to the disease.168 Prisoners who were weakened by heavy work and hunger were especially vulnerable to this “disease of poverty.” Hoshko-­Kit recollects: “Barracks with low ceilings and no ventilation, high quotas, and hunger exhausted them, and the majority fell sick with tuberculosis. At that point, the really ill, the ones at death’s door, were sent to the TsLT, the central hospital unit of the Mordovian ASSR camp group.” 169 Among the many illnesses, the most dangerous for the prisoners were the infectious diseases, which rolled across the Gulag camps and colonies in 1942–43, taking thousands of lives: the prison population was massively infected by scrub typhus, epidemic typhus, dysentery, and paratyphoid fever.170 Mariia Hrendysh describes the mass mortality from her own experience: “In 1950, we were driven into an overpopulated lagpunkt. There, a serious typhus began to go around. Many people died at that point, especially men. Day after day, Red Guards would pierce corpses with ramrods to check whether they were really dead.” 171 This wave of illnesses was a direct consequence of the unsanitary conditions under which the prisoners were being held, the considerable overcrowding that allowed epidemics to spread rapidly, the poor nutrition and backbreaking work, and the unsatisfactory medical assistance at the camps. Iryna Hladka-­Kanii recalls a different situation, when the prisoners were poisoned by bad food: One day, many of us got food poisoning from fish. Some ten or thirteen died, while two hundred of us were close to death. There was

Figure 2.8. Icon of the Mother of God, embroidered by Nataliia Nepip at the Chortkiv Prison, 1947. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

152

a huge scandal. For a whole month, no one could work. The hospital was filled with the sick, while those who were a bit stronger lay in their barracks or yurts. I was also poisoned.172

Uliana Honchar-­Bakai wrote about an epidemic of infectious hepatitis that swept through another camp, killing dozens of prisoners.173 Surovtsova describes the active efforts taken to combat infestations of lice, which started only when everyone was faced with the threat of a typhoid epidemic: three times a day, all the prisoners had to undress completely and check their clothing for any signs of the parasites. In addition, the staff “began to drive us to the bathhouse every other day. While we washed, our clothes were treated with heat in a special oven. Sometimes stuff came back a bit scorched, but the lice disappeared. They started giving us soap and a lot more water.” For the initiative she showed in combating this pestilence, Surovtsova was jokingly called narkomvosh, meaning People’s Commissar of Lice.174 The food in the camps was extremely unhealthy and lacking in vitamins, which was the main reason for various kinds of hypovitaminosis, the extreme forms of which—scurvy, pellagra, and dystrophy—caused irreversible damage to the health of the prisoners and often led to lethal outcomes.175 Khrashchevs´ka, who worked as a nurse in the hospital at the Viatlag no. 3 OLP (the separate camp section), offers a more detailed description of the main diseases: The most common disease among prisoners was alimentary dystrophy, due to poor nutrition, avitaminosis, and hard labor. . . . The prisoners worked without days off or holidays, hungry all the time and tired, not just physically, but mentally as well. That’s why they died like flies, especially during the winter and in the spring, died of exhaustion, scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, of hopelessness and grief. . . . Many prisoners were already barely ambulatory, they had alimentary dystrophy, a gradual dying off of body tissues from a lack of nutrients. Some were dehydrated by it and were little more

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

153

than skin and bones. Others, on the contrary, would swell up, their faces puffy and hardened, without any expression, and their legs like logs. There, the skin would burst, forming painful ulcers that wept incessantly.176

For instance, in the first ten months of 1942, pellagra accounted for between 40 percent and 93 percent of all deaths, depending on the camp. In reality, these figures may have been even higher, given that sometimes the cause of death was recorded as acute gastrointestinal disorder—one of the symptoms of pellagra.177 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, who worked in the permafrost digging earthwork ditches, recalls: The quota for a single man-­day was to dig a ditch 1 meter [3.3 ft.] deep, 1.8 meters [5.9 ft.] wide, and 10 meters [32.8 ft.] long. If you didn’t do it, you lost your ration of 650 grams [22.9 oz.] of bread and got only 450 grams [15.9 oz.] of soup with rotten cabbage or lentils. We were not used to the arctic climate, and we swelled up from hunger, frost, and scurvy. . . . The scurvy caused us to blow up, our gums receded from our teeth, and what teeth hadn’t been knocked out during the investigation now fell out on their own. We were blind by the first rays of the polar sun. The polar night drained all our energy.178

In describing the pitiful food and exhausting work in the camp attached to a sovkhoz in Cheliabinsk Oblast in spring and summer 1946, Hanna Iurchyk-­Ivasenko recalls sadly: “After six months of being in this hell, I weighed twenty-­six kilograms [55 lb.], although I was 1.72 meters [5.2 ft.] tall. Of the 250 girls who started out, only 107 were still alive.” 179 Benoni also describes her condition after six months in a camp: When I was transferred, I weighed seventy-­four kilograms [163 lb.], but half a year later, I weighed thirty-­one kilograms [68 lb.]. My long blond braid fell out, and instead of hair, down began to grow on my head. My face was covered in it as well. My eyes had sunk

Figure 2.9. Handmade cards by Iaroslava Senkivs´ka-Onuferko (b. 1923), made out of birch bark at a camp in Vorkuta, n.d. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

156

in deeply, and all that was left was a skeleton covered in thin skin. There were a lot of people like this in the camp, and it was frightening to look at them.180

Indeed, all the women’s memoirs contain episodes or recollections of periods in the camps when they experienced acute forms of physical exhaustion at the edge between life and death. Mariia Stadnyk and Makohon-­Duzha echo the testimony of many other women about what they lived through: It’s hard to imagine what kind of martyrdom and death those who were dystrophic suffered in the camps. They would think they saw food. Their hands would reach for bread that wasn’t there. Or they would see food but no spoon. They were worn out, just a thin layer of skin stretching over their bones. Their eyes were half crazed and pleading. Whoever witnessed such deathbed hallucinations will never, ever forget.181 Because of poor nutrition and overwork, I became completely dystrophic after the first winter and spring.182

One of the symptoms of this kind of exhaustion was what they called “chicken blindness”—nyctalopia or night blindness—which left the person unable to see at all in the dark. Orysia Mochul´s´ka describes her experience: “ 1946 and 1947 were very hard years. Hunger and hard labor in freezing conditions exhausted every one of us. Nobody got any parcels from home and we walked around like shadows. We suffered from scurvy and night blindness. . . . As soon as it grew dark, we couldn’t see a thing.” 183 Surovtsova also encountered this condition: “This disease soon became widespread as well. Those women who had to be led by the arm to the distant toilets and back at dusk were a pathetic sight. They became anxious, fearful of this sickness they did not understand.” 184 Still, the chronically ill and crippled prisoners were not relieved of their work duties: they were simply switched over to

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

157

lighter types of work within the regular camps or shifted to special camps for invalids.185 It is not hard to imagine the conditions under which people were kept or their fate, given the horror with which the prisoners themselves write about these camps, like Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna: “All the debilitated and sick were designated to the fourth category of physical labor capability and transferred by convoy even farther north to the Abez camp (meaning, in the Komi language, ‘rotting pit’ or ‘death pit’). Hardly anyone left that camp alive.” 186 The crippled prisoners continued to work even at this camp, although by now at relatively lighter work—sewing, clearing snow, or helping in the kitchen—and this gave them some chance to restore their strength.187 Having spent considerable time in such a camp herself, next to those whose physical or mental health had been irreversibly destroyed in the camps, Hoshko-­Kit describes it: “The camp for the disabled was the place that collected all the maimed martyrs destroyed by investigations, the terrible life, overwork, and age, the place where our executioners triumphed. Here you would see young girls who had been crippled for the rest of their lives.” 188 Hoshko-­Kit herself had fallen sick with tuberculosis: “I kept fainting, coughing, and choking. ‘Lungs full of holes like a sieve,’ said the doctor, and I was only twenty-­five. The doctors labeled me a complete invalid. . . . I was removed from the barracks and transferred to a camp for disabled prisoners at the Potma station.” 189 Although every woman underwent a major illness, was injured, or developed a chronic illness in the camps, their stories about all this are relatively restrained: there is little sense of despair or calamity. On the contrary, they are filled with a sense of patience and acceptance of what has happened, of detached efforts to improve their condition, and of a desire to establish facts. Their stories typically exhibit a certain kind of emotional detachment: The food was really bad, and we were being fed the lowest ration. Our barracks gradually became a ward of dystrophics. We weren’t

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

158

in the condition to walk, and we were constantly tormented by hunger. A Latvian and Estonian who had once been strong women went crazy with hunger. They began to pick fish heads out of the dump, boil them up, and then drink the water. A week later, they died, after having swelled up enormously. We goners were subject to aktirovka, which doomed us to a slow death.190

Given the conditions in which the prisoners lived, their immune systems were, in fact, unable to defend their exhausted bodies. The smallest infection turned into an extremely serious health problem, while the completely unacceptable hygienic practices increased the risks of skin diseases. Suppurating ulcers, boils, and various infections of the skin were widespread: Because I had become severely chilled, my lower body was covered in boils and sores. After eighteen months in jail, the boils disappeared, but the weeping eczema remained. If it disappeared for a short time in winter, in early spring, summer, and fall, it would reappear in another place. . . . Many of the girls had weeping eczema on their breasts. Sheer agony. It would dry and stick to your underclothes, then in the bath it would get wet and weep even more, and nobody gave you time off from work.191 The chills would lead to huge sores and boils. The entire body would be covered with small abscesses. All your strength would leave you.192

In Kokhans´ka’s memoirs, for instance, one constant topic is a chronic condition called erysipelas, which she caught while in prison during the investigation stage and which bothered the woman unspeakably for twenty-­two years after that, in the camps and even after her release.193 Other women also wrote about many instances when they became sick due to overwork in inhuman conditions, like Zakydal´s´ka: “The hard physical labor in the cold caused my hands to start aching, and soon some painful red ulcers began to cover them. Our camp doctor told me

Figure 2.10. Icon of the Mother of God with Infant, embroidered by Anna Burbela-Oleksiv at a camp in Mordovia, 1955. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

160

that I had pyoderma, but she was in no hurry to refer me to the infirmary.” 194 Beata Obertyńska, a Polish woman who published her memoirs under the pseudonym Marta Rudzka, describes two women who were sick with tuberculosis and yet were forced to log in severe frost: The fingers turned numb from the cold and wouldn’t bend—don’t even try to untie a belt or undo a button. The semiconscious women simply evacuated inside their clothes, and their pants grew stiff in the frost. As a result, they all ended up suffering from bladder infections, and the weakened bladder meant that they were constantly working frozen to the waist.195

Andrusiak experienced something similar. She suffered all ten years of imprisonment from persistent respiratory ailments and was forced to work despite being an invalid.196 On-­the-­job injuries were far from rare as well: the absence of proper occupational health and safety measures, as well as the expectation that prisoners undertake work for which they were unqualified and physically unfit, led to tragic accidents, crippling, and even deaths at job sites. For instance, official Gulag statistics show that, during 1945 alone, just in the Vorkuta coal mines, 7,124 accidents were reported, leading to 482 serious injuries and 137 deaths.197 Kokhans´ka writes in detail about working conditions in the Vorkuta mines, where the katorga prisoners did backbreaking work splitting coal and rock with pickaxes, and loading these materials with their bare hands into trolleys with not even the most elementary safety measures in place: With that kind of exhausting heavy labor and the kind of food being provided, prisoners quickly lost their strength and became dystrophic . . . dying slowly from utter exhaustion. No one was held responsible in any way for accidents in the mines, where people were being crippled and killed. Sometimes the struts would not be able to take the weight of the rock, and it would all come

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

161

crashing down on the people there. What’s more, the ventilation was terrible, and sometimes methane gas would explode.198

Work on the surface was also linked to life-­threatening risks. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk describes one accident that took place in a sand quarry, when a collapse might have killed a number of prisoners if their mates had not dug with their bare hands for fourteen hours in the frozen sand, rock, and clay, to make sure that some air got to the completely buried girls.199 Zakydal´s´ka saw a quarry tragedy take place before her eyes: Disaster struck. . . . A wall collapsed in the quarry, and three girls disappeared under the soil. My God, you should have seen what went on there! The German foreman rushed to start digging them out, and we began to help him. We managed to pull one of the girls out of the heap fairly quickly, but in terrible shape, looking completely crushed. They took her and drove her to the infirmary, but whether she lived or not, no one ever told us. . . . The two others could not be found for a very long time.200

Elsewhere, at an earthwork where explosives were being used, an explosion knocked out the eyes of several female prisoners because of a mistake on the part of the drunken civilian detonator.201 The logging sites, where thousands of prisoners worked, were anything but safe. Sofiia Stefanyshyn remembered an incident where a tree fell on a girl.202 Ol´ha Spodaryk injured her leg when a platform full of bricks collapsed onto some women at a brickworks, while another woman died when she fell into a stone crusher.203 Iosyfa Zholdak injured her foot at a sawmill and spent four months in the hospital afterward, while her friend lost her arm because of a falling tree.204 Iryna Senyk’s arm was broken by a rock at a rock quarry.205 Teklia Tykhan saw a truck with an open cargo area roll over, as it was carrying prisoners to a sovkhoz. Only one woman survived that accident.206 Mariia Lavriv-­Skrentovych recalls one of the most terrible periods of

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

162

her imprisonment with horror: “In 1952, I suffered a major injury. That year, something happened every single day in our camp: five people drowned in the Vorkuta River, girls were killed in the quarry and in the factory. A truck carrying thirty-­three girls was hit by a train at a crossing. Only one of them survived.” 207 The camp managers, in fact, did not care about the safety or health of the prisoners, basically seeing them as a consumable resource. Meshko recalls: Caution was ignored, never mind safety equipment: there was no such thing, nobody cared about it, and the circulars did not really address it. Every new day brought serious “industrial injuries”: ambulances would pick up the injured ones to take to the only women’s hospital. Few ever came back from there, as these women were crippled for life. One enthusiast, an unbeatable shock worker in this diabolical competition, a girl of remarkable passion from Khmelnytskyi Oblast, was killed in the forest while felling trees the way she might crack walnuts.208

A comment from Oksana Kamins´ka-­Iurchuk reads as almost a summary of the countless stories about what the women had lived through: “Nobody cared about our health. Instead, at every step there was neglect and accidents. People went crazy. It’s so hard to remember it all. Not every prisoner was able to endure such conditions.” 209 Sometimes, however, women would take advantage of a minor injury to take a break from the tiring labor. They saw time in the hospital or at lighter tasks as a way to rest and recuperate a bit. Senyk talks about this openly: While we were loading a turntable, a rock fell out and crushed my forearm, and I was sent—no, not to the hospital as I should have been—to a neighboring women’s camp. As I was going off, the girls sadly said, “Boy, are you lucky!” And this was my luck: my arm in pain, swollen to the elbow, and no medical help. But still I wouldn’t

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

163

have to work hard. I would be able to lie around on the bunk because I was “supposedly” sick. Lordy! That was my short-­lived luck in the camp.210

Although camp statistics do not encompass the level of venereal diseases, many prisoners suffered from them because of unprotected and often casual sexual relations. In her memoirs, Skarga writes: “Gonorrhea was very widespread. It was treated with potassium permanganate drops, what folks called ‘margantsovka,’ with problematic results. There were also a lot of syphilitics. . . . They were regularly called up by the monthly medical commissions.” 211 Because syphilis can be passed to others through ordinary contact, using common implements, its presence in a camp was not necessarily due to sexual activity among the prisoners. Oleksandra Blavats´ka recalls a separate barrack in which women with venereal diseases were housed: “They only went there to sleep for the night, anyway, because they worked in a crew with us the entire day.” 212 MEDICAL SERVICES AT THE CAMPS Camp management and medical staff did everything they could to hide real health indicators, reducing sickness rates and falsifying diagnoses, which had catastrophic consequences for sick prisoners.213 Raïsa Rudenko writes about the kinds of practices she witnessed in the camps: A quarantine is not put in place even when prisoners are sick with dysentery, scabies, or hepatitis. The sick are either not treated at all or are treated but are not told what for. In other words, they act like it’s an allergy and not scabies, or an irritable bowel and not dysentery. Camp managers and camp doctors see no point in having prisoners know what’s making them sick and consider it very inconvenient to record on paper that infectious diseases are widespread in their camp.214

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

164

Kokhans´ka describes her shock the first time she saw the camp hospital: When I first came to the infirmary . . . what struck me was the deathly silence. Patients—or, more accurately, skeletons covered in skin—lay silent and unmoving. They looked more like ghosts than like people. They came to life only when food was being served. . . . Patients frequently died. Every day, seven to ten of them would die.215

The Gulag system suffered from a chronic shortage of qualified medical personnel. Sometimes convicts who were medics were allowed to carry out this work, but quite often the post of physician was given to a prisoner from a criminal background who lacked the necessary qualifications, never mind any feelings of empathy toward the sick. As Skarga testifies: The camp clinics typically had poorly qualified paramedics working instead of doctors. They had no idea how to distinguish different diseases and were bound by regulations: only 1 percent of the camp’s prisoners could be relieved of their work duties. And so this paramedic had to be strictly selective. Having fever was the most important criterion.216

Meshko writes about her first experience in a camp infirmary, after an explosion at a quarry near Irkutsk: In the medical unit, the doctor, who was a convict, struck me as a very dubious specialist. . . . Patients were dying off because there were no medications, no suitable food, care, or anything. And there was no point in complaining. My only medications were to lie on a bed faceup in a clean, bright space, which, compared to the barrack, seemed like a resort. . . . They gave a full bread ration, and the meals were somewhat better.217

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

165

Paradoxically, sometimes sickly prisoners had a better chance of surviving than the relatively healthy ones: where the former spent most of their time in infirmaries or at lighter work, the latter were assigned to “general labor,” became exhausted, and saw their health destroyed more quickly. In her memoirs, Senyk carries on an imaginary conversation with her sister, who was also imprisoned but had a chronic heart condition: “Although our blood is the same, our fates were very different. You, with your sick heart, traveled from hospital to hospital, while I wandered from logging camp to mica digs, from a railway tie factory to a rock quarry.” 218 Some prisoners would simulate sickness in order to get into the hospital or at least have a few days off, which they did through mastyrky, meaning various tricks to provoke the symptoms of different diseases: fever, reddening, edema, and so on. But they often did damage their health as a result and even took serious risks by deliberately freezing their extremities, infecting wounds, consuming toxic substances, and worse.219 Driven to despair, some even crippled themselves by chopping off fingers or an entire limb.220 In fact, nearly every prisoner dreamed about getting to stay in the hospital for even a short while, where it would be at least a bit better than the general conditions, and where the woman might not so much get medical treatment as simply rest a little from the exhausting work and regain her strength thanks to somewhat better food. Having worked at one point as a camp nurse, Skarga described attitudes toward the camp hospital: The hospital was paradise for the prisoners. Everyone dreamed of getting into it. . . . Imagine this wonderful moment, when a fatigued, barely alive person . . . suddenly sees before her clean sheets . . . warmth, peace and quiet, gauze curtains in the windows, the smiling face of a nurse, and, for lunch, a relatively thick soup.221

Figure 2.11. An embroidered bag to keep prison mementos such as embroidery, letters, and photographs, belonging to Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), prisoner at the Taishet camps (1947–56). Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

167

The recollections of former patients confirm these observations. Vahula recalls how, frozen to the bone and with frostbitten feet, she ended up in the infirmary: “And so I find myself for two weeks as though in a resort in the infirmary, on a clean iron bed, relatively better food—white bread!—and a rest.” 222 Franko similarly describes her serious illness as a positive thing that allowed her to survive: After four months in the mines, I was lucky enough to catch pneumonia. I was sent to the infirmary, and there a Dr. Tarnavs´ka, daughter of the famous general and commander of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, saved me.223 She helped me, taught me to give shots and to bandage, gave me medications, and I stayed in the infirmary.224

Hladka-­Kanii is convinced that a stay at the hospital saved her life: “Having lain in the infirmary for all the rainy days, I came back to life a little. The doctor, a Volga German . . . may God bless him, he saved me from a certain death.” 225 Potykevych-­Zabolotna writes that in the infirmary she was finally able to wash and sleep as much as she needed: They picked me up in their arms and carried me to the medical station. They bathed me. What a joy that was to wash for the first time in a bath, in warm water! “At least I’ll die clean,” I thought to myself. They gave me a somewhat larger portion of balanda and some bread, and I fell asleep really like after a bath, between clean sheets.226

The critical shortage of medications in the infirmaries, and even their complete absence, are constantly pointed to by the memoirists. Ivanna Vykovych became seriously ill in the camps and recalls:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

168

I was sent to the central hospital. There they checked me and said: “Write home for them to send us injections until we tell you that we don’t need any more.” We were only allowed to write two letters a year, but they gave me an official note so that I could write for medications. I wrote, and they began to send me injections from home.227

In describing the camp infirmary, Pozniak (Skrypiuk) mentions that “the patients lying in it were sick with a variety of illnesses. The largest number had heart diseases and tuberculosis.” 228 Although those with tuberculosis were hospitalized, they generally did not receive the necessary type of treatment and in most cases were doomed to die. Zakydal´s´ka remembers her friend dying slowly of tuberculosis in the complete absence of drugs, as well as the failure of physicians to help her in any way: Our favorite, Lidunia, lies in the women’s barracks, such a thin girl, with huge dark eyes. . . . She’s lost weight and is just skin and bones, while her eyes burn with a feverish light. She probably realizes she’s going to die, as tuberculosis is inexorable. And what is there here to treat it with? 229

Still, Meshko warmly recalls some camp doctors whom she encountered during her years of imprisonment, grateful for the humanity and professionalism that saved the lives of prisoners: The chief of the medical station was a military physician by the name of Nel´ga . . . she was possibly the only doctor among the civilian personnel who was as decent as possible under the circumstances. More than once she stood up for the patients . . . she noticeably favored the Ukrainian girls, and during the medical examinations she refrained from blatant violations in designating physical labor capability.230

2. Living Conditions in Prisons and Camps

169

After her second arrest in prison, Surovtsova suffered from prolonged bleeding from the uterus, which left her on the edge between life and death. Despite an unpromising prognosis, she managed to pull through and acknowledges the professionalism of her doctor: “I began to eat a little more, and an evidently very experienced woman doctor decided to treat me. Without any surgical intervention, she managed to get me up on my feet again in a month.” 231 Similarly, Kokhans´ka recalled with gratitude a doctor in the Lviv transit prison whom fate brought her way.232 Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk wrote thankfully about a number of physicians who saved her health during imprisonment: one protected her from the Norilsk camps during a medical commission reviewing a transit group in the city of Krasnoiarsk by marking her as having heart disease, and another conscientiously treated her skin ulcers with the help of herbal ointments that he had made up himself.233 Anna Martyniuk remembered a doctor who felt pity for her sick baby and managed to scrounge up some hard-­to-­find penicillin to treat it.234 Overall, the prisoners had mixed feelings about the doctors: they could relieve the person from heavy work, but they also represented the camp management. A significant proportion of doctors lacked the necessary medical education, and many had been rushed through training to work in camp hospitals.235 Irena Volodymyrs´ka recalled both the physician who sent her, sick, to work in a logging operation, and a decent nurse who tried to cheer the girl up and gave her additional bits of food when she was being treated for tuberculosis. One empathic doctor made sure she was transferred to lighter work and saved her life as a result.236 Quite a lot of camp medical staff were convicts or former convicts. Most of the time, as the memoirists testify, they tried their best to ease the suffering of the exhausted and sick women, but their professional knowledge, capabilities, and resources were extremely limited.237 In the absence of medications, hospital staff

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

170

had to make use of what was at hand and accessible, which most often meant phytotherapy. They would try to treat scurvy with decoctions of evergreen needles, and serious vitamin deficiencies with willow herb or epilobium.238 Scholars acknowledge that it is impossible to establish with any exactitude the share of a given disease among those illnesses that dominated in the camps and led to mortality among Gulag prisoners, for a number of reasons: (1) difficulties diagnosing illnesses because physical exhaustion alters the clinical picture of the progress of a disease and its symptoms; (2) inadequate and poor qualifications among the medical personnel in the camps and colonies, which had a critical shortage of professional doctors; (3) the dishonesty of some medical personnel, who, under pressure from camp managers keen to cover up certain facts, would distort data about the actual state of affairs.239 Unacceptable housing conditions, overwork, a harsh climate, insufficient and poor-­quality food, lack of appropriate clothing and footwear, a shortage of the most basic necessities, poor hygiene, and an almost complete absence of medical care brought many women prisoners to the verge of death. Hunger, cold, exhaustion, and injuries drained the women and destroyed their health, crippling and killing thousands of political prisoners. Despite all these unbelievable difficulties, many of them managed to survive. Indeed, many different factors enabled some of the women to preserve their physical and mental health in the inhuman conditions of the Gulag, as subsequent chapters will show.

CHAPTER 3

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH DURING IMPRISONMENT

Figure 3.1. “God grant Ukraine freedom.” Embroidery by Ol´ha Zaverbna, made at a camp in Inta, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, ТК 4452.

NATIONAL SOLIDARITY IN THE CAMPS ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AS MUTUAL-­SUPPORT NETWORKS 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: “There were prisoners who built their own survival networks. Members of ethnic groups that dominated in some camps in the late 1940s—Ukrainians, Balts, [and] Poles—created whole systems of mutual assistance.” 3 In this sense, especially noteworthy is the example of Polish women, whose considerable body of memoirs has been studied by Katherine R. Jolluck. Polish women separated themselves from the rest of the prisoners, precisely based on ethnicity, and generally did not demonstrate solidarity with others.4 Barbara Skarga explains this phenomenon based on her own experience: “A kind of natural trust came to be among us compatriots, trust. . . . We

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

176

could depend on each other there. In a sea of nations, we were always a relatively small lot. . . . But our little islets held on.” 5 Looking closely at the personal recollections of former political prisoners in the Gulag camps and prisons, we can better see the significance of national identity in captivity, patterns in interethnic relations among prisoners, and the ways in which ties among Ukrainians were established and maintained, both inside the Gulag and beyond it. The memoirs of Ukrainian women confirm that solidarity developed, first and foremost, on an ethnic basis: All the Ukrainians stuck together, as this gave us strength. We remembered our traditions and felt ourselves a tiny part of our homeland.6 We were always like the fingers of a single hand: the Galicians and the Volhynians, the westerners and the easterners. There were weeds among us, too, whom we recognized and acted [toward] accordingly.7

Women of other nations who happened to spend time imprisoned with Ukrainians testified to their solidarity. Walli Schliess, a German woman who spent several years among Ukrainian prisoners, recollects: The camaraderie that prevailed among the Ukrainian women made life easier for all of us. Despite the crowding, no sharp word ever passed among us. We lived together like one big family.8 We were young and lived hand in hand. In our group, there were never any informers. We strengthened and supported one another.9

A Polish Jew by the name of Aleksander Chwat, whose pen name was Wat, also made special note of the solidarity of the Ukrainians

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

177

with whom he was imprisoned in the Zamarstyniv Remand Prison in Lviv: “In comparison with Poles and Jews . . . theirs was a beautiful community, with excellent traits of loyalty and solidarity.” 10 Another memoirist, Ruf´ Tamarina, a Russian-­speaking Jew from Mykolaiv, also pointed out the spirit of ethnic solidarity and mutual support within various national groups in the Gulag.11 In some camps, the management even allowed work brigades to be organized on an ethnic basis.12 National identity and national feelings remained a substantial element in the camp life of Ukrainian women. Their memoirs repeatedly raise such issues as the importance of the Ukrainian language in the completely Russian-­speaking environment of the camps and prisons, a longing for their homeland, and grief over the fate of the shackled Ukrainian people. Scholars have noted that Ukrainians from western Ukraine often refused to speak Russian, preferring to communicate in their own language.13 Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk remembers a striking episode from her camp life. One of the civilian workers in a sand quarry where Ukrainian politicals worked was on his way for a vacation in Ukraine and asked the women what he could bring them back as a gift: “The girls asked for water from the Dnipro and a tiny bit of Ukrainian soil, to keep on them.” 14 The collection of the Terebovlia Local History Museum has a little bag in which Ivanna Dilai-­Vodoviz from Ternopil Oblast kept a small bit of earth from her native village while she was serving her sentence.15 Female political prisoners continually emphasize in their recollections that national self-­awareness and a resulting solidarity are what allowed them to keep a steadfast spirit. As Orysia Mochul´s´ka writes: “Friendship and the readiness to help one another in a difficult situation, the awareness that we shared the same fate and were all here for a common ideal—the struggle for freedom and the fight against a savage tyranny—helped us survive all these horrors.” 16 Foreigners who were able to observe Ukrainian women prisoners in the Gulag also noticed their patriotism, which the women

Figure 3.2. Women politicals after release. Photo by Mariia N., sent to her parents, 21 December 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

179

managed to maintain even in the inhuman conditions of the katorga. Indeed, they sought to increase national awareness at every possible opportunity, especially religious feast days: “In their speeches, the Ukrainian women usually talked about their struggle for and faith in Ukraine’s liberation. I think that their national feelings did not diminish, but rather strengthened. This very strength of theirs drew us as well.” 17 A convicted member of the nationalist underground, Stefaniia Chaban-­Haval´ carried out the functions of the priest during a secret Easter liturgy in one of the camps on the Taimyr Peninsula in 1953. She felt it necessary to commemorate in her sermon all those who had died for Ukraine’s freedom, in order to uplift the national spirit of those present.18 Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls how even members of other ethnicities respected the Ukrainians for their national pride: “The Kazakh was the son of a man who had been dekulakized. . . . He appreciated us very much for the fact that we never shunned our own, nor our language, that we were the way we were.” 19 Typically, the prisoners were aware that strength of spirit and resilience added to their unity and cohesion. Mariia Iakovyshyn, for example, writes: “There were thousands like me. And because we were together, so many of us, we preserved our dignity. Even the camp management was amazed that we all kept to one faith. Of course, we made an effort.” 20 The Ukrainian women’s feeling of national belonging even in the Gulag was conveyed in their creative efforts, which were visibly grounded in traditional Ukrainian culture. Despite strict bans on such activities, singing folk songs, embroidering, and celebrating Christian holy days became widespread practice among the female politicals and turned into a recognizable indicator of Ukrainianness and a way of representing Ukrainian identity in the Gulag camps. Gradually, patriotic national motifs began to dominate.21 The concept of nation proposed by Benedict Anderson has shown itself to be applicable for analyzing national identity and solidarity in the camps. He refers to nation as “the imagined

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

180

community”: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-­members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their community.” 22 At the same time, Anderson argues that “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” What is particularly significant in his definition is that a nation is specifically a community: “because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” 23 Based on this understanding of nation, we can trace how female Ukrainian politicals built their connection with the nation as an imagined or wider community by establishing and maintaining contact with their homeland. At the same time, they brought together their own real but narrower nation in the camps, like a diaspora, by establishing channels of communication and setting up networks of compatriots among the Gulag prisoner population. Similarly, the ways that relations and interactions were developed with groups of prisoners of other ethnicities reveal how these women established the discursive borders of their own nation in a multiethnic environment. INFORMATIONAL ISOLATION AND ITS IMPACT The women in the prisons and camps were completely cut off from the rest of society and devoid of reliable information about the world around them: prisoners, and especially political ones, were forbidden to listen to radios, read papers, or by any other means receive news about current events in the Soviet Union or the world. Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk recalls how, when the camp regimen was eased somewhat in 1954, after the death of Stalin, she was happy to finally have the opportunity to read even a propaganda magazine: “For nine years, I had not seen the printed word. Even small scraps of newspapers were removed

Figure 3.3. Notebook belonging to Kateryna Zaryts´ka, made and embroidered at the Vladimir Central Prison, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5269.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

182

from our parcels. They turned us into animals that only thought about food and work quotas.” 24 Even in places without an outright ban, some camps simply had no press or printed literature available. Sentenced in 1949 to five years in the camps, Tetiana Deineha writes: “For the entire time, I never read a single book or paper, never heard a radio, because the ‘small zones’ simply had neither library nor radio.” 25 Informational isolation destroyed the individuality of the prisoners at least as effectively as physical hunger destroyed their bodies. The lack of news about the fates of their families and friends, and the inability to find out what was going on in their hometowns, kept the prisoners in a permanent state of anxiety and undermined their mental health. Larysa Zadorozhan recollects: It was hard. You worked yourself so much during the day that you could no longer feel your arms or your legs. But at night, sleep wouldn’t come. You keep worrying about how your son’s doing, how’s your mother, what’s happening to them? When will I see them again? Will I ever see them? And so I would worry myself all night and never close my eyes. But in the morning, it’s back to work again. A never-­ending situation. For three years, we lived in that godforsaken, abandoned barrack.26

Because of this, any kind of contact was exceptionally important. The lack of reliable sources of information meant that the main means of getting news was through personal contacts, rumors, and stories based on the fragmentary information that managed to get to women from the outside, one way or another. These rumors and hearsay spread among the prisoners, despite strict prohibition on establishing and maintaining contact with people in other camps or zones. Many informal channels functioned as both source and medium for generally unverified information in the Gulag, making every opportunity for fresh news extremely important for the prisoners. Oksana Meshko describes the

Figure 3.4. “For my friend Nusia, may you remember a long time, a photo from Iuliia.” Inscription on the back of a photograph given by Iuliia N. as a memento to Nusia, her friend at a camp in Magadan, July 28, 1954. Archives of the Museum of the Memorial Union of Political Prisoners in Buchach, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

184

significance of such rumors, both for the psychological state of the prisoners and for their sense of community: People . . . would talk and dream about being released, because whatever hurt people, that’s what they would talk about. . . . It all came from the toilet, parasha, where rumors traveled through the toilet grapevine.27 And people would go from barrack to barrack—a zone could have nine to ten housing barracks and up to a thousand people—and would spread what became known as parashi, “the most likely” rumors and “reliable news” from the lips of the camp management, the very managers “themselves”! Someone would be sweeping in the managers’ offices, someone would be helping the managers with their black ledgers, someone else would hear something whispered from a “good” and “sympathetic” female supervisor. . . . And these parashi would circulate and spread among the mass of morally browbeaten, deliberately misinformed women, gaining form and content—becoming most unbelievable and fabulous. . . . The moral power of these rumors had a miraculous impact! Nobody really believed these parashi, but they were the only thing that stirred the hope of the doomed, because they were based on common sense. We were a people, and awareness of that never left us. We were many.28

The Gulag administration took steps to prevent the development of close friendships among the prisoners, which could have provided the basis for mutual assistance networks and potentially consolidated resistance to the system.29 “So that the prisoners don’t group together or join forces,” 30 they would be transferred from time to time from one location to another, breaking up any sustained contact with other prisoners or with individuals among the management or the hired civilian personnel in the camps— who might show them compassion and provide help. In fact, as prisoners later testified, they rarely stayed for a long period in any given camp. Every few months they were forced to give up their accustomed places in the so-­called OLPs

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

185

(separate camp sections, otdel´nye lagernye punkty), and start all over again elsewhere: We were separated often, transferred to other camps, so that we would not get close to one another.31 The camp system was to never hold prisoners for long in the same OLPs, so that they would not get used to friends and to things, or get used to the place. They were often taken by convoy and driven to other OLPs or other camps.32 We were often shifted from one prison to another, and while in the prisons, we were moved from cell to cell. Even there, we were considered dangerous! 33

Prisoners were supposed to feel constant psychological discomfort, loneliness, and isolation from their usual environment. They were forced to adapt over and over again to new social milieus, to start over in gaining trust and establishing contacts, and to get used to different working conditions, climates, and camp regimens. However, this policy of constantly moving prisoners around had an unexpected consequence, as Steven A. Barnes rightly notes: “Rather than tearing apart prisoner society, it actually contributed to the creation of a broad community of Gulag residents. Transferred prisoners carried their experiences from institution to institution. . . . [They] carried Gulag rebellion from one camp to another.” 34 Talking about the prison “camp mail,” Schliess notes: It was easier to establish communication with other camps. It was constant, and even though it was frequently disrupted, we were able to quickly restore it again. Severe punishments were meted out for this kind of contact, even worse than for looking for contacts with the outside world. Maybe they were afraid of the

Figure 3.5. “On your Angel’s Day.” Handmade greeting card for a friend’s name day at camp, 1955. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, ТL 275.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

187

influence of other prisoners on us. And it was there, despite all the prohibitions.35

The movement of prisoners among camps helped them establish broader links and even fostered the illicit circulation of information within the Gulag system.36 Quite often, people who were close to one another ended up in the camps, although they were scattered over various locations and had no idea about the others’ fates. As Meshko writes: Many of the women on this “Irkutsk highway” had men who were close to them—fathers, brothers, husbands, fiancés, or even men who had been convicted in the same case, men from their own village, or male acquaintances—serving sentences nearby. Living next door to one another, families were separated forever: no visits, no correspondence! 37

Surprisingly often, as the memoirs testify, the imprisoned women were able to get news about their relatives from those newly arrived from other camps, and so, at least virtually, the women were able to maintain a connection with their families and friends and to keep their imagined community. Because of the exceptional significance of this kind of news, incomplete and distorted as it sometimes was, it was highly valued, so these informal and illegal channels of information were carefully preserved and maintained. THE ROLE OF “CAMP MAIL” IN SHAPING NATIONAL NETWORKS Despite the efforts of the Gulag administration to divide and isolate women prisoners, the women found a variety of ways to communicate, and they established permanent channels for communicating beyond bars. Even at the investigation stage, women who were arrested for political reasons and were held in local remand prisons established contact with prisoners in other cells and exchanged information that way. Mariia Teslia-­Pavlyk, who

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

188

happened to be held in a Polish prison during her trial, recollects: “The girls learned Morse code and sign language for the deaf and were able to exchange information with other cells that way.” 38 Other former prisoners also remember using Morse code to communicate in remand prisons: “With Morse code, we were sometimes able to converse with prisoners in neighboring cells and found out who was jailed at that time and where they were from, and to warn one another when a provocateur had been put into someone’s cell.” 39 There were other ways, as well. Renowned member of the nationalist underground Dariia Husiak describes another common method: We corresponded with the men’s cells. If there’s someone upstairs who wants to send you a letter, he knocks, gives some kind of signal . . . that he’s sending a letter, and you look to see what shows up in the window, which had a vent open. A so-­called horse shows up, a rolled-­up note attached to a string, sometimes more than one, as there were several respondents there and several here. You’d take off that letter and attach your response to the string, and they pull your letter back upstairs. From time to time, we’d get caught, and we’d have to sit in punishment cell for a while, or the letter was confiscated, or access to the prison shop was withdrawn. Those were the three forms of punishment.40

In the camps, where correspondence among prisoners was strictly prohibited, a secret “camp mail” system operated. The inventiveness of the prisoners is striking: they came up with the most incredible and extremely risky ways and means of communicating with their sisters and brothers in misery, and they circumvented prohibitions in every way possible while avoiding punishment for themselves and their recipients. This secret “postal service” operated illegally in just about all the Gulag camps, forming a broad network of channels for exchanging information, both by word of mouth and in writing.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

189

The central “hubs” in this system were premises of a sanitary nature: toilets, showers, baths, and so on. They were regularly visited by both sexes and so pretty much every female prisoner had an opportunity to leave something or receive something in a secret cache. As Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk) recollects about the transit prison in Kyiv: “In the toilet, there were places where the prisoners put their ‘mail.’ These places were handed down to newly arrived prisoners.” 41 Nadiia Surovtsova, who spent many years as a captive of the Gulag, mentions that the prison and camp toilets were the main places where notes would be exchanged among the prisoners: Ordinary running correspondence took place through the bathrooms. The walls there were painted in a dark brown oil-­based paint. . . . At the agreed place, it was possible to read something written in pencil by squinting your eyes to eliminate the glare. The note would be wiped off and the answer written in its place. Everyone who was corresponding knew their place and their respondent. . . . There was a certain degree of risk in this letter-­ writing, should the escort accidentally notice something written. But we would often write in some random foreign language, so, in fact, that never happened to us.42 In a corner of the yard stood the main bathroom building: on one side was the women’s, and the other side went out into the men’s zone. It was possible to talk there, and later people got clever enough to organize parcels, never mind just letters.43

Other places for the secret exchange of notes were the prisoner work sites. While quite often the men and women worked separately and in different shifts, they did work on the same sites. Ol´ha Liads´ka explains: There was, of course, no communication. But we worked on one and the same site as the men, the women in the daytime, the men

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

190

at night. People would leave letters and notes in hidey-­holes. Many, many girls and boys corresponded among them. Young people from western Ukraine were especially tight-knit.44

Sometimes former prisoners who worked on the same sites would support them and help pass letters along, although it could took a long time to find the addressee.45 A short note with a few warm words, a handmade card, or a trinket served the women as a sign of moral support for the men, which helped them all overcome hopelessness and despair. Although passing along such notes was risky business, given the severity of the punishments, it went on constantly: the value of this kind of correspondence in the prison subculture was so significant that the women prisoners were prepared to take their chances. Omeliana Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka writes: We had our own internal “camp mail” among prisoners. . . . The letters came from the men’s zone. . . . They threw letters tied to stones at an agreed-­upon time, under cover of the sirens at the power station. Every day I would “take in” the mail, except on my days off. In four years there, I only got burned once. We were being minded, but we watched the overseers even more carefully. Thus, we knew what was going on in the men’s zone, and they knew about ours.46

Other former prisoners also write about this kind of correspondence as one of the most widely used approaches. Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) notes: One of the easiest ways to arrange “mail” was to wrap the note around a stone and toss it over to the other side of the forbidden zone. Any note found by someone with only the name of the addressee was passed along, from hand to hand, until it got to the person to whom it had been written.47

Exchanging letters allowed the political prisoners to establish and maintain a real national microcommunity in the camps.

Figure 3.6. Handmade greeting card by Iryna N., given to a friend at camp on her name day, 30 September 1953. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, ТL 278.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

192

Altogether, these networks effectively created a Ukrainian diaspora in the Gulag with which the women prisoners could identify and whose support they knew they could depend on. LINKS WITH THE HOMELAND CORRESPONDENCE WITH HOME The practice of keeping prisoners, especially politicals, in complete isolation intensified after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941: correspondence of any kind, packages, and newspapers were completely prohibited in most camps, and the broadcast of radio programs over loudspeakers was stopped.48 Iryna Hladka-­Kanii describes how she felt in the first months of being in camps that were nothing but endless hunger, cold, and exhausting work: “We stopped resembling people. . . . Work went slowly, and life even more slowly. Hope faded. No letters came from home, so we got no news about how things were and what was happening. It was a complete wasteland.” 49 The prisoners felt adrift in time and space, as though the world had forgotten about them. Vladislav Pocheptsov underscores the destructive impact of this kind of situation on the prisoners: The detainees find themselves in an informational and social vacuum: in this kind of situation, the person not only loses their usual world, but also suffers from the awareness that the world has lost them. This state can be described as an existential death, so that the opportunity to maintain any kind of communication with the outside world and the desire to leave some kind of trace in it become a moral need.50

The prisoners themselves were all too aware of the destructive impact of this kind of isolation because they felt it acutely, and they desperately sought ways to break through the informational blockade. As one former prisoner puts it: “We constantly sought

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

193

opportunities to communicate with the outside world. Given the monotony of our daily lives, any bit of news was a bright little ray of light that strengthened us.” 51 Halyna Kokhans´ka describes in detail how letters from friends and relatives would contain news about the village in a veiled way, using allegories. These letters let her know not only about the sad fate of her family but also about the defeat of the local nationalist underground.52 Correspondence with their home made it possible for the prisoners to maintain a slim line of communication with the society from which they had been removed. For many of them, it meant a chance to remain a human. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) writes about this feeling: “It’s hard to talk about what a person feels after ten years of being imprisoned. . . . You become indifferent to everything, you go wild. The only joy and the tiny bridge between us and our dear ones was the letters.” 53 Yet, prisoner correspondence was strictly regulated. In the Rules for Internal Routines for Prisoners in Gulag Camps and Colonies, dated 15 May 1945, the list of prohibitions for prisoners includes “sending and receiving letters bypassing the administration.” In fact, outgoing correspondence—no more than two letters per month—was to be handed to the administration in unsealed envelopes.54 Indeed, the women prisoners lived from letter to letter, anticipating news from home, hoping that their nearest and dearest had not forgotten them: “Every letter in jail was an event. We waited for every response like hope. Some of those among us were found by their families. Others never stopped waiting.” 55 The joy and uplifted spirits that the women felt from getting a letter from the free world was something they would share with their sisters in misery: “That first letter brought such joy, I remember a few lines to this day. . . . The letter passed from hand to hand, we read it and were happy, and sprinkled it with our tears, and once again waited for bits of news.” 56 Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) was only able to restore communication with her brother in her seventh year of incarceration.

Figure 3.7. “For the Birth of Christ!” A Christmas letter with a drawing by Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, 20 December 1955. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/9.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

195

She recollects how this secret, forbidden correspondence helped her overcome despair and the loss of hope: Our letters became an escape from unbearable thoughts and the futility of our existence. They were also an escape from the real life, despite the barbed wire encircling our camps. . . . Every letter was a written conversation, genuine communication, and a search for something wonderful in this environment.57

The special harshness of the regimen for political prisoners was especially evident in the severe curtailment or complete prohibition of letter-­writing. Often families did not even know what had happened to their loved ones, so the prisoners did everything within their power to let their relatives know that they were alive, as Schliess describes: It was strictly forbidden to write and even to get paper, a pencil, ink . . . it was anything but easy. Yet we constantly looked for ways to communicate with the outside world. But what was most desired was contact with home and family. . . . And, more than anything, the girls wanted to find out something about their loved ones, about their friends, and about their village or town.58

Kokhans´ka recalls how, even in the Lutsk Remand Prison, the detainees looked for ways to pass notes to the outside world, secretly rescuing scraps of paper from wastepaper baskets while cleaning the offices of the prison interrogators, while she herself got the idea to snitch a pencil from the officer’s desk during an interrogation.59 Meshko describes her desperate attempt to send word to her mother while in transit to the camp: Using a stub of a pencil and a scrap of paper—and that was a real treasure that you did not find in every parcel—I scribbled a few words of comfort home to my mother. I sealed the little piece of paper with some chewed-­up bread, having written the address on

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

196

top, and when the escort led us into the train station, I tossed it into the crowd, yelling, “People, throw it into the mailbox!” My first letter never made it.60

Political prisoners, who accounted for the majority of Ukrainian prisoners, were completely prohibited from sending and receiving letters or parcels during their first year of incarceration. They were also not allowed to read books or newspapers. In time, the camp supervisor could give them permission, depending on how the prisoner behaved and how well they met their production quotas.61 According to Kokhans´ka: “For an entire year, prisoners were not allowed to correspond with relatives. They could receive letters, but not parcels.” 62 In Polish prisons, where Ukrainian women were also held pending investigations, those who were accused of nationalist activities were prohibited access to newspapers. Arrested in fall 1947, Teslia-­Pavlyk recalls: “Initially, they would give us newspapers, where we tried to read a bit ‘between the lines.’ We would always find something. After a while, they prohibited newspapers.” 63 In the memoirs, there is quite a lot of testimony about how prisoners evaded the restrictions and prohibitions on correspondence, sending letters outside the camp walls with the help of some of the civilian personnel. These were individuals who genuinely sympathized with the prisoners and took on the risk of violating the ban and illegally sending letters to their families: One of the civilian nurses looked in and said that I should write a letter to my parents and tell them everything, and she would toss the letter in the regular post.64 Our overseer, a Kazakh, was a good man: “What, you want a letter? Give it to me, and I’ll toss it in the mail.” So I wrote a letter. He even brought me an envelope. He’d buy it for you and throw the letter in the mail. There were some very decent people.65

Figure 3.8. “Christ is Risen!” An Easter letter from Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, n.d. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/10.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

198

The main trick was getting the letter outside the zone, avoiding a search by the guards at the gate, and then getting someone from among the civilian personnel to send it. . . . Whenever we could distract the escort, we would give the letter to a machinist or the conductor of a passenger train.66

After 1951, all Gulag prisoners had the right to write two letters a year, but all incoming and outgoing correspondence was checked by censors for any prohibited information: prisoners were strictly forbidden from describing their living conditions and the work they did, or mentioning the location of their camp or the names of other prisoners.67 Having spent time in the special regimen camp in Mordovia, Oleksandra Blavats´ka admits: “What bothered us the most was being forbidden to correspond. We were allowed to write two letters a year from the camp and could only receive letters from home if we met our production quotas.” 68 In different places, however, the rules could vary, as Pozniak (Skrypiuk) reveals: We were told that we could send only two letters a year, but we could receive any number of letters. But if anyone ever tried to get a letter out without going through the censors, then they would be completely prohibited from corresponding. . . . At the beginning, we followed these rules, but in time we tried to send letters through the civilian personnel. The guards at the gate would search us and force us to take off our shoes, but we still managed to get letters out.69

In some camps, in addition to these two annual letters, “you were allowed to write a single postcard once a month with a request to your family. For instance: ‘My dearest ones, I’m alive and healthy. Please send me . . . (listing what to send in the way of foodstuffs or clothing). Kisses, stay well.’” 70 With time, the number of letters that prisoners could send was increased somewhat: “We had the right to write once every three months to our families.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

199

With what impatience and anxiety our mothers waited for news from their children!” 71 That the prisoners constantly sought and found ways of maintaining more-­or-­less regular contact with the outside world and with their families back home is mentioned by other memoirists as well: Sometimes we managed with a stub of a pencil—and boy, would we have to answer for having one!—on a scrap of paper to write a few words, somehow make a little envelope and throw it through a crack in the railcar right onto the tracks. And decent track workers would be found who picked up these little letters and sent them “postage due” home.72 They allowed us to write letters twice a year, and thanks to the civilian personnel that worked with us . . . we could write more frequently. Many letters went missing, but something managed to get to the right address. Of course, we did not provide any return address.73 Kindhearted overseers and civilian personnel who worked at the brickworks saved us. They would take our letters outside the barbed wire fences and bring back answers addressed by regular mail to them.74

Just how important the opportunity to correspond was for the prisoners is illustrated by an incident that took place at a construction site near Inta. Somehow the chance came up for the prisoners to secretly get some things that they needed from sympathetic civilian workmen. The women asked for what was most valuable to them: paper, pencils, and envelopes, “which allowed us to write letters to our families, transcribe poems, send greetings to our girlfriends on their birthdays, and so on.” 75 Moreover, the women who were taken to work outside the camps were incredibly clever and invented many tricks to secret-

Figure 3.9. “Where there is memory, words are not needed. A memento for my family from Mariia.” Inscription on the back of a photograph sent by Mariia N. to her parents after being released from camp, 21 December 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

201

ly get letters out of the camp during their transfer to the work site, where an opportunity might arise to send the letter off. Of course, oftentimes such attempts would fail,76 and those who were caught were punished. For instance, when an illicit letter of Anna Hoshko-­Kit’s was found by the security detail, she spent ten days in a punishment cell for breaking the rules.77 But this possibility never stopped those who were punished or anyone else: the women continued to do everything in their power to get news about themselves to their homeland. Obviously, the management of the camps and colonies not only guessed that this was going on but knew very well that it was happening on a large scale and regularly reported about it to the Gulag administration. That this was the case is evidenced in a top-­secret document entitled From Materials Prepared for the Report of Gulag Supervisor G. P. Dobrynin at a Meeting with the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs to Verify the Conditions under Which Prisoners Are Being Held in Special Regimen Camps, dated 30 November 1949. Among other points, this document states: Operational staff at special regimen camps must pay increased attention to efforts to prevent illegal communication with the outside world on the part of prisoners, who have been showing considerable resourcefulness and cunning in this matter. . . . In this particular camp a number of incidents of criminal links have been uncovered between civilian personnel and prisoners (the illegal

passing of letters from prisoners to the outside world and so on).78

Despite this order, camp management clearly did not succeed in stopping the flow of correspondence: prisoners continued to send letters through illegal channels, circumventing censorship. The scale of this activity was such that, in November 1952, the deputy Gulag supervisor issued a special document called Gulag Instruction no. 9/2–2/34285c on Stopping the Transmission of Illegal Correspondence by Prisoners, in which camp supervisors

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

202

were exhorted to use “urgent, effective measures” to prevent that kind of correspondence and to severely punish the perpetrators.79 Why did the women risk so much by writing illegal letters to home? Why did they so desperately want to inform their families and loved ones about themselves despite the growing severity of the prohibitions and punishments? The memoirs of Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk, renowned member of the nationalist underground, reveal just how important correspondence with those who remained free was for the mental health of the prisoners: I was also overtaken by depression and tried not to show it. Sometimes I wanted, just once, to cry my heart out, so that no one could see or hear me. . . . I wanted to be able to open my heart to someone. I would write a letter to my director, Mrs. Bylitsova. She was elderly at this point, a wise woman and a patriot, although her father was Polish. . . . I would ask the civilian agronomist to get me an envelope just to avoid the triangle with the “mailbox.” I no longer remember what I actually wrote, but the unforgettable response from the other person has stayed with me all my life. . . . What a pleasant surprise it was for me, when I got a letter from my former professor Mrs. Volodymyra Volians´ka. . . . A page and a half from an ordinary copybook, it would seem like not that much writing, but every thoughtful word touched my soul very deeply and was illuminated with a bright warm ray that warmed the most difficult moments in my life. . . . I read the letter to all my girls and saw how their hitherto sad eyes brightened and how they smiled through their tears. I have often recalled those encouraging phrases ever since then.80

Like many foreigners, Skarga suffered particularly hard because of the lack of contact with her home. She very clearly formulates the significance of letters for a person who is in captivity: Some might say it’s trivial, something that means very little, but it turns out to be such a very important thing for every prisoner.

Figure 3.10. “Memento of Siberia. Help us, Virgin Mary.” Fragment of the icon of the Mother of God, embroidered by Mariia Vorobii-Bereza at camp, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

204

A scrap of paper that had been read and reread many times grew into a symbol, became a fetish, a visible sign of the unspoken connection with life, with the past, and with humanity that the prisoner lacked. Fear of a disease was less serious than fear of losing this last little bit that reminded you of the past and of your own former life.81

It appears that, for the women, it was not just and not so much about the ordinary exchange of news and receipt of information about events in the outside world, as it was about the desire to remain—even at a distance—part of that community from which each of them had been cut off, the desire to preserve a sense of involvement in the everyday life of their social circle, and to continue, however virtually, to be part of this community. Writing letters allowed the women to position themselves in their minds as temporarily absent members of the community, not gone forever, and to perceive their imprisoned state as transitional, as a kind of anomalous break in continuity, before and after which normal life continued. Some scholars have considered the practice of letter-­writing between the prisoners and their homes to be a means of surviving in the Gulag. Preserving the connection with their normal environment and life outside the camp allowed the prisoners to preserve their mental and physical health.82 PACKAGES FROM HOME: STAYING IN THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY The rights of political prisoners were extremely limited, and even what marginal rights they had were systematically violated by the Gulag camp management. This was apparent, for example, in the fact that long-­awaited letters from home were not always given to the women and their parcels were pilfered. Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka bitterly recalls:

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

205

We were allowed to send two letters a year and to receive an unlimited number, but those letters rarely got to us. When cleaning the building of the guards, the prisoners often came across entire packets of letters addressed to different prisoners. As to parcels from home, after being inspected by the camp bosses, little was left.83

The fact that, in early 1942, all prisoners at NKVD camps and colonies were allowed to receive parcels of food in no way reflected a sudden humanitarian streak among Gulag administrators. The decision was forced by the critical state of food provisions for prisoners. Because all the country’s resources had been mobilized for the needs of the war and the front, supplies to camps and colonies were down to an unacceptable level. Prisoners were starving, falling ill, and dying at an enormous rate. A top-­secret NKVD directive dated 13 February 1942 stated: In the interests of using additional sources to improve the provision of prisoners with foodstuffs and clothing . . . at our request the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR . . . has decided to allow branches of the People’s Commissariat for Communication to receive parcels addressed to the USSR NKVD camps.84

Thanks to this decision, some female politicals who still had close relatives outside the prison system were able to occasionally receive parcels from home. Needless to say, this allowance provided the prisoners with some support, as their families would send them food, clothing, basic necessities, little presents, and so on. Still, it could not fundamentally improve their situation. Moreover, for various faults, including breaking camp rules, this privilege could be—and often was—easily withdrawn. From the minute a parcel was sent to the time when it was received, months could go by, or the parcel could simply be lost along the way. Parcels regularly arrived damaged or with their contents no longer all there. In the camps, every parcel was checked,

Figure 3.11. Handmade Christmas card by Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, n.d. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/2.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

207

and items that were prohibited to prisoners would be removed: pencils, knives, scissors, medications, cologne, books, religious items, and so on.85 Sometimes the recipient would only be allowed to take some of the contents, with the rest left in a storeroom for gradual use. Poliuha (Masiuk) was in charge of such a “left parcel room” for a while after Stalin’s death: I would take in parcels twice a week. It went something like this: the overseer, a woman, would unpack the parcel and check over everything, no matter how trivial. I would weigh all the food products and enter them into a card catalog, carry the parcel to a small room, the “left parcel room,” and set everything up on a shelf. The parcel room was open all day, and anyone could take something from it for themselves, because we were not allowed to keep foodstuff in the barracks.86

Most likely such rules were intended to reduce the risk of theft among prisoners, but in practice the guards themselves tended to steal from the parcels left in their care.87 In some camps, the process of checking packages basically turned into open theft on the part of the guards. Oksana Khrashchevs´ka, who was herself a nurse and thus was once witness to and unwitting participant in this procedure, describes what happened in some detail in her memoirs: Parcels would never go directly to the prisoner right away. Who knew what might be in such parcels—especially those coming to enemies of the people! And so there was a special commission to check them. It was supposed to include the censor, a work-­ assignment clerk, a foreman, and a medic. This “committee” would, making no effort to hide the fact, right in front of the prisoner to whom the parcel was addressed, unpack the parcel and boldly take out the onions, tobacco, and lard, leaving the recipient a smaller share at its discretion, all while mocking the poor individual.88

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

208

Still, every parcel also turned into a real occasion—and not just because of its material contents: Everyone can probably imagine how the prisoner impatiently awaited a parcel. It represented both news from home and something edible. . . . Someone still cared for you, they hadn’t forgotten or cut you off from themselves. And the parcel probably had something to eat, and some tobacco, and maybe just a little bit of lard.89

Parcels had a special symbolic value as well, connected to the heightened feeling of belonging, of being part of that family circle from which the woman had been torn. Schliess mentions the Ukrainian women with whom she shared a barrack: When such a parcel arrived, it was a huge celebration for the lucky ones. The entire barrack joined in. Then the lucky girl unpacked the parcel in front of everyone, and it has to be said that everyone was bathed in the love and care of her family. Not just because everyone got something from this package. But we all had the feeling that they remembered us, that they hadn’t forgotten, and that maybe they would send something more.90

Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna recalls her reaction when she unexpectedly received a parcel: The head of the medical station informed me that a parcel had come for me. I was surprised: “It can’t be for me. I don’t have anyone. I don’t get packages.” . . . Then I read from whom it had come: from Zonia and Yakiv Havrylyshyn in Oryshkivtsi. My God, was I happy! These people there, so far away, at home, were thinking of me.91

As Surovtsova recalls, this connection with their families helped the prisoners to not lose heart, but to keep focused on life:

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

209

There were quite a few people in the barracks who were getting books from the mainland, but this was a fairly closed circle to which I did not belong. . . . They preserved their femininity, lived and breathed the interests of their families and the mainland beyond the Gulag, and it gave them that sense of solid ground under their feet that feeling your nearest and dearest always gives, feeling their concern for you and the possibility of support.92

Packages sometimes came not just from parents, but also from female friends back home. Mariia Vahula mentions the gratitude she felt on such an occasion: “I got a package together with a letter from a classmate at the institute, my friend Oksana Kuziak. I was awfully moved. The package contained food and was really generous. From her letter, I understood that my dear girlfriends had contributed to the parcel.” 93 Clearly, such events had a special meaning for the prisoners, as they allowed the women to feel like they belonged to a certain social circle, in this case the student community, and helped them preserve this identity. But too many women never got any packages. For many prisoners, their nearest relatives were also incarcerated or in exile, were themselves suffering in poverty, or had died. Yet, as a rule, the women could count on the support of their luckier sisters: “Mariika received parcels nearly every month. The minute she got the package, she would wait until the three of us were back from work and would bring it all to us so that we could eat as a foursome.” 94 Sometimes, the foodstuffs sent from home literally saved the lives of the prisoners, who suffered constantly from hunger and exhaustion: And here a message came for the first time for Nina and me about parcels. We didn’t even have the strength to go over there. . . . It turned out that I had received not one, but two parcels. One with lard, clarified butter, and rendered pork fat, and the other with various grains and pasta. I invited all my friends and bunk neighbors

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

210

to share. . . . Thanks to these packages, I slowly began to return to normal. . . . But the terrible feeling of hunger never disappeared, even immediately after having eaten.95

It was important to have friends with whom to take turns sharing the contents of the parcels that arrived. This kind of cooperation increased the chances of surviving in conditions when incoming support from any one family tended to be sporadic: At this very time, I received two parcels at once from my mother and suggested that Nina join me in feasting. . . . She wasn’t getting anything from home. . . . She had no contact with her family, and they also knew nothing about her. . . . We hadn’t yet managed to finish everything in my parcel, when we saw her name on the list of those receiving parcels. The contents of her parcel were far more abundant than mine, and now it was her turn to insist that we eat together.96

It seems that sharing the contents of parcels was an unspoken but firm rule among the prisoners. In fact, this kind of mutual sharing of resources and joint consumption was yet another way to strengthen group loyalty and solidarity: Sometimes one of us would get a parcel, with clothing or with food. In our cell, the first such parcel came to Zenia Chekh. Everybody was thrilled. Of course, it would never have occurred to Zenia to keep anything just for herself. She honestly and fairly shared everything with everyone equally. . . . And this was the way it went with every parcel. My friends in need were friends indeed.97

In their memoirs, the former prisoners always have a good word to say about those who shared food that was sent to them from home, helping others survive in this way: One Konotop student, Halia, received a parcel. . . . She led me to her barrack to share a hot delicate dish. She could afford to do this

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

211

because she regularly received parcels, and she was the work-­ assignment clerk’s assistant, yet she remained a good person.98 There were girls who never got any parcels or packages, because their families had been sent to Siberia. I shared everything I possibly could with them. I didn’t have what it took to live with the look of a hungry person.99

However rare and pillaged they might have been, parcels from home were one channel for women to receive the sorts of prohibited items that only really had value for those serving multiyear sentences. This channel operated with the help of individual workers in the administration who felt sorry for the prisoners. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls that prisoners would receive money hidden in balls of yarn, and she herself was sent a golden ring that proved useful after her release.100 Ol´ha Hodiak remembers: I was sent a missal, and Grandma sent me a rosary. And when they were issuing this parcel to me, it was handled by someone who had already served ten years, while a policeman did the checking . . . and when the policeman turned aside, the other man whispered: “Hide it, quick!” . . . I kept that prayer book and rosary for ten years. Every Sunday we would say the Mass with it. Two of us would keep watch while we stood somewhere in the barracks . . . and quietly celebrated the Mass, praying from that little missal.101

Among the main objectives of the Gulag system, other than the harsh exploitation of prison labor, was the destruction of connections between women prisoners and their regular social environment: family, friends, and community. Atomized and scattered, isolated from the outside world, denied access to reliable sources of information about events in their homeland, and separated from their reference group, they were expected to quickly lose their national identity. But thanks to the formation of ethnic cohorts among the prisoners, the operation of the “camp mail,” and communication with the homeland through letters and parcels,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

212

the women were able to establish a tangible national community in the Gulag and maintain a connection with the broader imagined community. This made it possible for them to preserve and shore up their own national identity, and to remain and feel themselves Ukrainian. INTERETHNIC RELATIONS: SOLIDARITY AND STRESS In their memoirs of imprisonment, Ukrainian women consistently mention the ethnicity of each person whom they recall and emphasize the importance of solidarity among prisoners precisely on this basis, suggesting that the ethnic factor was significant among the prisoners. For instance, in her memoirs, Kokhans´ka makes an effort to list the various ethnic groups and their relative share among prisoners: In the camp, the largest numbers were Ukrainians and Russians. From the Baltics, there were more Lithuanians and Latvians, fewer Estonians. There were fewer Poles, Belarusians, Volga Germans, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Georgians, Armenians, hard to list them all. . . . There were also Greeks, Tatars, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Germans, Frenchwomen, even a few Swedes and Finns. They all looked for landswomen and were happy to find someone and talk in their own language.102

In her recollection of ethnicities, Hoshko-­Kit focuses on their differences: In appearance, we all looked the same, but we were very different. There were women from various ethnicities: Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Russians, Koreans, and Jews, but we Ukrainians were the most numerous. We were united by the same cruel fate: we were all political prisoners who thought and believed in the truth. . . . We clustered according to nations, although we worked in different brigades.103

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

213

Clearly, Ukrainian women were in the majority in some camps: Zakydal´s´ka testifies that in one Inta camp there were “many different peoples, but the majority of the prisoners were Ukrainian, and Lithuanians were next.” 104 Kokhans´ka notes that, although the camps tended to have members of more than a dozen nations, “Ukrainian women were the most numerous in the camp, 80 percent of the population.” 105 Typically, when the women mention interethnic relations in the prisons and camps, they only rarely describe incidents of open mutual enmity, hatred, or harm based on ethnic differences, although such things probably did happen. Instead, their recollections are dominated by stories of real friendship and sisterhood among women of different ethnicities. As Ol´ha Spodaryk confirms: Although there were women from different nations among us, everyone clung to their own: Ukrainians to Ukrainians, Russians to Russians, and so on. There were Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Estonian, and even Korean women among us. I don’t remember any quarrels. Everyone lived amicably.106

Ukrainian memoirists unfailingly present themselves, and by extension all Ukrainian women, as a fundamentally tolerant group, free of ethnic prejudices and amiable toward representatives of other nations. Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna quotes an Estonian woman who, she says, apparently wrote to another Estonian woman regarding the Ukrainian prisoners: The Ukrainian women have really been helping us. They’re called Banderites. They are extremely kind, responsive, and brave people. They don’t let the escorts in, and they know how to defend themselves and us properly. Elsa, stick close to them! They won’t betray you or abandon you in trouble.107

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

214

Former prisoners from different years and different locations describe interethnic relations in the camps in almost the same words. Melaniia Hrytsiv-­Kozak offers a typical example of their rhetoric: In our camp, there were Lithuanian, Russian, German, and Latvian women. Everyone lived amicably and learned to understand one another. To this day, I even remember many Lithuanian words

because I had a friend from Lithuania called Iryna Karkaskaite.108

The Ukrainian memoirists have especially fond memories of women from the Baltics, with whom they felt not so much ethnic as political solidarity: Women from different nations were drawn to us Ukrainians, but especially girls from the Baltics—the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians—who considered themselves very close to us in spirit, in the struggle for the freedom of their people.109 Lithuanian and Latvian women were very friendly. They would get more generous parcels than the Ukrainian women. They always shared with us.110

From their telling, Ukrainian women appear to have maintained loyalty to their own while remaining open and friendly toward members of other ethnicities. They say that their behavior and assistance to other groups gained the respect and approval of those foreigners: “One thing we knew was that we are Ukrainians. And although there were among us children of the Baltics, Tatars, Russians, and Belarusians, the Ukrainian language dominated. . . . Yet we did not make any distinction among us.” 111 Hanna Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn) remembers an older, persecuted communist Jewish woman who grew extremely weak in prison because of an old illness that was very serious. Later, after being

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

215

released, this woman gratefully acknowledged that, if not for the care of the Ukrainian girls, she would have died.112 Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk writes about a Georgian woman poet to whom she gave some good advice. The Georgian woman was able to take advantage of this information to get her sentence rescinded and gain release.113 Such laudatory discourse is clearly intended to present the Ukrainian women in a positive light, as an open and kindhearted group. If tensions and conflicts between the Ukrainian prisoners and other ethnic groups did take place, they were more likely to have been provoked by these other groups, Kateryna Savchuk attests: “We were friendly with the Baltic women, the Georgians, and the Armenians. Only the Russian and Jewish women did not share our views, beliefs, and resistance. Most of them fell in line with the management and were unfriendly toward us.” 114 The situation for female politicals of non-­Slavic nations in the Gulag was especially difficult: those who did not know Russian not only could not quickly understand the rules and instructions, but had trouble establishing useful contacts. In contrast, the Ukrainian women—who better understood Russian and who formed their own ethnic communities of compatriots—were able to effectively overcome such difficulties: “The politicals from the Baltics, who didn’t know any Russian, had it the worst. Our Ukrainians at least were able to beat off [the criminal elements] together and did not allow anyone to harass them.” 115 The question of relations between the Ukrainian women and Russians and Poles, whom Ukrainians considered to be occupying forces, remains problematic. It is possible to find stories of mutual prejudice and open enmity, references to neutral and distant relations, and examples of mutual help and friendship in the personal memoirs of prisoners of all three national groups. For instance, Polish women, who were relatively numerous in the Gulag, formed a special ethnic community among the prisoners and kept separate from the rest, while at the same time openly demonstrating their national identity and their opposition to

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

216

the Soviet government.116 Skarga, herself Polish, did not hide her admiration for the way the Polish prisoners kept together: When I remember those times, I look with amazement at the way the Polish women carried themselves . . . maintaining their dignity. . . . Why did people call us “proud Polish women”? Did each of us feel herself a representative of her people, an ambassador of freedom, culture, and the highest European ideals? . . . Perhaps we were arrogant, or maybe we sensed a huge cultural difference.117

Meshko, who had plenty of confrontations with Polish women over national issues, nevertheless talks about their patriotism with admiration: Polish patriotism and their national consciousness deserve credit. The Polish women may have been illiterate villagers, but when they said “I am Polish,” they would proudly raise their head and touch their thin, dried-­out breasts with their right hand, clenched in a fist. There weren’t many of them among us, but they always stood apart and stuck together.118

At the same time, in their own memoirs, Polish women who had been in the Gulag camps or were exiled to Siberia testify to the openly hostile attitude of Ukrainian women—and especially women from Galicia—toward them. Jolluck writes that these Ukrainian women, “did not see women of the minority groups as equals and revealed an attitude of superiority towards them.” 119 In her in-­depth study of the recollections of Polish prisoners, Jolluck nevertheless tends to conclude that Polish women exaggerated the level of conflict between the two ethnic groups, whether consciously or not, saying nothing about instances of mutual help and support, but doing everything to accentuate the separateness and opposition of the Polish community and to defend their national identity in contrast to all the other ethnic groups in the Gulag.120 Interestingly, Jolluck finds that Polish men, more often than the

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

217

women, mention incidents of mutual understanding between the Poles and the Ukrainians and write about reconciliation in the face of a mutual enemy, the totalitarian Soviet regime. As one Polish political prisoner, Chwat, notes: “Ukrainians were restrained towards Poles, but extremely respectful. Here we were, all suffering from the same persecution. Relations were cool, but exceptionally courteous.” 121 There are far fewer stories about friendly relations with Russian women. Vahula refers positively to one Russian from the Saint Petersburg intelligentsia, whom she happened to meet in remand prison: “She was an educated, smart, and direct person who spoke openly and sincerely.” 122 Potykevych-­Zabolotna also positively remembers an older Russian woman, a communist and a teacher from Tula who rejected imperialist attitudes and empathized with the national liberation ambitions of Ukrainians.123 Iosyfa Zholdak similarly recalls another Russian woman: “Sofiia Mykytivna, a teacher of Russian literature, was in charge of our barracks. She was a kind, cheerful woman.” 124 But there were times, also, when the close-­knit community of Ukrainian women was not happy that one of them was good friends with a Russian woman. In one of the Mordovian camps, Blavats´ka grew close to two women from Moscow, a ballerina and a painter, and suffered a certain amount of ostracism: “The Ukrainian women had formed a tight little ghetto around Mrs. Nataliia Shukhevych, the wife of General Chuprynka. I have to admit that they were all quite negative toward me, condemning my friendship with the Muscovites.” 125 Similarly, in the memoirs of women from Galicia who had been members of the nationalist underground and who found themselves in Soviet prisons next to their ideological opponents from the Polish Home Army, there are frequent recollections of mutual enmity, and yet also stories of empathy and humanity because of their common suffering. Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak describes a fairly standard practice in the Polish prison, where the Polish women who had support from home would share their

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

218

food with the Ukrainian prisoners: “It was the custom in prison that, regardless of our views and what nation we belonged to, we tried to live in harmony, to help one another, to be polite and courteous, and, as much as possible, tolerant. Sometimes our overseers were amazed at this.” 126 Lidiia-­Oleksandra Tykhovliz (Dzhulyns´ka), who was imprisoned as a young Ukrainian nationalist, remembers fondly and refers to as an “adoptive mom” the older Polish woman who took care of her in prison, although this other woman was a member of the Polish Home Army.127 Ukrainian memoirists generally give credit where due and remember with gratitude the Polish women from their prison and camp years with whom they had decent, amicable relations, and who, to a greater or lesser degree, helped them hold on and survive incarceration: “The camp supervisor, Captain Lincewicz, was a Pole . . . and was the most humane supervisor that we had known until that point. Where he could, he tried to ease the plight of the women. For us, this was something extraordinary.” 128 Zakydal´s´ka writes warmly about an elderly Polish woman who used her own surplus to sew some clothes by hand for a Ukrainian woman who had been robbed, and who gave the girl a medallion of the Mother of God.129 Because of such contrasts and contradictions in the recollections of Ukrainian-­Polish relations in the camps, it is hard to come to any firm conclusions about their real tone. But in such difficult circumstances, ideology and prejudice would likely not always have been the main factor in relations, and while incidents of ethnic hostility might have come up among prisoners, so too did cases of mutual support. It was not uncommon for the imprisoned women, according to their own testimony, to eliminate interethnic tensions and develop a sense of solidarity based on their common fate of being imprisoned. This can be seen in an incident described by Teofiliia Bzova-­Fedoriv-­Stakhiv, who ended up in a Warsaw prison for her involvement in the Ukrainian nationalist underground and who was tortured terribly during her interrogation. She wound up in

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

219

a cell with two Polish women, one of whom was openly hostile and wished her to die because she was Ukrainian. However, on Holy Saturday, the Ukrainian herself was first to go up to this Polish woman and offer a truce in honor of the Feast of Easter, saying that this way the guards would not have the pleasure of gloating over enmity among prisoners. This action took the Polish woman by surprise, and she felt remorseful, after which relations between the two women became normal.130 Kokhans´ka paints a similar picture in her memoirs: despite her description of generally contemptuous attitudes toward the Germans in the camps because of the war, she also reports a lengthy friendship with a German woman. The memoirist also mentions by name Russian and Jewish women from Moscow and Leningrad who lived with her in the same barracks. Without stating her attitude toward them, she sums up: “The circumstances that brought us all together to some extent forced us to reconcile and to behave tolerantly with one another. Basically everybody kept to their own.” 131 Based on all this evidence, it is possible to talk about a certain solidarity among the prisoners in opposition to the repressive system, where their ethnic or political differences gave way before their gender identity as women, while awareness of their common fate encouraged them to seek and to find support among the women. Kokhans´ka recalls her friendly conversations in a Lviv remand prison, even with Polish women who had been involved with the Polish Home Army: “We came to the conclusion, that under the circumstances, we needed to join forces in the struggle against our common enemy.” 132 A similar situation is clearly articulated in Ievheniia Khomii-­Kamins´ka’s memoir: Prisoners from various nations lived in the thirteen grated barracks. Among them there were no differences or enmity over convictions or religious beliefs. We were all suffering the same calamity. And so it was no surprise that amity and mutual respect prevailed among the prisoners. The hard times of prison life

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

220

brought us together even more and gave us little reason for quarrels, complaints, or anything.133

Sometimes circumstances put a Ukrainian and Polish woman in such a situation where they were forced to forget about the interethnic tensions of the past because each of their lives depended on the other. When she was locked up in the punitive psychiatric hospital in Kazan, Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn) felt the mutual concern of women of different ethnicities who would have died without the support of their sisters in misery: Somehow a Russian woman called Natasha got sick. She stopped eating and washing herself. I began to spoon-­feed her and take her with me to the shower. And so she returned to herself. Roza Abramovna was suffering from necrosis of the extremities, and they tossed her into another room to die. We girls began taking care of her. Each of us gave her a small bit of our daily ration of milk, one hundred milliliters [3.4 fl. oz.], and she survived.134

After her release, Vahula found herself in exile in a distant village in a one-­room shack with a Polish woman, and they ended up sharing the roof over their heads and their daily bread for years. Although both women had strong nationalist convictions, apparently they not only were able to come to an understanding and find a balanced model of relations, but also became very close: Mrs. Jadzia was a fervent patriot of her homeland, as well as an intelligent, well brought-­up, and cultured person. We agreed to communicate each in her own native language, to share knowledge, what we had read and what we had heard, while avoiding the unhappy pages in the history of Ukrainian-­Polish relations. . . . I remember my friend in captivity with enormous admiration and gratitude: a smart and intelligent woman who, with her good advice and wise instructions on many an occasion in these difficult life circumstances, became like an older sister and friend. Together, we solved difficult household matters. We also discussed books

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

221

that we had read and news from the state radio—which we called brekhunets´, a little liar—from the papers, and so on.135

In documentary photographs taken in the camps during those years and among exiles, Ukrainians most often appear with groups of prisoners from Poland and the Baltics.136 Whether they wanted to or not, the women had to find common ground under circumstances in which it was impossible to avoid communicating. Polina Benoni recalls: The management’s regimen was extremely strict. However, among us things were good. We got along well, and we supported one another. There were no quarrels, fights, or thefts as in the regular camps, and you didn’t hear Russian curses. There were nearly 1,800 in the women’s camp, women of all ethnicities: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Russians, three Germans, some Jews, three Finns, two Armenians, two Czechs, two Kazakhs, a Chinese, and a Japanese girl who was the daughter of the Japanese ambassador to Russia. In this international mix, we were amicable and courteous, and we helped one another both physically and morally.137

Interestingly, some women from the Russian intelligentsia who were also in the Gulag and who clearly identified as Soviet felt a certain responsibility for the violence toward other nations that the Soviet government had perpetrated. Nina Gagen-­Torn writes in her memoirs: It was not the difficulties that incinerated the heart—what burned was a sense of shame for what was being done. . . . It was like the feeling of my guilt—national and Soviet guilt—before women like Alma, Gertruda, Mrs. Pylypenko and her Hryts´ko, before dozens of Carpathian villagers.138

Did the women really treat one another with a sense of sisterhood? Mariia Nych-­Strakhaniuk remembers a striking incident

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

222

during the Norilsk camp uprising, where one of the leaders was a girl from Lithuania: I saw how the two girls hugged. The official came to arrest one of them, the Lithuanian. The Ukrainian woman wrapped her arms around her shoulders and wouldn’t let him pull the other girl from her embrace. Meanwhile, people were yelling, “We won’t give up anyone of us. You’re wasting your time trying to break us up! There’s no nations here, and no Banderites. It’s now one prisoner class!” 139

Scholars from other countries mention a similar tendency for a solidarity of the oppressed to take shape among the women, one that was beyond the traditional national conflicts among these peoples. For instance, Mara Lazda writes: There was little tension between Latvians and other ethnic populations based on national differences: their strong identities as women crossed potential barriers between nationalities. They saw themselves as victims of a shared fate. . . . [This] helped Latvian women adapt to life in Siberia. . . . This did not eliminate national identities, but it did override potential antagonisms.140

Moreover, the Polish and Latvian prisoners celebrated their independence days on the same date,141 which testified to the mutual loyalty of the women to the patriotic feelings and national ambitions of each group. Apparently, opposition to the Soviet regime was a factor in the growing solidarity among women from different nations that felt oppressed in the USSR. This, as it turned out, was noticed by those who did not share such views: Ruf´ Tamarina, for instance, pointed out that the anti-­Soviet attitudes of these people sometimes reminded her of anti-­fascist attitudes during the German occupation.142 The clearest evidence of solidarity among female politicals, above and beyond their ethnic and national differences, was the

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

223

way they joined forces in standing up for their human dignity during the camp strikes and uprisings in 1953–54. The solidarity among women who shared nationalist views and had experienced repressions based on ethnicity was especially noticeable. In her memoirs, Stefaniia Koval´-Nadorozhniak talks about the role of her friends—Lithuanian Alida Dauge, Estonian Asta Tofri, and Belarusian Iuliia Stefanovich—who stood with the Ukrainian women during the uprising in defense of their right to remain human, and about their fate.143 Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka’s memoirs of the Kengir camp uprising make note of the ethnicity of every one of her sisters with whom she stood, shoulder to shoulder, to confront the regime in an open battle: Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians, and Jews. Her memoirs typically talk about how the prisoners taught one another the folk songs of their land, making it possible to get involved in their respective national cultures and even learn a shred of them.144 Nor are stories about such cultural exchanges unique: Hanna Mazepa-­Kuchma, who was involved in the Norilsk camp uprising, recalls similar experiences of sharing cultures among prisoners of different ethnic backgrounds: Despite everything, we got along well, almost like family. We didn’t make a big deal of ethnic differences. We would share what we could. We would tell one another the news, learn poems and songs, tell our histories. We adopted everything that was best in other nations. We told others about our land, our traditions and rituals. You could say that these were “universities in the arctic circle.” 145

The German Schliess notes: “We took up singing. For the most part these were Ukrainian songs, although the Ukrainian women rarely learned other songs from us. I do have to admit, though, that we actually loved the Ukrainian songs the best. While singing them, it was possible to dream.” 146 The idyllic interethnic relations that come up most often in the memoirs of Ukrainian women are probably the work of selective memory on the part of the former prisoners: conscious-

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

224

ly or not, they prefer to preserve and re-­create primarily the positive moments of their experience. These were what made it possible for them to survive the Gulag. In the memoirs of some non-­Ukrainians, interethnic relations in the camps are presented as far more problematic and conflicted than the recollections of the Ukrainians would lead us to believe. Skarga testifies to her own good relations with the Ukrainian women, but at the same time paints a fairly harsh picture of how ethnic prejudice and tensions permeated a camp near Ukhta: Old interethnic conflicts would explode in the camps for a variety of often very petty reasons. The Ukrainians would blame the Russians, or the Poles, and those would give it back in kind. Georgians couldn’t stand the Muscovites and liked the Poles. The Chinese were politely aloof with everyone, without a drop of warmth. Still, friendships would develop between individual people, even if they came from nations that were traditionally hostile toward one another.147

Indeed, the presence of such prejudice and a certain level of hostility between ethnic groups in no way excluded the possibility of mutual understanding, assistance, and cooperation, which the Ukrainian women obviously preferred to accentuate in their recollections about their camp life. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the situation for Gulag prisoners from other countries changed considerably: their cases began to be reviewed as a top priority, and they themselves were separated from the rest of the prisoners. Eventually, these foreigners were released and repatriated from the USSR. By mid-­ March 1955, no foreign citizens were still being held in the Gulag.148 Kokhans´ka recollects those events, which led to the world finding out about the inhuman condition of prisoners in the Gulag: Suddenly, they began calling all the foreigners to the special unit, confirmed their place of residence prior to their arrest, and asked

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

225

where each of them would like to go. One of the German girls, Iuliana, came and told me this news. They stopped taking these women out to work, and rumors began to circulate that they would be sent back to their homelands. The Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Romanians, and the Austrians all waited for this, day after day. . . . Soon the foreigners were shipped out. All of them were issued new clothes and shoes. Iuliana, the German woman, came to say good-­bye to me. She said that . . . she would tell everyone about us and the conditions in which we were being kept.149

Relations within ethnic groups were also, obviously, not as trouble free as the memoirists tend to portray them—nor could they have possibly been, under the circumstances. From bits and pieces of testimony, it becomes clear that just belonging to a particular ethnic group did not always guarantee empathy, loyalty, or solidarity among the women. One former prisoner bitterly ponders on the enmity among the Ukrainians themselves that she witnessed at a camp in Mordovia, as they competed for a position in the sewing factory: I’ve thought to myself many a time. . .: why are Ukrainians so unfriendly? . . . If the Pole, the Lithuanian, or the Jew can somehow find their way to easier work, they will try with all their strength to pull their compatriots after them, to somehow ease their burden. But with us, the Ukrainian who has somehow climbed out of misery a little won’t let the next one climb out but will push them even further down so that they don’t get in her way.150

Elsewhere, Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk compares the behavior of two work-­assignment clerks, one a Ukrainian and the other a Jew, praising the latter for his humane attitude toward the prisoners and criticizing the former for his crudeness and contempt.151 Nor did other ethnic groups in the Gulag show ideal solidarity or trouble-­free relations, as studies of daily life in the camps have demonstrated. Among the Polish women there were also those

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

226

who did not match the ideal of Polish womanhood, who would agree to cooperate with the camp managers, and so on—and the other Polish women would condemn their behavior.152 Among the Lithuanians, there were thefts of food, clothes, and personal items, as well as denunciations and slander for personal gain.153 In short, it can be reasonably assumed that, in such difficult circumstances, unworthy actions took place among the prisoners, regardless of their ethnicity. PRAYERS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS PRACTICES The Christian faith and religious practices of Ukrainian female politicals, including personal and group prayer, improvised liturgies, and so on, formed an important part of prison life for these women. The women’s memoirs about imprisonment make it possible to reconstruct this aspect of their daily lives and to understand the role of faith, prayer, and Christian rituals and items for personal religious use in maintaining their mental health, moral strength, and will to survive in the camps and prisons of the Gulag. Dariia Korchak is very clear about this: “Faith in God gave us strength to maintain our spiritual equilibrium and reinforce our hope that we would return from prison back to Ukraine.” 154 PRIVATE PRAYER AND ITEMS FOR RELIGIOUS USE Former prisoners constantly emphasize the unique role of the Christian faith, which helped them withstand their suffering, not betray anyone under torture, and maintain a human face and moral values under the inhuman conditions in the camps and transit prisons.155 A significant proportion of the Ukrainian women who ended up in the Gulag camps and prisons during the postwar period were from western Ukraine, a region that was not under Soviet control in the interwar period and that had not felt the destructive effect of the Bolshevik policy of militant atheism. For imprisoned Ukrainian women from Galicia,

Figure 3.12. “Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!” Embroidered icon by Hanna Kavets´ka, made at a camp in Magadan, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

228

Volhynia, Ciscarpathia, and Transcarpathia, the Christian faith was an integral part of their world view, religious identity was an important element of their personality, and religious practices were an important part of daily life. All of this was vividly manifested in captivity, from the moment the women were arrested until the moment they were released. During the investigation, while awaiting interrogation (and the inevitable torture that accompanied it) or the court’s verdict, during the transits, and in the face of death from overwork or illness in the camps, the women turned in prayer to God and the Blessed Virgin Mary for support and protection: That night we did not sleep. Every one of us whispered the sincerest, the dearest prayer to herself. We begged our Lord, we begged the Immaculate Virgin to guide and protect us. How we needed Him at that moment! 156 Prayer probably saved me. I sent it to the Almighty every day in the hope that He would help me survive.157 But I prayed. I walked and prayed. Every time I would pray and beg God not to let me reveal anything, but let me live. Before God, I asked for nothing, only not to talk. . . . I would say, “My God, I did not plan this, Lord, this path of mine. You led me to this path— please give me the strength to stay with it.” And so it was that I endured everything—and I wasn’t the only one.158

Faced with the powerful, ruthlessly repressive Soviet machine, individuals felt powerless and helpless and so they appealed to the highest judge and protector: “Here, you could scream all you wanted, no one would hear you. You could cry all you wanted, no one would take pity or help you. Only the Lord, our God, to Whom we prayed to give us the strength and health to endure everything and not be broken in spirit.” 159 Other prisoners de-

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

229

scribe their internal, insurmountable need for prayer in almost identical terms: We prayed a lot and asked God to help us get through this and endure.160 I knew that I was going to face all that terror that the others had faced. I prayed to the Lord to help me withstand, to endure every-

thing or to die, just not to betray my people.161

We believed completely in this, and this faith gave us the strength to endure all the trials.162 I fell to my knees and prayed passionately to the Lord to protect our child . . . in distant, beloved Ukraine. And for us, I asked Him to give us the strength to endure everything.163 In the evening, lying on the bunks, our blue lips rustled, saying prayers. We believed, and we prayed sincerely.164

The political prisoners were united in their common bitter experience of suffering, so it is not surprising that their pleas and prayers to God share many similar elements: they asked not for mercy but for perseverance and strength of spirit. One young Ukrainian woman, Anna Kotsur, put together a special prayer in captivity in one of the Taishet camps in 1952.165 In this prayer, the woman asks not just for sustenance in her suffering, but also for a better fate for Ukraine: Redeem us, Oh God, and our families, Do not allow us to die in this difficult moment. Do not let us perish, we ask of you, Oh God, and You, Mother of God, and You, all the Saints at the Throne of God. We beg You, do not refuse us a better fate.

Figure 3.13. “Oh Mother of God, release us from prison.” Icon embroidered in captivity, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5068.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

231

All of You, please intercede for our beloved land, And have mercy on our people.

The women prayed, not just privately, but also together with their sisters, especially in the remand prisons: when one of the detainees was taken away to be interrogated, the others prayed together to support their friend, having no other means of easing her suffering. Vahula recalls: One evening, I was called to be interrogated. . . . In my heart, I prayed and gave myself to the protection of the Immaculate Virgin. . . . When the dawn came, they brought me back to the cell. I come in and the girls are all on their knees, saying the rosary. . . . They had prayed for me the entire night. When they told me, I thanked them from the bottom of my heart and burst into tears. I thought: “The Mother of God will always protect me and will not allow me to perish while I’m surrounded by such good, decent people.” 166

Similarly, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna writes of a time when she and another detainee were put in a punishment cell for singing in their cell. Coming out of there: We hugged each other, put our hands together, and thanked the Almighty for His guidance and help. God heard our prayers, and we returned to our cell to our friends, who had also prayed the entire time and had faith that God’s power—which is almighty—would save us. . . . In prison, sincere prayer to the Almighty creates real miracles.167

The prisoners saw the Mother of God as their only protectress, the one with whom they shared their pain and pleaded for help. Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn) tells about a prophetic dream she had on the eve of her release from the camp, in which the Mother of God appeared to her and told her the good news.168 Zakydal´s´ka also admits that she always believed: “The world is not without

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

232

good people, but I was under the care of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I feel this.” 169 While she was under investigation, Kateryna Mandryk-­ Kuibida began to consider different ways of killing herself because of the unbearable torture. Still, she was a Christian, and her conscience nagged her for the wish to commit such a terrible sin. She goes on to describe a vision of the Mother of God at this most critical juncture in her life: Suddenly it became the cell was infused with light . . . and there on the threshold stood the Hoshiv Madonna, radiating so brightly that my eyes were blinded. . . . The Mother of God said to me in a kind, sweet voice: “Child, do not cry, just pray because such is your fate, but believe that God will save you!” and I felt so much easier. . . . My soul felt comforted, and my faith cheered me: I will be free because, no matter what, the Mother of God will save me! 170

For these women, the image of the Madonna clearly had personal meaning. Their faith in her intercession gave strength to the physically and mentally worn-­out prisoners of the Gulag, and prayer encouraged them not to lose hope. Vahula notes: “We prayed very fervently, each of us on her own and all of us together on rosaries made of bread. In addition to the regular rosary everyone knows, we would also say the rosary to Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” 171 Pozniak (Skrypiuk) also mentions genuine faith in the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, describing what was possibly the hardest period in her camp years: I stumbled and fell, but when I got up again, I saw the aluminum medallion with the image of the Mother of God of the Protective Veil. I took it, calmed down, and my pain receded. I’ve kept that medallion to this day, because during all our most difficult times, the only one we could turn to for help was the Mother of God. We would stand in silence. . . . It was better to pray and to think, to dream and to make and unmake your plans for the future, or to

Figure 3.14. “Oh Mary, Mother of God, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, pray for us.” Icon of the Mother of God with Infant, embroidered by Liuba BarabashBilyns´ka at a camp in Taishet, n.d. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

Figure 3.15. Rosary beads, made out of bread at Lontskyi Prison in Lviv, 1947, belonging to Nadiia Mudra (b. 1923). Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

235

remember the past. This is what our torturers could not take from us. This was the only satisfaction of our lives.172

The prisoners were forbidden to have personal items, so all items for personal religious use—pendant crosses, rosaries, prayer books, little icons, and so on—were taken away from them upon transfer to their place of incarceration. Given all this, these religious items became especially valuable to the prisoners. Their memoirs include frequent references to crosses that they made by hand. They would shape these objects out of the heavy black bread that was given to prisoners. This meant giving up part of their already miserly ration, so that the need for prayer had to truly be greater for those half-­starved women than the need for bread: We prayed a lot on rosaries made out of bread. We would knead breadcrumbs in our hands to a consistent mass that we then formed into beads. Using the needle that, despite prohibitions, was well hidden in every cell, we would pierce each bead and slip it onto the thread. We made little crosses in the same way.173

The testimony of many prisoners is very similar: rosaries made by hand out of black prison bread and passionate prayers are an integral part of the memoirs of imprisonment for just about every woman from Galicia.174 References to prayer books are more exceptional: it was harder to acquire one and much harder to hide it during the frequent searches: A prayer book was a real rarity, so they were very much valued, because with them it was possible to recite one of the litanies. This meant an awful lot to those of us who prayed together! It seemed, then, as though you had been in church at least for a short time. The regular common prayer of the Ukrainians was usually led by one of the educated women. In our barracks this was an older woman of about fifty.175

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

236

On the other hand, just about all the prisoners had a personal, most often handmade, icon.176 To the canonic images, the women would add elements that reflected their patriotic feelings, their yearning for freedom and justice, and other prayers.177 Crosses were handmade out of more than just bread: “The Ukrainian women wore crosses on their necks made out of toothbrushes. These crosses were made by our male prison friends and sent to us in presents before feast days the same way that letters were.” 178 In her memoirs, Beata Obertyńska (Marta Rudzka), a Polish prisoner, writes about an incident that took place in the Zamarstyniv Remand Prison in Lviv, which she had been told about by a Ukrainian woman called Ol´ha in one of the Vorkuta camps: Many priests had been incarcerated in Zamarstyniv. The female prisoners made rosary beads out of bread. They knew that the men would be washing in the bathrooms next to the corridor when the women were taken out for a walk. By some miracle, one of the women managed to get next to the little window and ask a priest to bless our rosaries. A hand appeared in the window, looking more like a bloody mass, and made the Sign of the Cross over the bread rosary.179

The prisoners seem to have been very much aware of the risks they were taking by making, keeping, and using religious items: “For this we were punished, thrown in punishment cells, and denied the right to correspond. During the searches, they would confiscate our rosaries and icons, and take away our prayer books. But they couldn’t take prayer away from anyone.” 180 The need to practice their religion actively was more important to some women than their fear of the punishment that awaited them for violating camp rules and regulations. This need forced them to become more inventive. The Catholics among the women found ways to confess their sins remotely and to receive indulgence from the priests who were in the men’s zone: they would write down their sins on a scrap of paper or bark, add their prison number,

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

237

and pass these notes along to the men’s zone so that the priest might pardon their sins while walking along the fence, or pass back a note with their penance written on it.181 JOINT PRAYERS AND THE DIVINE LITURGY In addition to offering individual prayers as an intimate and personal way to communicate with God, the Ukrainian women also organized joint litanies on Sundays and improvised liturgies on the two major holy days, Christmas and Easter. Joint prayers were prohibited in the camps, and initiators were severely punished, but the need to practice their religion and its significance for the women were so great that they were willing to take the risk. Halyna Holoiad (Savyts´ka) (writing as Marta Hai) describes one such incident: We needed to save our friends. We had to find ways to shore up their moral strength. Christ! Faith! Nusia would get us ready for prayer. The women would recite litanies and the Divine Liturgy. Meanwhile, the overseers would be poking around among the barracks, trying to catch those who were praying, and every time, whether they managed to do so or not, they would put Nusia in the cold punishment cell. Even among the camp women there were stool pigeons, too.182

Judging by the memoirs, regular Sunday Mass was a standard practice among Ukrainian prisoners. Schliess, who spent time in a Gulag camp with Ukrainians, writes in detail about the habit of group prayer every Sunday: Everybody hurried to finish things by noon. Then they went to pray or, as they would call it, “to the Divine Service.” This was not a real Mass, but a common prayer in one of the barracks. . . . And because this had to be secret, every Sunday they would change the barrack and the group, in order not to draw the attention of the

Figures 3.16 and 3.17. Small icons of the Mother of God and Jesus Christ, embroidered by Mariia Matkovs´ka and blessed by Josyf Slipyj at a camp in Krasnoiarsk Krai, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

240

overseers to our meetings. We would pray silently before a medallion or an icon that someone had managed to preserve.183

Meshko describes this kind of practice of prayer among the women from western Ukraine similarly: The Ukrainian girls from the western regions knew how to celebrate that “happy” Sunday. In the morning, they would never breakfast until noon: they would patiently place their ration of bread and balanda on the bunks, and, dressed up as well as they could, their braids freshly combed, they would sit down at the long table and silently, intently pray. They would sing church songs in beautiful voices. Prayer and the celebration of the Holy Mass became a spiritual recharging, giving us strength and vitality.184

Incidentally, the women’s memoirs do not mention any interconfessional conflicts or tensions. Instead, the women testify that their Christian identity and faith took on certain ecumenical qualities. Uliana Honchar-­Bakai separately notes: “Over all the years of imprisonment, God was always with us. . . . There was no enmity among us on an interfaith basis.” 185 Sunday Mass in the women’s zones took place without the presence of a real priest. The ritual was celebrated by the women prisoners themselves, who took on the necessary liturgical roles. Zadorozhan testifies, that in her camp, “we got together every Sunday and celebrated the Mass. Someone who knew the service would be the priest and the rest of us would pray like a choir. This gave us so much added strength that it was easier afterward to endure all the burdens.” 186 Spodaryk similarly remembers that, in their zone, “we celebrated the Divine Liturgy with the duties of the priest taken on by nuns from Lviv.” 187 Stefaniia Holyns´ka (Oleshchuk) tells about her experience with Easter service in the Rechlag near Vorkuta, where the women prisoners had a prayer book and took on the roles of priest, deacon, and choir.188 Chaban-­Haval´ happened to be one of the women who took on the role of the priest, and in her memoirs she describes in

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

241

detail her personal experience celebrating the Mass at a camp on the Taimyr Peninsula in spring 1953.189 Earlier in this same camp, the Divine Liturgy had been celebrated on the high church feast days by the daughter of a priest from Volhynia, Lina Petrashchuk. The women initially re-­created the text of the liturgy together, from memory, until one of the prisoners secretly managed to get a small prayer book sent from home. At Easter, Chaban-­Haval´ had to play the role of the priest herself, and in the overflowing barracks that had been taken over for the purpose, she celebrated the Easter Matins. As to her own role, the memoirist modestly writes in the third person: The girl who acted the part of the priest, at the request of the others present, began a “sermon.” People wanted to forget where they were, to remember the sermons in church, and so the girl began. She talked about those who had died in battle and in underground hideouts, about those whom no one was able to bury, about those who were tortured. She talked about the parents who were grieving in exile for their children and about those who were left behind in their native Ukraine. . . . She mentioned the Easter bells.190

At that moment, a group of camp officials and guards entered the barrack, and everyone waited tensely for the worst to happen, but the Mass was not stopped. Unexpectedly, the officials and guards turned around and left without a word, without reacting in any way to this obvious violation of the rules. Naturally, Chaban-­Haval´, who was then just twenty-­seven, was proud of her own courage and capacity to challenge the system. There are many other memoirs that describe how imprisoned women and girls took on the functions of the priest and led the Divine Liturgy. Karwańska-­Bajlak, for instance, recalls how her cellmate Olia Halych, “was nicknamed ‘padre’ because when we all began to pray out loud together, Olia led us. In another prison, Anna Kozlovs´ka celebrated the Mass every Sunday. Most of

Figure 3.18. Small icons of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, embroidered at the camps, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

243

us participated in this unusual prison liturgy. . . . From then on, Irynka Cheplia read the Divine Liturgy.” 191 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk recalls her camp friend Lina Petrashchuk, a priest’s daughter who not only encouraged the prisoners to pray and sing church songs, but also led the Mass: And now it was Christmas. The barrack was full of these grieving, heartsick prisoners. After their heavy work, they are lying down, it seems like no one and nothing will get them up. But Lina gets us all up long before wake-­up and begins reading the Mass: “The Lord is with us, know this, O people. . .” from the Matins, and then, like bells ringing, carol after carol, our Kurilian carols. . . . It was as though something had transformed everybody. One after another they raised their heads, got up, and cried and rejoiced. How many hearts flew to their family nest, although there might well have been no one dear there since long ago.192

It is hard to overestimate the role of this kind of liturgy in raising the morale and spirits of the imprisoned women. Paradoxically, in a situation where they were almost completely deprived of their civil rights and their opportunities were severely restricted, the practice of a common prayer gave the Ukrainian women a completely new and unique experience of the divine service. Indeed, at no point in their previous lives would these women and girls ever have had the opportunity to play a central role in this religious ritual, as priest or deacon. This new religious experience, although forced on them, can be seen as liberating, giving the women access to this area for the first time and allowing them to try on for themselves roles that were previously restricted to men. Not surprisingly, the memoirists write about these moments with pride and even elation. In short, the memoirs of female politicals testify to the exceptional role of faith, prayer, and religious practices in keeping up their spirits and their emotional stability. This was a factor that fostered their survival in the conditions of the Gulag.

Figure 3.19. Small icons of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, embroidered by Mariia Matkovs´ka at a camp in Karaganda, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

3. National Identity and Christian Faith

245

As Halyna Andrusiv explains: “And nevertheless we found the strength for the regular Sunday Mass. . . . Prayers to Our Lord helped us endure the abuse, the humiliation, the deprivation, and the separation from our nearest and dearest.” 193 Broader studies of the Gulag experience have shown that individuals with a deep faith demonstrated the greatest strength of spirit in the camps: Christians, Jews, and Muslims clung to their religious convictions, seeing incarceration as a test of their faith, and their desire to pass that test successfully gave them added endurance.194 The Soviet system of repression and punishment was designed to destroy the prisoners’ personality, to wipe out social identities—national, political, and religious—that were unacceptable to the system, to crush the individual will, and to turn each one of them into an obedient, faceless creature with no cultural roots or convictions. Faced with this implacable force, the political prisoners sought to preserve their traditional values system. The Christian faith and religious practices played an exceptionally important role in this, helping the women not only to support a humanist world view, but also keep alive a connection with the national community from which they had been forcibly separated. In this way, they maintained their loyalty to the values and morals of their own culture. The monotony of camp life, the repetitive daily cycle of exhausting labor that left people barely alive, the hunger, the disease, and the complete lack of information about the outside world—all this inevitably led to disorientation in time, indifference to the self and others, depression, and stupor. By contrast, Sunday Mass and the celebration of the great holy days of Christmas and Easter structured time in captivity, which sustained the mental health of the female political prisoners. The clear role of faith and prayer for the prisoners is formulated by another former prisoner, Vanda Horchyns´ka (Demchuk):

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

246

Regardless of the severe camp regimen and our unbearable living conditions, we continued to defy all the moral prohibitions and to live the life of freedom by preserving the tradition of daily prayer. We knew the feast days, starting them with the hymn, “God the Great and Only One,” to which we added our own stanza: May we return home, to where our brothers and sisters are, in our native land with song, O Lord, we praise Thee.195

The religious practices of the women in the camps became a way to counter the dehumanizing effect of the Gulag system. They helped the prisoners preserve their main social identities—religious, national, and gender—and they fostered the development of solidarity among the prisoners. This proved to be one of the key factors in surviving the camps and prisons. Common camp prayers and liturgies can be seen as an effective form of passive resistance to the repressive Soviet system. In this way, the women challenged its totalitarian nature, proving the inability of the regime to completely control the consciousness of women who were political prisoners.

CHAPTER 4

CREATIVITY AND FREE TIME

Figure 4.1. Napkin (fragment), embroidered in prison, n.d. Collection of the Museum of the Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, ТК 4993.

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´ka-­ Hasiuk, 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 overworked in the permafrost, unloading timber and building earthworks, they found time, not to rest, but to pray and sing.1

Although any kind of unsanctioned creativity was strictly prohibited in the camps and led to punishment,2 nearly every memoir has numerous references to a wide range of creative activity: the women would sing folk songs, embroider, shape figurines with the wet black bread, draw, compose poems and original songs, and craft trinkets out of whatever materials were at hand. Oksana Meshko recollects: We continued to feel . . . an attraction toward and a sense of the subtle and the beautiful in nature and in people. The young girls would write poetry and put songs together—which they tended to do on the birthdays of their bosom buddies and prisoners whom they admired. They embroidered, they wove creative items with

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

252

junk materials, because there wasn’t anything else. Finally, they sang songs of such sorrow and soulfulness that . . . they were imprinted on my heart in their pain and their sense of promises unkept.3

The women and girls invariably drew their inspiration from traditional Ukrainian culture, which can be seen in the form and content of their creative efforts. What drove the women to sing and write poetry, to embroider and draw, to celebrate traditional holy days, to savor the beauty of nature—expending what was left of their energy, finding meager resources, and exposing themselves to possible punishment? What gave such a creative urge to these outcast captives? Who were they, these camp artisans? Born into a nationally conscious family in Lviv in 1926, Iryna Senyk joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ (OUN) youth wing in 1939 and became a member of OUN itself in 1941, working in the local propaganda unit. She was a courier for Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) general Roman Shukhevych. At the end of 1945, Senyk, then a student at the University of Lviv, was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, five years of restrictions on rights, and life in exile. Poetry and embroidery saved her in prison. She had started writing poems when she was a child, and so she continued to versify behind bars, conveying in her poetic lines her experiences, feelings, thoughts, and dreams. Therefore, in the remand prison, in transits, and in the camps, Senyk would later recall: “I secretly composed my grief-­stricken lines in my head, and in the morning I would recite them to my cellmates. . . . How was I to thank all those who saved my life, who gave me the gift of kind words every day? I gave them my poetic lines.” 4 With embroidery, things were a little more complicated, as she had never managed to learn this art prior to her arrest. However, to forget about the nighttime torture in prison, other women embroidered. Senyk’s first attempts to embroider something for herself faced devastating criticism, but one cellmate, Abbess Mother Iryna-Sofiia Marmash, quickly taught the girl

Figure 4.2. Napkin (fragment), embroidered by an unknown Lithuanian woman prisoner at a camp in Taishet, given as a memento to Liuba BarabashBilyns´ka, n.d. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

254

the techniques of embroidering. After that, the former prisoner writes, “I was so eager to embroider that I can’t even convey it! From that day on, I’ve never stopped embroidering. It may be only three or four stitches, but I’ll make them.” 5 Another former prisoner, Nina Virchenko, remembers Senyk well: Poetry and embroidery—for her, these were like the air, and without them she would suffocate! Irtsia was always stringing something together, whether lines of words or stitches in an image. . . . She was the one who beautified our gray prison days. . . . She was wonderfully able to take some moment in life of one or another of the girls and make something beautiful of it.6

After torture in the remand prison and heavy labor in the camps had crippled Senyk, she suffered from constant pain. Her many poems and samples of embroidery patterns were published after Ukraine gained independence. In 1998, she was recognized as one of the One Hundred Heroines of the World at the convention of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations.7 Born in Halychyna in 1925, Oleksandra Blavats´ka was from a fairly wealthy, educated family and had no relationship with the national-political resistance. At the time of her arrest, she was studying harp at the conservatory. In June 1946, she was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Luck was with her when she arrived at the camp near Sillamäe, Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, because the forewoman was a petty criminal who did not want a wimpy intellectual in her crew. She arranged for Blavats´ka to be transferred to the prison design office. The girl did not know how to draft, but here she was lucky once again: an Estonian by the name of Ivan Mets fell in love with her and decided to teach her to play the accordion, so that she could instead work in the KVCh, the cultural and educational department, avoiding general labor altogether. When Blavats´ka ended up in a camp in Mordovia, she saw that, once again, the only thing that could keep her from hard

4. Creativity and Free Time

255

labor was participating in cultural activities. She wrote to a female relative who had remained in Lviv, asking her to sell off the remaining family possessions and buy Blavats´ka an accordion for the money. Her ability to play the accordion well ensured relatively easy work in the KVCh. Moreover, members of the criminal element would invite her to play for them at their parties, and fed her well for her effort. For Blavats´ka, music became that priceless resource that not only enabled her to preserve her health and survive in the camps, but also allowed her to find work after she was released from prison to a life in exile. Working in a traveling “culture crew,” she earned the money she needed to get back to her homeland. FOLK SONGS AND PRISON SONGS The most easily available and widespread “entertainment” for the women was singing folk songs. In prison, this activity was so common for Ukrainian women that it took on a special meaning. In their memoirs, the women note that songs gave them solace at the most difficult times, reminding them of their home and their family, and allowing them to re-­create a mental connection with their homeland, immerse themselves in memories of the past, and distance themselves from heavy thoughts and emotions. As Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk writes: Almost the entire crew was musical. We sang the Holy Mass, Passion songs, and koliady. We also sang lay songs, and historical songs, songs of the Sich Riflemen, songs of the insurgents, and our own songs. Somewhere from the depths of the soul, songs about our life in an alien land would pour out.8

While they sang, the women would briefly forget about the terrible reality in which they were living and could permit themselves

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

256

to dream about a happy future. Stefaniia Koval´-Nadorozhniak tells how singing brightened the time in a prison cell after a trial: Youth would have its way. We wanted to sing, we wanted to break out of these walls. In the neighboring cell, eighteen of our boys were being held. . . . A big crack appeared in the wall . . . they would give concerts outside our wall, and we would sing our songs in response. . . . We sang sotto voce but it came out very nicely.9

Joint singing kept up the spirits of the prisoners in the most difficult circumstances. Even girls who had been punished for participating in the Norilsk camp uprising and transferred to other camps sang: Their prison sentences were extended but they were laughing. . . . Summer, green everywhere. . . . How could a person not enjoy at least this miserly bit of happiness that had come our way. Every evening, we would get together between the barracks in the zone yard and sing. . . . Our repertoire was endless. The entire camp gathered around for our evening concerts. Whoever could, would help. Others would soar soulfully over the familiar places that a cruel fate had torn them from.10

Ukrainian songs rang out despite all the prohibitions, sometimes moving even the camp management. There were times when the guards not only tolerated the singing but actually listened to it: At the sovkhoz farm, we met other girls from Ukraine. There were about three hundred of us here, and almost all were from western Ukraine. . . . The camp director was a Ukrainian who had fought at the front and was crippled. . . . On feast days, when the girls had more days off, he would ask them to sing Ukrainian songs.11 We would give concerts. . . . The officers came and listened to us, and we would sing Ukrainian songs.12

4. Creativity and Free Time

257

Dartsia Palahiichuk with her gorgeous voice . . . when she sang, even the camp management stood outside the barbed wire to listen while pretending that they did not hear the very thing that they themselves had prohibited.13

Song would accompany Ukrainian women at every stage of their imprisonment: from the remand prisons until their release. Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna recalls how, in the Bryhidky remand prison, women who had been injured during interrogations would nevertheless sing: Oh, how our young prisoners would sing! Sometimes even the harshest of the overseers would listen and not punish them. . . . It seemed as though these young girls had been sent to us by God Himself, to dispel our prison grief and sadness. With their songs, they lifted our mood, and then it would seem that the iron grates and prison walls were not so terrible anymore. In song, we were free! 14

Nadiia Didukh has written about the powerful impact of singing on the morale of imprisoned individuals, comparing her personal experience in the Gulag with what she saw during the Holocaust: I remembered those terrible times when the Germans were destroying the Jewish population. Going to their death, they often sang, while I wondered how people could sing knowing that they were going to their deaths. But there’s clearly some special force in song that makes it easier to go either into battle or even to one’s death.15

It would seem that the camp management saw group singing as evidence of ethnic solidarity among the prisoners, which constituted a potential threat. Therefore, singing was prohibited, and violators were fairly severely punished. Still, this did not stop the women. Anna Kotsur recalls: “For singing out loud, some of us

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

258

ended up spending three nights in the punishment cell, but that didn’t scare us.” 16 Larysa Zadorozhan describes an illuminating incident when some girls who had been singing together were immediately punished by being sent to different camps: One time, we just wanted to sing our folk songs so badly and brought out “Oh, How That Seagull Grieves.” The song just tore us up. This song about our fate flew out over the taiga, crying like a wounded seagull. And that grieving seagull buried us. . . . The very next day, we were scattered across the wasteland and separated. Someone did not like our song: they saw great strength in it, and they saw our souls.17

Similarly, Vira Drozd was punished with six months in her camp’s punishment block, BUR, for singing a koliada in her barrack at Christmas.18 According to the memoirists, the two active forms of resistance to the abuse of camp managers were refusal to work and group singing. Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk) remembers a case in an Inta camp where the women who were digging ditches on Easter Sunday met their quota early in order to return to camp sooner and celebrate the holy day, but the guards in the escort wanted them to keep working. Shooting in the air, they forced the women to lie on the ground, but the women categorically refused to work any further: Our forewoman was Natalka Tiutiun, herself from Poltava. Some of the girls were already crying: “Let’s go.” And she then sang out, “Let Them Put Us All in Prison,” 19 and everyone began to sing. Oh, how we sang! The guard got nervous: “Line up, we’re going back to camp.” . . . Being an older woman—and us being young, just girls, really—she understood very well.20

4. Creativity and Free Time

259

With their singing strike, the women not only got what they wanted, but they even got the camp director to promise that this guard would never escort them again. A similar protest involving group singing took place in 1952, on Easter Sunday, in the fourth women’s zone of the Minlag no. 1 special regimen camp in the city of Inta: At that time, the convoy brought the women’s crew to the work site to dig ground that was still frozen solid after the winter, in order to place the foundation of a building. The women managed to dig their quota by 4 p. m. in order to get back to the barracks to celebrate, but the guard ordered them to keep working. When the crew refused, he threatened them with the dogs and fired warning shots into the air. Suddenly, one of the women sang out “Christ Is Risen from the Dead!” The hymn was taken up by all the other women. It gave them courage to stand against lawlessness. Faced with resistance for the first time, the guard was at a loss, and so the officer ordered: “Line up, back to the zone!” 21

Polina Benoni describes yet another incident, in a camp on Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan, when the female overseers started a massive attack on the women’s barrack and trashed everything that the Ukrainian women had prepared to celebrate Christmas Eve. In protest against the overseers’ actions, the prisoners raised their voices in a koliada: “One of the girls began to sing ‘God Eternal Is Born.’ Everyone else sat on their beds and sang along so that the entire barrack shook from their singing. . . . The overseers could not understand that you can kill the body, but not a free spirit.” 22 The last statement is the most accurate reflection of the significance of this kind of singing protest, with which the prisoners demonstrated their refusal to bow to the regime and their internal freedom despite their physical captivity. Female politicals not only sang folk songs, they wrote their own songs from prison that reflected their unhappy plight and their dreams of freedom.23 Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna wrote

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

260

an entire series of such songs, in which she not only expressed the thoughts and feelings of the imprisoned women, their longing for their homeland, and their strength of spirit, but also revealed the role of song in their lives: Singing—and only with a song— we can comfort this life so wronged, with a song that has survived such pain we can forget for a moment again. Through these bars with thought alone, we can cross to reach our home. Soaring freely in our dreams, we can fly to familiar realms. Strength is our human wherewithal, with souls not killed inside these walls, with our faith, we shall withstand,

right here in this distant, foreign land.24

Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, a poet, was the author of another well-­known prison song, “I’ll Never Forget Those Prison Nights,” which she wrote in the Bryhidky remand prison.25 In addition to these solo-­authored original songs, there were also songs that were the result of joint effort. Mariia Halii recollects: And when we came back to the barrack, exhausted, worried . . . there were some wise people there. . . . Give us a song, one would say, another one would make a verse, a third one would say something else, and then we’d pick a melody. And there was our song. And that’s how songs were born.26

Kateryna Mandryk-­Kuibida presented in her memoirs one such group song written in captivity.27 Some of the main motifs in camp songs were: longing for their home and thoughts of traveling to their beloved land; memories

4. Creativity and Free Time

261

of the happy past; the pain of separation from loved ones; pleas to one’s mother and an imaginary conversation with her; dreams about a happy future; fear of dying in a strange land; dedication to the homeland and courage in the face of torture; and separation from a lover.28 In fact, camp songs covered the entire spectrum of the prisoners’ thoughts and concerns, allowing the women to articulate their common problems through this form of creativity. Songs became the symbol of spiritual freedom among the prisoners, a way to travel thousands of kilometers in their minds and return to their homeland, to their families, to their homes. Both folk and prison songs helped the women overcome despair, gave them a sense of solidarity and unity among prisoners, and fostered a connection with their national community both in the camp and beyond it in their faraway homeland. Songs were the manifestation of their national identity and an important means to maintain national awareness among the political prisoners. Members of other ethnic communities distinguished the Ukrainian women precisely for their singing, which impressed and moved them. In thinking about the devaluation of words in the camps, Barbara Skarga, a Pole, writes with admiration about the depth of Ukrainian singing: There’s more meaning to the songs that the Ukrainians launch into in the evenings before the barracks . . . with a melody that combines all the sorrow of these downtrodden people. How musical they are, how they love to sing, and how wonderfully it comes out for them! . . . Compared to us Poles, whose ears were undoubtedly trampled by an elephant, the natural musicality of these people is amazing. They sing as easily as they breathe. . . . These songs float, and in them, the human voice and language return to their real meaning.29

Prohibited in the camps, the singing of folk songs was nonetheless practiced widely and constituted a form of passive resistance to the anti-­human Gulag regime, which treated prisoners like slaves

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

262

without feelings or emotions, without the right to any happiness. Despite their physical captivity, the women felt an internal freedom: in song, they were free to remember and to dream, and the walls, the bars, and the borders lost their deathly meaning. Obviously, singing together in prison meant a lot more to the women than it had in their ordinary lives. Songs became a sign of devoted friendship, something that united them and that allowed them to reaffirm their loyalty to their community. Halyna Kokhans´ka remembers saying good-­bye to her dear friends when she was being sent off to another camp: “Before I left, they sang me a few of my favorite songs. . . . I was moved to tears.” 30 At a camp hospital near Inta, women who were on their deathbeds would ask their Ukrainian women friends for a farewell song.31 A song performed by their friends was a kind of gift in a situation where there was nowhere else to get a present. Virchenko recollects her unusual birthday in eastern Siberia in 1952: “The girls knew how much I loved songs, because nothing expresses your feelings like a song. Oh, how many songs they sang for me! Never again, ever, and nowhere did I have such a birthday.” 32 The consolidating effect of collective singing is hard to overestimate. As the memoirs show, songs united the women not only in captivity, but for decades afterward. In her memoirs, Dariia Korchak proudly recalls how, in 1991, right after Ukraine declared independence, the All-­Ukrainian Association for Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression organized an ensemble of women political prisoners: “With our songs—prison, camp, and patriotic songs—we traveled all over the countryside in the Stryi area, and even farther.” 33 For Ukrainian women who were onetime politicals, singing became a way to publicly articulate their prison identity, to preserve and hand down the memory of political imprisonment and the common women’s experience of the Gulag, and to consolidate their “community of memory.” The need to sing together was similar to the need that was felt and expressed by former Soviet forced laborers in postwar Bel-

4. Creativity and Free Time

263

gium, who “in this way re-­created their personal narrative of war memories.” 34 POETRY BY FEMALE POLITICAL PRISONERS One widespread form of amateurish creativity in the camps was poetry. Studies of the literary efforts of prisoners, including camp memoirs and prison poetry, have even formed a separate area of Gulag studies. Scholars have analyzed the “Gulag narrative” and verses, revealing the generic features, rhetorical devices, and differences among periods, thematic foci, typical subjects, and generally recognizable characteristics.35 And yet, such studies have rarely looked deeply at the gender aspects of this kind of activity or of the texts themselves.36 Scholars of camp poetry tend to refer to it as secret, underground, or “internal” because it was not primarily intended for publication, was often “written” in the author’s head and in secret, despite camp prohibitions, and was generally preserved in the memory, not on paper.37 While imprisoned, even those who might have never noticed any special talent in themselves or inclination for poetic expression under normal circumstances, began to compose poetry. Former political prisoners kept countless lines of verse in their memories, lines that expressed longing for their families, their lovers, and their homeland, dreams about freedom, and thoughts about the meaning of life.38 This kind of activity was strictly forbidden in the camps and, if uncovered, led to punishment. Koval´-Nadorozhniak recalls: “At that time, many of our girls wrote poems, mainly about love for Ukraine and about longing for their homeland. So did I. It was considered to be anti-­Soviet propaganda, using poetry with “bourgeois nationalist” content.” 39 Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko writes: I wrote poems. During their searches, the overseers would confiscate any poetry. Sometimes they would turn it in to the operational unit, and there they would decide who went to the punishment

Figures 4.3 and 4.4. Poetry by Ol´ha Duchymins´ka, written in a camp and preserved by her friend Liuba Barabash-Bilyns´ka, n.d. 12 × 8 cm (4.72 x 3.15 in). Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 295.

4. Creativity and Free Time

265

cell, who went to the BUR, and who was given a second term. There were also overseers who would toss into the burzhuika, the iron stove, the poems, letters, and so on that they found during their searches. They weren’t interested in currying favor and didn’t want to see us given a new term.40

Another camp poet, Potykevych-­Zabolotna, wrote quite a few poems in captivity, which she jotted down in a miniature notebook. After Ukraine declared independence, she managed to publish a part of her creative oeuvre.41 Virchenko mentions Senyk and talks about how inspiring her creative efforts were during captivity: Iryna was unusually young then, and very talented . . . even in those unbelievably difficult circumstances, when just about everything was prohibited. . . . After all, we were in a special regimen camp! But Irtsia would find scraps of paper, make a miniature notebook out of them, and secretly write poetry: about her mother, Ukraine, Lviv, romantic love, and her friends. She was a truly God-­ given poet. . . . Poetry and embroidery were like the fresh air for her, and without them she would have suffocated. . . . And so we nicknamed her “electric Irka.” 42

Another former prisoner, Korchak, who never wrote any poetry herself, nevertheless felt strongly compelled to write down the prison poetry that she heard from her sisters in misfortune, although the authors of most of the poems remain unknown. In her memoirs, she re-­created as much as she was able to preserve, explaining: I received the poems from other girls who came in convoys from Norilsk and Kengir to the central transit camp in Taishet in 1954, after the uprisings [of 1953–54]. . . . I tried as quickly as possible to write down some of the poems in a small notebook in tiny handwriting, so that it could easily be hidden. After my release in 1955, by some miracle I managed to avoid a search and brought

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

266

them with me to Ukraine. After reading those poems, my brother recommended that I bury them in a jar in the garden. In the 1980s, we dug them up again.43

In such secret camp poetry, scholars have distinguished such themes as internal flight from captivity, images and symbols of imprisonment (including bars, small windows, and doors), protest, and rebellion.44 In addition to song lyrics, Potykevych-­Zabolotna wrote a substantial number of poems in which she revealed her thoughts and feelings about her own lost youth, about her lost love, about the horrors of daily life in the camps—the suffering, sickness, labor, and death of prisoners—and about her yearning for Ukraine’s freedom. She also wrote about dreams of freedom and the return to her family and her native land. In her poems, she addressed her mother, her friends and her lover, her homeland, and her people, mentally restoring severed connections, and reminding herself of what was most valuable: How my poor heart grieves for thee, to know, Mother, that you weep for me, Oh yes, oh yes, I remember it then, Our home was like a true Eden: We lived in peace, were loving and gay. Then came the war and swept it away. Mother, don’t think I’m crying in here, That I can’t see the world for tears. I work hard, true, but I do not fret, This grief shall pass; I’ll come home yet. If in some strange land I must live, I’ll always love what my land gives. The mountains, the woods, the groves of oak, Like singing birds, the tongue we spoke, The rivers, ponds, and grasses green, The lovely sound of songs in spring. These prison walls and barbed wires all Whisper to me, “You must recall.” Fall to your knees and pray to the Lord,

4. Creativity and Free Time

267

To give us strength, our souls succor, Give us the strength to live in wisdom, Above all to love truth and freedom. (Ukhta, 1950) 45

Typically, the poetic efforts of the women in the camp were not a private or secret business. On the contrary, in their memoirs the women later recall those special moments when they were able to listen to their sisters’ poems together. Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka remembers with reverence the talented poets with whom she spent time in the Inta camps: “We would have these literary evenings and listen to the poems of our prison poets Katrusia Storozhuk-­Androzhyk, Katrusia Mandryk-­Kuibida, and Orysia Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna. They would put on performances.” 46 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna herself writes with enthusiasm in her memoirs about the poetic talents of Olia Levyts´ka from Ternopil.47 Some poems were addressed specifically to friends and given to them as a memento. Potykevych-­Zabolotna published an entire series of such poems that she had written personally for her sisters in misfortune.48 Senyk, herself a well-­known poet, wrote to remember the good people who had helped her when she was seriously ill in prison: “How was I supposed to thank all those who saved my life, who gave me the daily gift of a kind word or some warm clothing? . . . I gave them some lines of poetry.” 49 Meshko testifies to the widespread nature of creative writing of this kind among the Ukrainian women prisoners: The poems weren’t preserved: they were personalized gifts, read aloud or written down on scraps of scarce paper, that were then destroyed or were confiscated in the next search by our guards. And people were punished for them. . . . These anonymous folk poets, the Hannusias, Nastunias, Stefas, Ninas, and ­Bohdanas— their names were legion—responded with their poems from Stalinist captivity.50

Through this creativity, the women inspired and supported one another. Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna recalls a sister captive: “­Khrystia

Figure 4.5. Poetic greeting written by Iryna N. at camp on a handmade card on the occasion of her friend’s name day, 30 September 1953. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 278.

4. Creativity and Free Time

269

would always listen eagerly to my little verses, while I was fascinated by the little pictures that she would make on scraps of cloth or paper. . . . Her drawing would inspire my lines of verse.” 51 In their memories, former political prisoners managed to preserve numerous examples of camp poetry written by other women. From time to time, they quote them in their memoirs and offer a good word for those who did not survive imprisonment.52 Nusia Katamai mentions one of them, Nina Virchenko, in her memoirs: “Her poems survive, too, although we haven’t always been able to track them down because our girls would read them and pass them around. Marusia and I were able to remember some of them, if with some inaccuracies.” 53 In this way, the names and works of female Ukrainian politicals are being returned to the Ukrainian cultural body from which their authors were so brutally torn. Andrea Gullotta points out certain characteristic stylistic features of camp poetry: the writing tends to be very straightforward in terms of rhetorical devices and poetic imagery.54 The scholar believes that this tendency occurs because the purpose of such poetic efforts was to verbalize what the prisoner herself had gone through. A poet who composed poems in her head in the Gulag had three potential target audiences: first of all, herself, as the poems were intended to help her heal from the endless repression; second, other prisoners who were her listeners and potential custodians of the poems in the absence of recordings; and, finally, future readers of poetry, who were, in fact, rather hypothetical. But the main recipient was the author herself, not an external audience, and the poems were effectively a kind of unwritten camp diary.55 Since the poems were generally put together as the author was living through events in the camps and reflected her state at that particular moment, they had a dual, hybrid nature: literary work and personal testimony.56 Camp poetry is distinguished for the intimacy of its contents, as its main accent is on the author herself, her feelings, and her experience of incarceration.57 Aside from the obvious psychotherapeutic effect of poetic writing—the ability to verbalize and release emotional burdens and heavy

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

270

thoughts—the practice of writing poetry also helped the women who had found themselves in such inhuman circumstances nurture their most cherished memories and dreams of a normal life, and reaffirm their own values and beliefs. At the same time, this kind of activity, which was both strictly prohibited and very widespread, can also be seen as a form of nonviolent resistance to a totalitarian regime that looked at the prisoners as having no individuality or name, having no aesthetic needs or right to the joys of creative work. Memorized and transmitted orally, the poems were beyond the control of the camp overseers, and so poetic work manifested the internal freedom of the prisoners. THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES AND CELEBRATIONS AMATEUR PERFORMANCES AND ARTS One means of forgetting about the horrors of incarceration, relieving nervous tension, and dispelling sadness for the prisoners was putting on plays. Benoni, another former Gulag prisoner, aptly observes: “Trapped in prison and wretched, people looked for a moment of tranquility and oblivion.” 58 Despite the terrible living conditions and the exhausting work, the women were happy to spend time and energy preparing plays, as Ol´ha Zaverbna recalls: We refused to let our spirits fall. At Inta there were four hundred, maybe even more, girls and women. We went to work to dig wet peat. One time, I barely dragged myself back to the barrack after work, my leg wraps frozen to my feet and to my felt boots. . . . We had to cut the boots to get them off our feet, and you could hear the girls screaming and groaning. Once we had warmed up, we had something to eat, then went by foot to the drying facility for a rehearsal. We were putting on a Ukrainian play in the barrack of the Lithuanian prisoners. They showed us their plays, and we showed them ours. There was joy in those evil, heavy days. We made really

4. Creativity and Free Time

271

nice costumes. We colored bandages for ribbons. We made red bead necklaces out of bread. From under the dead snow, we would find and pick the leaves of the cranberry for wreaths, painted every-

thing with streptocide, akrikhin [quinacrine], and brilliant green.59

This kind of activity increased when the women were preparing for a high feast day, giving them an opportunity to properly mark the event while expressing their national identity and raising the national awareness of their friends. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk herself wrote and directed a Christmas vertep or mummers’ play in the camp and describes this occasion and the essence of the performance in her memoirs: Holy Christmas came, and we once again performed our play in the barracks. . . . We started preparing by learning to sing [Taras Shevchenko’s] “Testament” and “The Wide Dnipro Is Roaring and Groaning” as a chorus. . . . We put together a vertep on the subject of our incarceration, and our koliady. . . . The essence and the idea were undemanding, simple, based on what we experienced: a young prisoner completes his sentence and returns to his native village. He has no idea whether there’s still anyone in his parents’ home. So he sits on a stump and remembers all that he had gone through. Kids come down that same road with a sled of firewood and a fir tree for some poor woman in the village. The woman is all alone, she’s just come back from exile, the house is cold, and there’s no firewood. The boy follows them . . . he understands that this is his home and his mother. . . . There wasn’t a soul in our barrack or in the neighboring ones who watched this calmly.60

Elsewhere, the traditional vertep for Christmas became a way to bring a little joy to the outcast, exhausted sisters in misfortune. Korchak recollects Christmas at the Ozerlag camp near Taishet in the early 1950s: The Christmas vertep, which we organized together, brought us a small bit of happiness. Some of the women among us remembered

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

272

the words to this play, and we sewed the costumes for the emperors, angels, and devils ourselves. I was a shepherd in a Hutsul keptar and a hat on my head. We went from barrack to barrack, sang koliady, and brought the joyful news about the birth of Jesus Christ. The older women cried, hugged, and kissed us, while we were glad that we managed to evade the watchful eye of the overseer.61

When despair and sadness took over the physically and emotionally exhausted women, it was extremely important to defuse the stressful atmosphere, lift everyone’s spirits, and release some emotions. Improvised plays made a big difference, as Nadiia Surovtsova writes: The mood was falling. The number of quarrels and conflicts was growing. People began to hate not just everything around them, but one another as well. Oh, how sad it was, really, this atmosphere of enmity in our common, crowded cage. . . . I announced that after lunch we would put on a circus. People were always to be found, and so, in something like two hours, one end of the barracks was declared an “imaginary arena.” The barracks laughed. The main goal was accomplished.62

In the Lontskyi Remand Prison in Lviv, the women in one cell “put on the ‘Golden Slipper.’ The day went fast and it was a lot more fun for the girls.” 63 Zoia Marchenko, an educated woman who knew several languages, recalls how in the camp in Magadan, the prisoners put together a play through their own efforts. Although it was a poor production in terms of props and costumes, the audience was moved to tears and asked the actors to do repeat performances several times.64 In the 1940s and early 1950s, prisoners were punished for any kind of self-­organized amateur activities by a few days in enforced regimen barracks. This forced them to do everything secretly, using all kinds of conspiratorial methods, including lookouts to keep an eye on what was going on outside and warn

4. Creativity and Free Time

273

everybody if overseers were approaching. All this, of course, meant a constant risk of being exposed and punished. At the same time, the management of the camps and colonies organized mandatory “amateur arts” among prisoners in the form of KVCh with groups engaged in drama, music, choir, and even “culture crews.” Their activities, such as staging plays and concerts, were intended to “foster higher productivity at work and to eradicate all kinds of violations of camp regimen and labor discipline,” according to the Directives to the Culture and Education Departments of the Gulag, dated 7 January 1943.65 That same document included criticism of the actual state of affairs at that time: “In a slew of camps, amateur arts are not always focused properly and not always connected to current political events, the specific objectives of production, or the daily activities of the given camp unit or colony. In essence, they are purely cultural and divorced from life.” 66 This statement makes it perfectly clear that the purpose of “amateur arts” was not to develop and express the creative potential of prisoners, but to promote communist ideology and the practice of a socialist way of life. In the May 1945 Rules of the Internal Regimen for Prisoners in Gulag Camps and Colonies, the list of rights enjoyed by prisoners included the right “to participate in cultural and educational institutions (clubs, libraries and so on).” Meanwhile, the prohibitions included “making any kind of notations in the books or magazines provided,” while the section on the proper daily regimen mentions the requirement to turn off radios after the lights-­out signal. At least some of the prisoner population thus had access to books, periodicals, and radios.67 This allowance obviously did not apply to political prisoners, including the more severely restricted katorga prisoners,68 since their memoirs regularly mention prohibitions on reading any kind of printed matter, the absence of radios and so on.69 The Gulag system included a broad network of entities whose purpose was to organize political indoctrination in the form of various cultural and educational activities and events.70 The

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

274

camps and colonies had something called cultural and educational departments, or KVCh,71 whose main objective was to organize “socialist emulation” (a kind of work competition to display commitment to socialism) among the prisoners and to engage in ideological and propaganda work. Its tasks included arranging ideological presentations of political news (known as politinformatsiia), political discussions, and lectures; publishing bulletins and small-­run papers; setting up reading rooms; and educating illiterate and semiliterate prisoners. KVCh units were also expected to organize amateur creative activities and cultural events, such as clubs, concerts, performances, and movie nights.72 A Brief from the Gulag Cultural and Educational Department on Cultural and Educational Work among Prisoners in MVD and UMVD Administration Camps and Colonies for 1949, dated 20 March 1950, reports that over the previous year, 3,937 cultural units and points and 4,690 amateur clubs had operated, putting on 81,758 plays, publishing 8,444 newsletters and bulletins, and so on.73 Such clubs were largely populated by those prisoners who had been professionally involved in the arts—theater actors, singers, dancers, ballerinas, and so on. Ol´ha Spodaryk recalls: Some of the girls prepared to perform. There were actresses among the prisoners, and they were in charge of the amateur clubs. I remember that many, even among the civilian personnel, came for a performance of Zaporozhets´ za Dunaiem [The Zaporizhian across the Danube]. [Ukrainian] Cossack hats were made out of kerchiefs, while the girls embroidered the shirts themselves.74

After Stalin’s death, and especially after the wave of camp strikes and uprisings in 1953–54, the number of strict prohibitions was reduced in many camps. Thus, in summer 1954, the prisoners in the camp in Taishet put on theatrical plays and organized song concerts in the yard of the zone, in the presence of the camp guards, staff, and management.75 Moreover, the women performed works from the Ukrainian classics, including folk songs, songs

4. Creativity and Free Time

275

of the Sich Riflemen, and insurgent songs.76 Poliuha (Masiuk) notes in her memoirs that one of the convoy groups constantly urged the girls to sing: The best convoy was the boys from Leningrad. . . . “Girls, sit down and sing us a tune, girls. What did they arrest you for? . . . Well, sing, you Ukrainian girls, sing any kind of song.” Sometimes we would sing them some folk song, and then we’d sit down and chat with them. They would constantly ask us to sing.77

Kryzhanivs´ka-­Hasiuk has a similar memory: “In 1953, ‘after the death of the father of nations,’ these exhausted but brave women and girls organized an amateur artistic club. Its repertory included classical operas. . . . All the men’s parts were sung by women politicals.” 78 The KVChs in the camps involved the prisoners in various educational and indoctrinating events. Gifted prisoners had the opportunity not only to use their skills, but also to ease their situation somewhat, because actors were partly relieved of regular work duties or were transferred to lighter work.79 In some camps, “embroiderers and actors lived in a very cozy and clean space with many very nice things.” 80 In the distant regions where most of the special regimen camps were located, local provincial cultural facilities suffered from a serious shortage of actors, singers, musicians, and dancers, and so, unsurprisingly, sometimes talented professionals from among the prison population were engaged in local troupes. Thus, the newly established theater in Ukhta agreed verbally with camp management to make use of the talents of local prisoners, who would, in turn, be relieved of general labor and provided with a pass to leave the camp territory.81 This practice not only allowed the prisoners to engage in their profession, but also made it possible for them to preserve their health and even strengthen themselves, since the local audience would always bring some food backstage after each performance.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

276

The KVCh repertory was supposed to correspond to the objectives of communist propaganda. In her memoirs, Walli Schliess explains how difficult it was to add classical works to the program list because the repertory had to be approved not just by the KVCh boss and the camp manager but also by what was known as the “second department,” the camp’s department of registration and distribution.82 On matters like this, a lot clearly depended on subjective factors, such as the personal tolerance of the camp management to Ukrainian repertory. For instance, Benoni recalls the camp at Lake Balkhash, where an amateur group was set up and played Taras Shevchenko’s Nazar Stodolia, Ivan Kotliarevs´kyi’s Natalka Poltavka, Ivan Franko’s Ukradene shchastia (Stolen Happiness), Mykola Hohol’s (Nikolai Gogol’s) Noch´ pered Rozhdestvom (The Night before Christmas), and other works.83 All these were Ukrainian classics that, in principle, were not prohibited during Soviet times. Like the majority of political prisoners, Ievheniia Hymon (Khom’iak) continually mentions Ukrainian works in the programs of such prison theaters, especially after Stalin’s death: Parents would send us parcels with embroidered shirts. We put on plays like Beztalanna [The Unlucky One, by Ivan Karpenko-­Karyi], Oi, ne khody, Hrytsiu, ta i na vechornytsi [Oh Hryts, Don’t You Go a-Courting, by Mykhailo Staryts´kyi], Natalka Poltavka, and Dai sertsiu voliu, zavede v nevoliu [Give Your Heart Freedom and It Will Make You a Captive, by Marko Kropyvnyts´kyi]. There were no male actors. So the girls would get dressed up in trousers, paint whiskers on, and play the male roles.84

However, the Ukrainian women were not always happy to participate in every amateur initiative by the KVCh. Blavats´ka at one point directed the KVCh in one of the Mordovian camps and writes that her efforts to involve the Ukrainians initially led to misunderstandings, suspicion, and accusations:

4. Creativity and Free Time

277

Unfortunately, my landswomen not only did not support me, but they even quietly boycotted me, because they thought I was brownnosing the management. They just about accused me of betraying Ukraine. But I stood my ground, that if, during a concert or play, the entire group of overworked, wretched women could forget our terrible daily life for two hours and tear ourselves from our dark thoughts, then this was already worth a good word and was in no way a form of hypocrisy. In the end, after first the Russian women, and then the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians all began to prepare their national programs for the KVCh, the Ukrainians also took things seriously and performed the Arkan, for which girls dressed as boys did the dancing.85

Ukrainian politicals often used such activities to raise the national spirit. Events such as concerts and plays that were put together within the KVCh were presented not only in the performers’ own zone but also in other Gulag units, where the prisoners had the opportunity to meet and socialize with other Ukrainian political prisoners. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk recounts with considerable emotion one such outside concert that took place in the men’s zone: They welcomed us with a dear, sincere spirit. The first thing they did was feed us, as they themselves knew what hunger was. . . . The boys stood at the entrance . . . in embroidered shirts, as though we were in Ukraine, and sang the songs that are dear to our hearts. . . . Anyone who did not experience this cannot imagine what was going on in each of our souls.86

During this visit, while the official concert was going on, the girls even managed to sneak into the barrack with sick and injured prisoners and cheer them up with their singing. Unfortunately, a similar visit with a concert to a different men’s camp almost ended up in gang rape for another group of women, among whom Stefaniia Shuplat (Bodnar) was one.87

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

278

Without any doubt, the main KVCh repertory was based on politically correct works of a propagandist nature. But in their memoirs, the former prisoners constantly emphasize the Ukrainian works, both folk and classical, that were exceptionally significant for them. Vira Lemekha writes about such an episode in 1956, when she was basically forced to set up a choir in the camp and prepare a celebratory concert. She managed to include Platon Maiboroda’s song “Znovu tsvitut´ kashtany” (Once More the Chestnuts Blossom), which greatly helped raise morale among the prisoners.88 Nataliia Popovych similarly recalls: Camp life would have been a lot harder if not for the poems, the concerts, and the plays that the prisoners organized. Somehow, we even managed to put on Shevchenko concerts. Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians all came to the performance, while the Ukrainians rejoiced and cried.89

The performance of any Ukrainian play was a real sensation, as the preparations mobilized enormous efforts. Schliess describes the typical effort to put on a Ukrainian production: From time to time, they would put on something Ukrainian as well. Oh, how my Ukrainian friends would buzz around! They needed Ukrainian costumes, so each one would go and look for something in her satchel that might be of use. . . . Really, the camp was like an anthill before a performance. Every girl was running around, carrying something, sewing something, putting something together. . . . Later, when we began to earn money, we would buy some material at the camp shop, and together we would sew the costumes.90

These productions clearly took on certain important psychological functions. They facilitated the expression of Ukrainian identity through the language and the national content of the programs, and they consolidated the prisoners through an awareness of their common fate and a developing feeling of solidarity. They

Figure 4.6. Poster announcing a performance of the camp’s creative activity group: a duet by Odarka and Karas´ from Semen Hulak-Artemovs´kyi’s opera Zaporozhets´ za Dunaiem (A Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube), at a camp in Inta, 16 March 1949. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

280

also provided catharsis by allowing the women to release the accumulated stress and negative emotions that had to be suppressed in the day-­to-­day life in the barracks. Finally, they satisfied the artistic and aesthetic needs of the prisoners through the preparations for each performance, which mobilized the women’s creative potential. For this, the women were prepared to put in enormous, even superhuman, effort, considering the circumstances, as Schliess testifies: These evenings added variety to our gray lives. And although they cost us dearly more than once, because we had to work off the lost time and do all the props and costumes on our own, everyone worked together on it and very eagerly. So that, for one evening, at least, we might forget the terrible reality.91

CELEBRATING CHRISTIAN FEASTS Despite a ban on the practice of religion, nearly every memoir by Ukrainian political prisoners contains stories about the celebration of the high Christian feast days—Christmas and Easter. In all the years up to 1953, this contingent—for that’s how they called us there—upheld parental traditions that were stringently forbidden by the camp regimen and led to the punishment block and penalty rations. Still, we stubborn Banderites did not forget our own, even in the worst possible conditions. We knew that we would be punished, but we anyway would change our clothes for a vertep and koliada after a hard day’s labor. The very walls of the barrack would shake from our singing, we would remember our prayers, and no punishment could scare us.92

For the prisoners, this was a very rare occasion for joy in those unbearable conditions, a long-­awaited celebration that allowed them to chase off grief and relax a little: “We tried never to let our spirits droop and remembered all our feast days, both religious

4. Creativity and Free Time

281

and national. We celebrated them, we sang—koliada at Christmas, and shchedrivky at the Feast of Jordan.” 93 Despite the unbelievable difficulties of day-­to-­day survival in the camps, the Ukrainian women anticipated these feast days and prepared for them long in advance, trying to stock up on foodstuff for a celebratory meal and other attributes of a feast: pysanky, branches of willow or fir, wheat berries for kutia, and so on. The prisoners tried to re-­create the traditional form of the feast as much as possible, and to preserve at least its main elements. For instance, in celebrating Christmas, they made sure to have at least a surrogate fir tree: “And we made a Christmas tree out of the bush of some kind of dwarf tree, because nothing grows in Vorkuta. We hung all kinds of little papers on it and a bit of cotton batting. We tried to make this Christmas tree nice. And it came out well.” 94 In her letters home, Kateryna Zaryts´ka, who was sentenced to a term in cellular prison, thoroughly describes the preparations for Christmas and Easter and how they were celebrated, emphasizing in particular how the traditional attributes and rituals of the feasts were kept up.95 In the camps, where every crumb of bread was worth its weight in gold, the prisoners would nevertheless set aside their meager ration in preparation for Christmas or Easter in order to use it to prepare a festive meal. On the day of the feast, the women tidied up and decorated their living areas, while their clothing had to be the best and cleanest—and festive: From the evening on, there was the scent of the holiday spirit, because I had washed the walls, the radiator, and the shelf with soap, while Darka did the window. The sheets were freshly washed, and personal underwear as well. A few more bags, pillowcases for our pillows, and a small cushion—and everything’s ready.96

Similarly, Stefaniia Chaban-­Haval´ describes preparations for Easter in the Norilsk camp in spring 1955:

Figure 4.7. “We worship Your [Jesus’s] Cross.” Embroidery by Hanna Potiuk, made at the Kolomyia Prison, 1948. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

4. Creativity and Free Time

283

Easter was coming. A few days earlier, the entire barracks, both sections, stopped eating their evening ration of bread. . . . On Holy Saturday, we made “pies” out of our kasha. We used the bread to make a pretend paska. We made krashanky out of clay, painted them with the paint used to mark slogans. We brought in some green branches. People covered the table with whatever they had. All this “beauty” was put on the table, the branches blossomed with greens, and everyone’s mood became really festive. . . . Easter came. Everyone was dressed up in whatever they still had from home, but everyone was at least in clean clothing. The barracks had been tidied up. And so we got ready for the Divine Liturgy.97

Recollections about preparations for Christmas and Easter and their celebration in other memoirs are almost identical.98 Among the “must haves” at such prison holiday tables were “sweets” (sugar rations that had been hoarded in advance) and “cakes” made of whatever primitive components were available: meal, crumbled cookies, or just bread.99 These created the illusion of a proper holiday and helped the women maintain a positive atmosphere in places where joy was largely impossible. In an oral history interview, Drozd described the preparation and celebration of Christmas in the camp. The women not only prayed and prepared ersatz kutia using pearl barley and sugar that they had previously hidden, but also engaged in caroling in several sections of the barracks. In the lyrics of the traditional koliada, they included the words, “Sleep, Jesus, sleep on the hay, and grant, please, that Ukraine be free!” For this bold violation of the camp regimen, one girl was severely punished by being placed in the punishment block for six months.100 Religious feasts were an occasion not just for joint prayer, but also for a morale boost through a virtual reunion with their homeland, families, and culture. Sometimes a leader would emerge from among the prisoners who dared offer a celebratory speech in order to lift the mood among the prisoners. Such a one was

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

284

Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka), in one of the special regimen camps in Kolyma: I went to the middle of the barracks. . . . I knew these next few words would determine whether I would be able to reinforce their faith in a better tomorrow or take this hope away from them. . . . I don’t know where I found the strength. . . . “My dear sisters, on this Holy Christmas Eve, we are not alone. God is with us, as are our parents and our nearest and dearest. . . . I wish for you strength and more strength, to withstand the sentence each of us has been fated. . . .” Suddenly, the barracks came to life and a smile appeared on every face. . . . We laughed, and even joked, yet each of us had flown in her thoughts to her family home, to her loved ones—and so we caroled together with them. It didn’t matter that 14,000 kilometers separated us.101

Ol´ha Moda-­Pokaliuk similarly recalls: I celebrated this Feast in a special mood. We prayed. I wished everybody merry and happy holidays, then I mentioned Ukraine, our nearest and dearest who are waiting for us, and our traditions. We quietly caroled. . . . While we celebrated, women rotated on the watch in case the overseers came up.102

Stefaniia Holyns´ka (Oleshchuk) writes that after Stalin died and the regimen was eased somewhat, the women at one of the Rechlag camps near Vorkuta were even able to make use of the canteen equipment and bake the paska, the Easter bread—with the permission of the supervisor of the separate women’s camp section.103 Another integral aspect in the recollections about the celebration of Christmas and Easter was that the Ukrainians invited all residents of their camp barrack or jail cell to participate, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. Schliess, the German woman who was held in the Vorkuta camp among Ukrainian women, admits:

4. Creativity and Free Time

285

The Ukrainian prisoners carefully prepared for their feast days . . . trying to involve each person in the celebration. Their enthusiasm and energy affected prisoners of other nations, and we all helped them. . . . They drew in everyone who lived in the barrack. It didn’t matter what they believed in or whether they believed in God at all.104

To some extent, a common fate and the shared experience of suffering eliminated interethnic tensions, giving way to mutual, if restrained, respect and tolerance, especially in the context of the festive seasons, as Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak notes: At the celebratory table, Polish women were sitting next to us. In the prison, we established our own ethical code of behavior and traditions. One of its significant elements was that, at Latin Christmas, the Polish girls would invite us as their guests, and on our [Greek Catholic] Christmas, we would invite them to celebrate with us. It was obvious that they were quite delighted with the richness of our traditions.105

During these celebrations, the prisoners would once again discover their sisters in misfortune and see them as individuals, not just a faceless slave army. Meshko recalls an awestruck camp doctor, a Russian woman from Leningrad whom the Ukrainian women had invited to share their Christmas Eve meal: They sang beautifully, albeit sadly, and they prayed. The solemnity of the moment and their tired faces with eyes that gleamed with spiritual passion created an indescribable mood. For the first time, Khor´kova saw these workers as though in a painting at the Holy Supper, their intelligence and their internal strength, being kept in such inhuman conditions. . . . “How beautiful their religiosity, so much aesthetic in this celebration. I have never seen anything like it among my people.” 106

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

286

Kokhans´ka describes Christmas Eve supper in 1952: This time, our kutia was made of barley and sugar. We also cooked up some uzvar. Everyone contributed what they had, bits of various preserved fish, and bought halvah at the camp shop. The entire barrack sat at the table only after we had been locked in for the night by the overseers. We invited everyone who lived with us. We wished one another all the best and quietly sang some koliady. . . . Just in case, we put people on watch at the window and near the doors, and not for nothing, either.107

In the memoirs, there’s no mention that the Ukrainian women expected their neighbors to contribute to preparations for the celebration. Instead, words like invited and treated are constantly used. Holy Christmas came. . . . For several days, we did not eat our miserable rations of bread, sugar, and fish, and put them aside for the Holy Supper—that’s also how we celebrated Easter. . . . We made a single table across the entire barrack as well as we could, by taking apart the bunks. And everything that we had saved from breakfast and supper was placed on this improvised table. We even made cakes out of our bread rations and decorated them as we could with what we had. No one was left out. We invited everyone to the Holy Supper.108

In addition, the Ukrainian women politicals that had been sentenced for actively working with the OUN and UPA used these celebrations as opportunities to raise national and patriotic spirit among their sister prisoners, and to unite them in resistance to the repressive Soviet machine: We washed up after work and then started the celebrations in the barrack. We dressed up in the best that we had. Preparations were underway in the barrack: planks from the bunk beds were taken

Figure 4.8. Portrait of Taras Shevchenko, made on mica, which the prisoners were extracting. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 265.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

288

and placed in the middle of the two tables, and this was covered with a sheet. Everywhere there was embroidery. . . . In the middle stood the bowl of kutia—wheat berries sweetened with sugar—the Ukrainian girls had gotten the wheat from home back in the fall. Then the Holy Supper began. One of the Ukrainian women brought out some white bread, cut into small pieces, on an embroidered pillow. This, too, came before the feast day in a parcel from home. Each of us took a piece, and when we heard “Christ is born,” we answered “Let us praise Him.” Then we wished one another to be released quickly and began to pray at the table. . . . First of all, each one took a spoonful of kutia as there was not much of it. Then we shared all the other good dishes. At the end, we all sang some more koliady and listened to one or two speeches as well.109

Shuplat (Bodnar) tells about how, for Easter, the girls managed to set aside some sugar, got some yeast through the convoys, and made a barley mash that they tried themselves and treated the overseer to.110 If at times the overseers tolerated such activities, however, it was more often that religious practices had to be done in utter secrecy because they were strictly forbidden in the prisons and jails—and punished. Valentyna N., who was detained in the Rivne Remand Prison, recalls how, in spring 1940, she herself made all the items for the Easter table out of bread, for which she was given three days of solitary confinement as punishment: We needed to have some puss willows, and pysanka, too, but where could we get them? I began to chew up my bread ration and mix it with ashes from cigarettes. Although I was pretty hungry myself, I was determined to carry out my plan. From this bread and ashes I made a pot and the puss willow from . . . sticks—it came out wonderful! Now to the pysanka. So again I chewed my bread ration for days on end and mixed it with ashes. An egg as a pysanka turned out well. Luckily, I had a skirt on me that was colored. I pulled the threads out of it and made some designs. The pysanka came out surprisingly pretty, so we thought.111

4. Creativity and Free Time

289

Obviously, the celebratory camp prayers and liturgies had to be held in secret and most often involved prisoners of other ethnicities and even atheists who all happened to live in the same barrack and became involuntary witnesses of the events. They often did not understand what was going on, but they joined in the generally uplifted mood. A sense of the sacredness of the event was often transmitted even to the guards, and although they were expected to stop and disperse this forbidden activity, they sometimes ignored their instructions and allowed the prisoners to celebrate the Mass. Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) remembers such an incident at Camp no. 75 in Kharkiv Oblast in spring 1947: On Easter Sunday, everyone got up very early, before wake-­up, when the sun was just beginning to come up. . . . We had a prayer book, and we began to “celebrate” the Divine Liturgy. The overseers came running over, but they stood there without saying anything. Some of them even had tears in their eyes. . . . But they did not give us a day off for Easter, chasing us into the forest and sending the supervisor of the KVCh along with us. . . . We told him that on such a great Feast Day, we would not work. We all stood in a circle and began to pray. . . . He understood that he would not be able to force us to work and said, “Well, OK. I won’t say anything about your sabotage or that you’re celebrating, only after the feast day you have to cover the quota.” We agreed. We appreciated the fact that he understood us.112

Several women mention incidents of complete tolerance from overseers toward their religious practices and celebrations. For instance, Halyna Shubs´ka recalls how in one of the Mordovian camps, the women “were not stopped from holding the Divine Liturgy, complete with singing, every Sunday in their barrack. We also gathered in the barrack to celebrate key days in our history. The overseers pretended that they saw and heard nothing.” 113 In Vorkuta, as Mariia Iakovyshyn explains, the Ukrainian women

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

290

prepared everything to celebrate Christmas and even invited the camp management to the festive table: We set the table, putting out everything that we had. Then the operations official and the camp manager walked in. They asked, “What are you doing?” We answered: “It’s Christmas for us.” . . . Everybody was already seated, and the girls asked the officials to take seats as well. We said a prayer and then sang a koliada. They took this all in stride and left satisfied, saying only, “Make sure you’re quiet about it.” . . . And we later celebrated Easter the same way.114

Ievdokiia Kotelko (Kapko) describes an incident at an Inta camp, where the Ukrainian women prisoners organized a Divine Mass in front of an improvised homemade altar with handmade cross and icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary, decorated with embroidered runners. The camp management respectfully joined the service, as did some local residents with children, who were allowed to enter the camp territory for this purpose.115 In carrying out the traditional household and ritualistic roles in the process of preparing for and celebrating Christian feast days, the women re-­created established gender scripts and patterns of behavior while upholding their own gender identity—as befitted Ukrainian women. In this way, they effectively counteracted the process of depersonalization. In marking the main Christian feasts, Ukrainian women as political prisoners both covertly and overtly violated a slew of Gulag rules and regulations. In order to maintain their traditions, they deliberately risked severe punishment and demonstrated considerable inventiveness, dedication, and courage. They found ways to satisfy their religious needs, which presented a serious challenge to the repressive system. In her memoirs, scholar and former political prisoner Nina Gagen-­Torn describes the typical prisoner state: “The main difference between a camp mind-­set and an ordinary one is that the camp resident loses track of time.

4. Creativity and Free Time

291

Locked in a very limited space, the person also sees time as very restricted, as a matter of days. And beyond that lies uncertainty.” 116 However, preparing for celebratory events gave the camp routine a special meaning and emotionally mobilized the women, stimulating their interest in life itself. The desire, at any price, to as fully as possible re-­create the traditional festive events stimulated the women’s creative potential, increased the sense of solidarity among the prisoners, and raised their spirits. EMBROIDERY AND ITS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS One of the most common forms of creative activity among the women both in prison cells and in camp barracks was embroidery.117 Yet, very few studies have analyzed the reasons behind and significance of this activity for the prisoners.118 A very typical—and gendered—craft for Ukrainian women, embroidery acquired special meaning in the camps. For the women themselves, embroidering was an easily recognized marker of Ukrainianness, as well as a purely feminine manifestation of gender identity. Needless to say, no embroidery materials were available in the camps and prisons, but the women’s strong desire to engage in this work drew out their inventiveness. Schliess remembers their cleverness well: The Ukrainian women loved to embroider. I admired their zeal. When they had no thread, they would take some old rag and unravel it, wind the thread on a spool, and embroider with it. Out of nothing, they would manage to create a work of art! Moreover, each one of them knew how to do this.119

In other places, the thread came from material that the women had access to at their workplace:

Figure 4.9. “A memento from prison for my children. Mama.” Embroidery by Anna Khomiak, made at a camp in Norilsk, 1948. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

4. Creativity and Free Time

293

We would get our thread at the mine shaft from bits of cable. We’d tear off the rubber coating and unravel the colored threads. And that’s what we embroidered with.120 Someone got smart and made a needle out of a fish bone, and for thread, we would unravel anything that we could to make thread for embroidering.121

The prisoners were strictly forbidden to have any possessions of their own, and needles and other sharp objects were completely taboo. Still, the practice of using fish bones instead of needles was widespread, and the women came up with other variations. For instance, one prisoner made sewing needles out of matchsticks so that the Ukrainian women could satisfy their urge to embroider: One time, as I was going to an interrogation, I saw a pin on the floor mat. This was amazing luck, to find a pin at a time when we could not have anything of the kind in our cells. . . . And so the thought came to me to make needles out of matchsticks. I would burn the end of the pin until it was red hot and make a hole in the match with it. I would then rub the other end of the match on a woolen blanket until it was sharp. That’s how I made needles for everyone. We had a sheet that I tore into pieces. We pulled the threads out of one of these pieces and then embroidered on the other pieces, sometimes roses, sometimes grapes. I showed each of the women how and what they needed to do, drawing patterns with the sharpened matchstick. Everyone was delighted. The work went on in earnest, but we had to hide it from the watch, as we weren’t allowed to have needles.122

The resulting embroidery embodied the prisoners’ thoughts and dreams. Speaking about those pieces that have been preserved in the collection of the Lviv Historical Museum, Svitlana Kocherhina describes typical imagery:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

294

One of the embroideries shows the high gray walls of a terrible prison with tiny grated windows. An imprisoned girl is looking out of one of the windows. The doors to the prison are very large, dark, and closed. Next to these forbidding walls and doors stands a sad mother figure with a basket on her arm, bringing a parcel. In another embroidery, we can see a young girl praying in her prison cell. Her youth is conveyed by the pale pink color of the dress she is wearing. A miniature piece has a blue wavy frame at the top: a village street, a house, a garden, and a fence, above which a bright sun is shining, conveying the prayer and dream of an imprisoned girl of freedom and a return to her family home. There are many similar images. They are fairly typical for our landswomen because they reflect the pain of many Galician families.123

In her memoirs, Poliuha (Masiuk) not only describes the use of embroidery to decorate the interiors of barracks, but also explains its significance for the prisoners: Even in the barracks, you could tell where a Ukrainian woman was sleeping. An embroidered coverlet lay on the ersatz pillow, while an embroidered rug made out of leg wraps was hung on the wall. I kept as a memorial of those terrible times a similar rug out of leg wraps on which was embroidered a little basket with all the wonderful flowers that reminded me of Ukraine: cornflowers, daisies, and poppies. This was how we tried to beautify our hard barracks life.124

Indeed, the presence of embroidered items in the prisoners’ living space served as a reminder of their national identity. It was a means of preserving the thread of connection with their own culture and at the same time a source of positive emotions that were vitally important for the prisoners. A separate type of embroidery was made by the prisoners for their children: typically, these pieces involved images of children being protected by their guardian angel, or icons of the Blessed

Figure 4.10. “Guardian Angel accompanying children.” Embroidery by Anna Burbela-Oleksiv, made at a camp in Mordovia, 1955. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

Figure 4.11. “Eternal memory of prison to my neverforgotten beloved husband, Iaroslav, a gift from your Hania.” Embroidery by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), made at the Chortkiv Prison, 1949. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

4. Creativity and Free Time

297

Virgin Mary with an infant and a prayer or plea to the Mother of God to guard their children. Generally stitched in prisons, these served the children as messages from and reminders of their mother: to explain her absence, to tell them about her plight, and to convey to them maternal feelings and care. The items embroidered in captivity, usually the size of a napkin or hanky, served no practical purpose. Their aesthetic features were also not very prominent, but their symbolic value in terms of the social life of the prisoners was indubitable. Given to a brother or sister in misfortune, these items were tokens of personal trust and genuine friendship, and symbols of the eternal link between the prisoners as well as their common fate. This symbolic value can be seen in the fact that nearly every embroidered napkin had the name of the author and the recipient, together with such phrases as “in fond memory” and “as a memento.” Many a prisoner did hold on to these mementos until the end of her life.125 Senyk, a famed embroiderer as well as a poet, admits: “I really loved to do something nice for the girls. For Christmas or Saint Nicholas’s Day, I tried to embroider something for each of them. I would embroider on their collars as that’s how everyone knew we were Ukrainian.” 126 The story of Hanna Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka makes clear how such seemingly trivial embroidered items gained so much significance for those in captivity: We prison girls . . . decided to bring to our comrades in ideology and the struggle in the men’s camp at least some small joy so that, for a moment at least, they could forget the horrifying reality and fly home to their native land in their thoughts, to Ukraine. Each of us found some scrap of cloth and embroidered a handkerchief, with our own initials in one corner. Having prayed together, we sent the gifts . . . through one of the escorts—among whom there were some decent people.127

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

298

The tradition of exchanging embroidered gifts in prison was one means of establishing, strengthening, and maintaining social connections among the prisoners. It fostered the formation of a kind of sisterhood among the Ukrainian women behind bars. Evidence that prisoners’ embroidery had a unifying social function can also be seen in the practice of jointly embroidering a single item. The collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum in Lviv holds one such handkerchief, containing initials, cell numbers, dates, and small patterns that were embroidered by different women (Figure 4.12). This embroidery is a kind of list of prisoners and at the same time an embodiment or representation of their community. Stefaniia Kvas describes her recollections of a similar instance when the women in the Zolochiv Remand Prison embroidered an icon: “I cut a small piece of rubber off my boot, and someone else tore off a piece of cloth, and, using that rubber, I drew the Mother of God. After, the girls unraveled whatever varied threads they had on them and embroidered that Mother of God.” 128 Moreover, deft embroiderers could use their skills and talents as an additional means of survival by improving their situation somewhat. The memoirs occasionally mention that some women earned a little on the side with their embroidering, fulfilling orders from female criminals (whose material standing in the camps and colonies was substantially better), from civilian employees, or even from friendly guards and camp managers.129 For instance, Nataliia Kostenko relates: I hung on because I embroidered: I used to know how to do it really well. . . . The wives of officers would bring the materials and threads on the q. t., and I would embroider for them. In return, they sometimes would give me some meal or something else, also on the sly. I sometimes made them curtains, tablecloths, and throws as well. Maybe something I once made has survived to this day— given to a daughter as a dowry. Only no one remembers, of course, that it was embroidered by Prisoner D‑832.130

Figure 4.12. Napkin (fragment) collectively embroidered by the arrestees at the Lontskyi Prison in Lviv from November 1945 through March 1946, featuring their initials, cell numbers, and dates. Belonged to Viktoriia Poltareva, a famous harpist. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum.

Figure 4.13. “An unforgettable memory of prison.” Prison embroidery (fragment), 1947. Collection of the Museum of the Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, ТК 5012.

4. Creativity and Free Time

301

Another prisoner recalls how, in exchange for embroidery, the prison warden would extend the women’s time for walks, which, under the circumstances, was vital.131 Similarly, Surovtsova, who had learned to embroider skillfully at a young age, writes that this kind of work allowed her to earn food from the “wealthy” criminal class of prisoners, saving her from starvation.132 Thus, embroidery, a traditional feminine skill, gained new functions and meaning in prison. First, the women manifested their national, religious, and gender identity through it. Then, by exchanging small embroidered mementos, they reinforced their sisterhood and defined their inner circle. Finally, embroidery skills were yet another resource for a woman to survive. DRAWING AND OTHER ACTIVITIES ARTWORK Other common forms of artistic work in captivity included the handmade postcards with which the prisoners greeted one another and their families outside the camp for such holidays as Christmas, Easter, name days, and birthdays. The relatively small size of such postcards made them easier to hide during searches, and so quite a few have been preserved to this day.133 Many were given to the Lviv Historical Museum by two former political prisoners, Liubov Pal´chevs´ka and Liubov Basarab. One series of handmade postcards depicting various subjects is especially interesting.134 These drawings were executed using a variety of drawing implements: colored pencils, inks, ink pen, stick, watercolors, or gouache. Some even contain dried flowers and carton appliqués. The subjects of these cards are fairly standard: landscapes, flowers, stylized horseshoes, children, and young couples. For special occasions like Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter, the drawings tend to contain the traditional attributes of the holiday. Typically, the greeting cards do not show

Figure 4.14. “The years go by like endless waves, though life’s night now darkens. Despite the storms and heavy weather, we meet a sun that brightens!” Handmade card by Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, n.d. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/4.

Figure 4.15. “On your Angel’s Day.” Handmade greeting card for a friend’s name day at camp, 1955. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, ТL 287.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

304

barbed wire, watchtowers, bars in windows, or other symbols of imprisonment.135 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna recalls with admiration the drawings and the celebratory cards made by her camp mates: our camp artists drew [them] and gave [them] to their friends for feast days and birthdays—Olia Matseliukh-­Horyn´, Olia Moda-­ Pokal´chuk, and other talented girls who were thrown here into forced labor. . . . Olia was well known for her drawings, which she generously gave out to her friends in captivity. . . . I looked at the drawings and thought . . . what enormous creative power a person must have to be able to create such masterpieces in such very difficult circumstances! 136

In these simple drawings, the prisoners conveyed their memories of their homeland or dreams of freedom. One theme that Ol´ha Matseliukh-­Horyn´ drew on a homemade card in Inta in 1954 is especially striking: it shows a handcuffed girl in a Ukrainian costume. She stands sadly on the deck of a ship, the sea before her, but somewhere far off in the distance, a shore can be seen, flooded with the bright rays of the morning sun, a bird flying above it. The composition is a clear allegory of Ukraine in captivity, wanting to get to the bright shore of freedom, where she flies in her thoughts like a bird.137 Matseliukh-­Horyn´ herself remembers another camp artist with admiration: Parasia Borys’s drawings were true miniatures and masterpieces, given the conditions and what was available, when we weren’t allowed to have paper or pencils in the barracks and couldn’t even dream of having colored pencils. . . . Her postcards brought so much joy: greetings on various occasions that Parasochka would without fail make for us, without regard to the punishment she risked. I still have those that I managed to slip through the searches and other obstacles, like holy relics that soothe my wounded soul to this day.138

Figure 4.16. Handmade greeting card for a friend’s name day at a camp in Nevelsk, 30 September 1954. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, ТL 282.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

306

That having a creative outlet was crucial for the prisoners is illustrated very clearly by an incident that was hardly unique. At a construction site in Inta where the women were working, an opportunity arose for some civilian male workers who felt sympathy for the prisoners to secretly get them some things that they needed. The women asked for paper, pencils, and envelopes—and also “watercolor paints so that we could color postcards for special occasions, and some scissors and threads for embroidering.” 139 For those studying the experience of women in the Gulag, a collection of pencil portraits of prisoners—from ballerinas and nuns to hardened criminals—by Iaroslava Muzyka has been especially valuable.140 Like embroidery and other talents, a knack for drawing could also become a resource for survival. Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) recalls a talented painter from Romania called Kateryna Treiman. Her health was very poor, and she could not meet her quotas, which meant that she was constantly on punitive rations. She managed to survive because she drew portraits and cards for other prisoners, who gave the starving artist some of their food.141 Skarga remembers another painter, Ol´ha Konstantinovna, who was assigned to the KVCh to make visual propaganda, but who in her free time would “passionately give herself to painting portraits of the managers, their wives and kids, the overseers, and all the camp staff. . . . Wonderful daubing that made us smile, but for poor Ol´ha it meant an additional slice of bread or a jar of carp.” 142 Similar practices took place in the Karlag camps, where talented artists painted on commission from the camp management in exchange for rewards, which in most cases meant extra food and exemption from general labor.143 Nor did the women only paint and draw on paper. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk tells how one time the Ukrainian women decided to not only whitewash the inside of their barrack but also decorate the walls: The girls whitewashed the walls in sections, and our girls came up to me, saying: “Draw something of ours, something familiar.” . . .

Figure 4.17. Handmade Christmas card by Hanna Kotsur, sent from camp to her sister, 16 December 1954. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/7.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

308

So I made a frieze . . . and on the walls I drew some pictures from our beloved, unforgettable places. Using soot and lime, it’s possible to get the different shades you want. We had no paintbrushes, but we had our braids.144

While they were being punished in Gulag camps, Ukrainian political prisoners lived for their memories and dreams of their homeland. The beauty of their native nature and happy family life were at the core of the fantasies that they expressed in their drawings. In this sense, the art of the Ukrainian female politicals sharply contrasted with perhaps one of the most famous and most striking collections of Gulag drawings: the images with which Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya illustrates her memoirs of the Gulag.145 These images reflect almost all aspects of camp life for female prisoners in its most inhuman manifestations, including terrible images of sexual violence and prisoner abuse. However, Kersnovskaya made these drawings not while still in prison, but more than a decade after she was released, when she sat down to write recollections of what she had lived through. This is likely the main reason why her drawings differ in subject matter so strongly from those that dominated in the creative work made by women while still incarcerated. RETELLINGS OF LITERARY WORKS, READING, AND SELF-­EDUCATION One exceptionally popular and widespread form of recreation in the prisons and camps was the retelling of classic literature and films. Kokhans´ka recalls that she often did this during her own investigation while she was in the Lutsk Remand Prison. Later she was to do this in camp barracks as well: Often in the evenings, when the investigators did not torture the girls that much, the girls asked me to tell them something

4. Creativity and Free Time

309

interesting. I would retell books I had read, films I had seen, or something from Ukrainian history.146 It was boring to sit in silence, and one thing led to another, so that every evening I would retell some interesting book or movie about outstanding historical figures, princes, and hetmans, or just tell about some incident.147

Mariia Vahula writes about similar activities in the Lontskyi Remand Prison in Lviv, where a highly educated woman from Leningrad shared what she had read with her friends in misfortune: “Every evening from after our so-­called supper to lights-­out, Zoia would tell us about different interesting novels that she had read or stories she had seen in movies. She had an interesting, artistic way of saying things and a real talent for storytelling.” 148 Kateryna Maksymovych tried similarly to lighten the grim reality of the Bryhidky Remand Prison in Lviv.149 She also brought this practice to the camps, where, as Senyk later wrote, she organized improvised “literary evenings”: “In the evenings, we would huddle together for warmth in the cold barracks, remember the past, and talk about books and poems read long before.” 150 Retelling literary works not only helped the women relax but also helped them ignore their physical agonies for a time and distract themselves from their miserable circumstances. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls: “In order to forget about our hunger, we began to tell one another about interesting books, and surprisingly enough, it helped.” 151 Oksana Khrashchevs´ka writes that although the women would tire themselves out from talking about books, “time would go faster, and we even forgot about our hunger.” 152 Zakydal´s´ka even tried to keep up the spirits of a dying friend in the camp infirmary by reciting poems by Ivan Franko to her.153 Surovtsova, who was highly educated and holding a degree from the University of Vienna, spent twenty-­seven years in prisons and camps, where she was one of those whose storytelling and retelling

Figure 4.18. Camp album of Ol´ha Diakovs´ka, put together at a camp in Mordovia, n.d. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

4. Creativity and Free Time

311

helped her sisters in misfortune distract themselves from the oppressive reality of the Gulag: I wanted to prevent people from losing the uplifting feeling, to somehow distract them from the unhappy thoughts that dragged them down. And so I became a kind of Scheherazade of the Prisons. Every night, as soon as it grew quiet in the cell, I would begin the latest tale, story, or novel . . . this was what I could offer to these tired, downtrodden, unhappy people to focus on. And—miraculously—the cell listened, holding its breath. . . . The story would sound very measured in the dirty, overcrowded space, and a brief forgetfulness would envelope the women. Thoughts left reality behind, carried off to the most fantastic lands, and gradually people would fall asleep. And every evening the cell would once again demand: “Forewoman, a story!” . . . These peaceful evening hours filled with storytelling made our lives remarkably varied. I was always and ever attracted to cultural engagement, even in the most inappropriate circumstances.154

Incidentally, the practice among political prisoners from the intellectual class of retelling literary works to their cellmates was widespread not just among Ukrainians, but also among Russian-­ speaking women and men, as can be seen in Russian-­language memoirs. In many cases, this practice allowed the storytellers to gain some standing among prisoners of the criminal class and to avoid potential abuse.155 Moreover, the women retold not only literary works. Dariia Koshak-­Svystel´nyts´ka would tell stories at the Norilsk camp about her experiences in the Ukrainian liberation movement: After work, we would wash up, climb up on our bunk beds, and sing, reminisce about the past, and tell one another about our families. The girls always asked me to talk about the resistance, how it was living in the forests. I would tell them because it was very pleasant for me to remember all my friends.156

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

312

And so, by telling the stories of their past, the women kept the connection with this past and preserved their own identity—political, national, and gender. The prisoners who were in camps that had libraries where they were allowed to read books were somewhat “luckier.” Vahula writes: There was a small but well-­stocked library in the zone. It contained mostly Russian classics and some good translations of works from world literature. After a long period starving for books, I threw myself at everything I could get my hands on. . . . We often would talk about what we had read.157

Shandarak-­Brovchenko also recalls the pleasures of a library: Evenings, we would go to the camp library, where there were many books donated to the library for “meeting quotas.” The books came from Leningrad and Moscow. We would also go together to watch films. I remember how we once all watched a film based on Oles´ Honchar’s novel Praporonostsi [The Flag Bearers].158

Camp and prison libraries, where they existed and when prisoners were given access to them, not only offered the women a chance to satisfy their urge to read and distract themselves from the severe realities of their daily lives, but also served an educational purpose. Some prisoners used the book collections for self-­education. For instance, Zaryts´ka spent many years in a prison that had a library and that also allowed the prisoners to receive books in their parcels, and she actively engaged in self-­ improvement, studying foreign languages—German, English, and French—as well as art history, philosophy, and psychology.159 Many memoirists noted that quite a few camps served as informal schools. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk recalls that among her sisters in misfortune there were some illiterate girls, so their educated friends took it on themselves to teach them literacy:

4. Creativity and Free Time

313

Hania can’t even write a letter, she’s illiterate. . . . Mariika is also illiterate. They were taken away as kids. . . . We had to work with these girls, and that was good, but we had started with Hania sooner, and so we were able to teach her to read and write, while with Mariika we were late getting going because we were transferred to another barrack. Hania was as pleased as a child. Now she wouldn’t have to ask anyone to write or read a letter for her.160

Zakydal´s´ka especially valued the company of the educated women with whom she shared time in the camps: These were lovely girls, patriots, exceptionally smart, highly spiritual, talented—the real flower of the Ukrainian nation. You could find out and learn a lot from them, especially Slava Liudkevych. We nicknamed her “the walking encyclopedia.” Slavunia knew an awful lot. She was very well read and had even studied at the University of Lviv.161

Ukrainian politicals in Polish prisons also took advantage of the situation to improve themselves. “We studied from one another and taught one another,” writes Karwańska-­Bajlak, describing the lessons in German and lectures in Polish literature that took place in her cell in the Fordon Women’s Prison in Poland in late 1951.162 It seems that even in the severest of regimens, the prisoners sought and found ways to take advantage of language as an instrument for consolidating and informing prisoners. In her memoirs, Ol´ha Hrosberh-­Nakonechna notes that prisoners in the Lviv transit prison even published a clandestine “newsletter” in the form of a handwritten circular called Volia v’iaznia (The Prisoner’s Freedom). They managed to publish eight issues and get them to the outside world. Later on, this effort was renewed in the Mordovian camp, where they managed to publish three issues.163 Unfortunately, in both situations, the initiators were severely punished.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

314

NATURE IN THE PRISONERS’ MEMOIRS Not only did the worn-­out prisoners retain their capacity to notice and take pleasure in the fleeting beauty that occasionally came their way despite the otherwise inhuman conditions of daily life, but they eagerly grabbed on to the smallest opportunity to feel joy. Didukh muses in her memoir on how a person’s understanding of happiness changes when they are imprisoned: I often thought, what’s happiness? There are moments of great happiness even in such a hopeless situation, even in enormous misery. Happiness that we’re still alive. . . . Happiness that our child is alive, happiness that at least for a minute you can see people and the sky, happiness that you managed to pass a letter along. And that means that there was happiness, after all. Even today, I remember that deep feeling of true happiness during the most difficult times in my life.164

The women felt an especially strong need for such joyful moments and experienced them exceptionally brightly in those inhuman conditions: “We were happy to feel those tiny fragments of joy that our miserable daily life gave us.” 165 The most common source of such joy was nature. The terse recollections that were written in letters or voiced in oral history interviews rarely include any mention of the significance of nature in the lives of the prisoners. But the more expansive memoirs, such as Kokhans´ka’s and Surovtsova’s, offer a considerable number of sketches on this theme and provide a better understanding of this aspect of camp and prison life. Having spent part of her incarceration in a prison, Surovtsova describes just how important the simple joy of holding an ordinary plant became for her under those conditions:

Figure 4.19. “On my independence day!” Cover drawing to a letter by newly released Vasylyna Iliuk to her imprisoned daughter-in-law Liuba, 20 February 1956. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, ТL 284.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

316

On the edge, I saw a small bean bush with only two–three leaves. This poor little flower became my dream, following me day after day, until I finally decided to take it in with me into my cell. For the next few walks, I would drop and pick up my hanky, taking a smidgen of earth with it, and when I had enough, I took the bean out of the soil and planted it into the shell of an egg. They didn’t take it away. This was one of my first joys in prison.166

A similar joy was felt by detainees in the Bryhidky Remand Prison in Lviv: on Pentecost Sunday, they suddenly noticed a clump of green grass in the prison yard, which was otherwise completely paved in cobbles. These few blades of grass became a real sensation that the imprisoned women considered to be a “gift of God,” “a holy miracle,” and “a good omen.” 167 Just how meaningful such seeming trivialities were for prisoners starving for direct communion with nature becomes clear in Zaryts´ka’s recollections about Christmas in prison: We had everything . . . and this time not a merely symbolic but a real Christmas tree, made of birch twigs. . . . After the morning walk, we began to dress the tree. What a joy, what an enormous emotional lift! Many of us hadn’t seen a live tree for years. We admired it from all sides and all angles.168

The simple living branches were, for the women, such a treasure, giving them joy in captivity. Zakydal´s´ka remembers trying to alleviate the suffering of a friend dying in the camp infirmary: “I tried to bring this poor girl anything I could from the forest, from nature: I was able to roll up some snow and find a cranberry twig, sometimes even with a few berries.” 169 Those who were kept in prisons felt their isolation and estrangement from the world even more, an alienation that even a tiny amount of communing with nature could soften. Surovtsova very fully describes her feeling as she fed a bird that would fly to her prison window every morning:

4. Creativity and Free Time

317

For me, this was an event of enormous substance, and I waited with a trembling heart. . . . I would feed the little sparrow every day. And every day, it felt easier to keep living. . . . I fed the sparrow, and it got used to me, so that it would fly right into the cell . . . and then fly out to freedom. To freedom. And life became easier for me. I now had some kind of direct link to the world on the other side of the tall fence.170

To preserve this mostly illusory but profound connection with the free world was so important to this prisoner that she preferred to suffer punishment for this “violation of the regimen”: she was deprived of her daily walks, access to the library, and the right to correspond.171 In reflecting on what things helped her survive captivity, Surovtsova draws this conclusion: “I would never have survived on high-­minded matters alone. I had to have something simply human: a mouse, a seed, a little flower, a glove. . . . All these little things would have been silly had they not helped me live.” 172 The possibility of having contact with a domestic animal also had a lot of meaning for the prisoners, a significance that people are rarely aware of in ordinary life. In considering the psychology of the prisoner, Skarga emphasizes the exceptional nature of a love of animals: “Since my years in prison, whenever I watch cats at play, my eyes don’t see any cats or dogs, only birds high up in some branches.” 173 The camps near Ukhta had no animals: they had no chance to survive among the hungry criminals imprisoned there. However, at the camp on Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan— after Stalin died and the regimen was slowly eased—”a stray dog appeared at the brickworks, an ordinary mongrel. The girls immediately took it over. They fed it as best they could, taking the food out of their own mouths. . . . It brought us enormous joy.” Unfortunately, the usually peaceful dog one day attacked an officer, so it was caught and shot on the spot. The memoirist concludes with some bitterness: “We weren’t even allowed to love a dog.” She is very clear about the need for the imprisoned women to have something to love and care for.174

Figure 4.20. Drawing by Hanna Kotsur, attached to a letter to her brother Bohdan from a camp in Taishet, 15 June 1954. Archives of the Lviv Historical Museum, АRKh 16896/5.

4. Creativity and Free Time

319

After the isolation that the women experienced in prison, they likely felt even greater pleasure at being able to directly commune with nature, experiencing its beauty more brightly. For instance, Kokhans´ka not only paints a clear image but delightedly describes her experience of one of nature’s great wonders: Although I was overcome with fatigue and coming back to the barracks late at night, it was impossible to turn my eyes away from the fantastic beauty of the northern lights. What a glorious, unforgettable spectacle. . . . I stood there as though enchanted, unable to turn my eyes away from this grand, cold, arctic beauty. Yet, no matter how carefully I choose my words, they can never convey this incomparable phenomenon of nature that belongs only to the North.175

Elsewhere, Kokhans´ka describes the awakening spring in the harsh arctic: “After the long polar night, this was strange and unfamiliar to us. The minute the snow melted anywhere, the grass immediately turned green, and flowers began to break through the thin layer of snow in a rush to bloom. Nature had given them so little time for this.” 176 She also conveys her feelings at a vision of wild flowers that stirred up memories of her homeland: Behind the construction site, it was possible to sometimes find flowers that reminded me of our meadows in Ukraine. Oh, how I wanted to bring just a few of those little flowers into the barracks. . . . Right next to the prohibited zone, and they were countless, so varied and so bright. There were forget-­me-­nots, yellow asters, white gypsophila, and ears of every imaginable color, like we have at home. True, their scents were considerably weaker than back home, and some were completely without any scent despite their brilliance. I stood there for a long time, drinking in the colorful carpet beyond the zone, where we could not go.177

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

320

In her camp memoirs, Surovtsova also conveys a sense of arctic nature from time to time: Above you, a pitch-­black sky and such stars that if you looked at them long enough, you’d forget everything around you.178 The road was unbelievably beautiful, a string of wild mountains going higher and higher, interwoven with pristine ridges and winding rivers along the route, everything pressing forward, forward.179

These women had known horrific ordeals, humiliations, and physical and emotional agonies. They had suffered from hunger and cold, were exhausted from overwork, and were cut off from their homeland, and yet—they did not lose their sense of splendor and continued to see beauty even in a natural environment that was alien to them, to value its smallest shifts, and to feel joy at every opportunity to commune with it. For female Ukrainian politicals, creativity remained an important component of everyday life in the camps. Having observed changes in the reactions of concentration camp prisoners, Victor E. Frankl came to an important conclusion that is confirmed by the experience of Ukrainian women prisoners: “As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.” 180 Drawing inspiration from traditional folk culture, teaching and encouraging one another, and applying the knowledge, know-­how, and skills they had acquired in the process of gender socialization, Ukrainian women in the Gulag sang folk songs, wrote poems, put on plays, embroidered, painted, and otherwise expressed their creative potential. As Anne Applebaum observes: “Involvement in some larger intellectual or artistic project kept many educated people alive, spiritually and physically—for those with gifts or talents often found practical uses for them.” 181

4. Creativity and Free Time

321

Creativity was a special phenomenon of the female experience of political imprisonment, serving a slew of important functions in the camps and prisons, and helping the women hold up under unprecedented physical and psychological challenges. First among these functions was representation: art allowed Ukrainian women to manifest their Ukrainianness through easily recognized Ukrainian songs, embroidery, poetry, performances, and drawings permeated by Ukrainian motifs and themes. This became a kind of manifesto of their national identity and clearly set them apart among the Gulag prison population. Art also functioned as a force of consolidation among the women, encouraging them to establish, reinforce, and maintain social ties with other political prisoners and helping them feel connected to the national community—the imagined one in distant Ukraine and the real one in the camps. It shaped solidarity among the women, which was a mainstay of survival in the camps. It is hard to exaggerate the role of creativity as axiology, as well. In their works, the women testified about and nurtured loyalty to an established system of values and moral guidelines, dominated by Christian principles. This helped the women resist the dehumanizing influence of the Gulag on the individual. Being creative made it possible for the women to at least partly satisfy their aesthetic needs and allowed those with the necessary abilities to manifest their artistic potential. Art as a vehicle of expression thus continued to have meaning in the camps. The creative process also had a powerful psychotherapeutic effect. Through their art, the women together overcame their traumatic experience and depression, released accumulated stress and mental pressure, benefited from positive emotions, and distracted themselves from the horrific reality of daily routines in the Gulag. This helped keep their spirits up and their interest in life alive. Since material objects, knowledge, and skills are all part of a culture, traditional arts were a way to re-­create, if only temporarily and fragmentarily, the cultural reality, the living world to

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

322

which the person belonged prior to being imprisoned.182 In this sense, a space of freedom was established in the midst of the prisoners’ camp. Inside the barracks, the oversight of the camp guards and managers was considerably less felt, and this space, outside the KVCh, was where the bulk of illegal creative activity took place. Here, the living world of freedom replaced the living world of captivity and gave the prisoner an opportunity to manifest her Self.183 Since objects represent or personify a certain cultural environment, a way of life, and specific norms, re-­creating such objects in a different environment makes it possible to reestablish the link with the culture, values, and norms that have been lost.184 Without any doubt, art in the camps was a form of resistance to the repressive Gulag system. Despite their physical incarceration and numerous prohibitions, the women felt internal freedom and manifested it in songs, drawings, poems, and embroidery, actualizing memories of their homeland and nurturing dreams of freedom. In effect, their art was outside the control of the regime.185 The wide variety of genres and forms through which the women’s creativity manifested itself in prison—and the women’s determination and inventiveness in doing so—testifies unambiguously to the exceptional importance of this aspect of their camp lives. Art in its most varied forms and manifestations helped Ukrainian women preserve their basic social identities (gender, national, religious, and political) and the coordinates of their value system (social norms, moral principles, and world views) in order to prevent the disintegration of the individual and to remain human, female, and Ukrainian.

CHAPTER 5

HUMANITY AND FEMININITY IN CAPTIVITY

THE DEHUMANIZATION OF PRISONERS The first thing that female Soviet detainees felt and understood, even at the investigation stage, was that they were no longer seen as women, or even as human beings. Traditional notions and social norms regarding women and humankind did not apply to prisoners. During interrogations, they were humiliated verbally, intimidated, blackmailed, subjected to physical abuse—beatings, sleep deprivation, hunger, and cold—and even sexually abused. Nearly every memoir about imprisonment during the investigation stage mentions, in greater or lesser detail, a wide range of tortures applied to women by the interrogators, contempt on the part of the guards, and indifference on the part of other workers in the prisons. The women not only describe the torture and their agonies, they also name those who did this to them and detail the emotions of the interrogators, who appeared to experience pathological pleasure in their sense of power over the defenseless victim and in their own impunity. As just one example, Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) writes: Even more terrible beatings began. They would interrogate me in the night on the second floor. They tied me to a chair by my braids and hit me on the nose with their fingers. Or they would pistol-­ whip me on the head. . . . I was hung upside down, which is very hard to take. The blood presses on the brain, your ears start to ring, and it feels like your head will burst open any minute. Your eyes feel like they are being pushed out of their sockets, your tongue

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

328

falls out of your mouth, and there’s terrible pain. . . . There was this one torturer who would come specifically to abuse “the Banderite.” . . . His favorite thing was to throw me to the floor and stomp on my stomach.1

The experience of being tortured was extremely traumatic for the women, not just physically because it damaged their health or even destroyed it permanently, but psychologically as well. Recollecting these experiences is unbearably painful, so some former prisoners have preferred not to return to such memories and have refused to talk about the torture during interviews: “I don’t want to talk about this. . . . Oh, it was so terrible. I don’t even want to bring it up.” 2 And yet, other women tell all about their suffering, describing those who abused them and how, their own condition, feelings, and anxiety, the reactions of other prisoners, and more. Sometimes, the entire memoir about political imprisonment is one long report on what the woman endured in a remand prison. For instance, during a 1993 interview, Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, who spent a total of eight years in captivity, spoke only about the few months she was in prison during her investigation and said nothing about the transfers or her life in the camps.3 Similarly, Ievdokiia Budnik-­Kekish fully reconstructs in her memoirs the cruelty of the interrogators that she experienced in the Krem’ianets Remand Prison: The interrogator took a fairly thin rubber hose, folded it in two, swung with all his might from a short distance, and proceeded to beat me. . . . It hurt terribly, and when the hose was pulled back from my body, it felt like it was tearing my flesh and leaving bloody traces behind. Another time, he beat me with a faceted iron bar covered in rubber. He used an oak ruler to hit me over the head. At the beginning it was very hard to stand these beatings. . . . My body was black and swollen from the beatings. . . . Sometimes other interrogators would come along too, like wild beasts, and help torture the victim who was in their hands. . . . They beat me very hard and threw me to the floor. One guy would squeeze my head with

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

329

his boots, while the others beat me until I passed out. . . . For a long time, they kept kicking me, stomping, beating, and when I fainted, they tossed water on my head. . . . I was all bloody because they had also pulled out my hair in two places, together with the skin. My torn-­up body was bleeding, as though I had been flayed. It hurt unbearably and burned. My arms and hands were beaten, and all my fingers cracked because when they were hitting me over the head with the wooden ruler, I tried to defend myself with my hands, to protect my head.4

Those women who have been able to bring themselves to tell about their suffering are no less deeply wounded psychologically than those who have not. In wrapping up her memoirs, Pozniak (Skrypiuk) admits: “What I went through has haunted me all my life. I can’t laugh from the bottom of my heart. The trauma will never heal. . . . Again and again, that terrible, terrifying time comes to mind and everything that we went through. These memories won’t let me sleep at night.” 5 Despite the pain that returning to those tragic events causes the women, through a sheer effort of will they pass on the truth about what they endured to their descendants. Indeed, the women knew, as soon as they were arrested, that the system was determined to break them: first physically and then mentally. Anna Hoshko-­Kit explains: The goal of the interrogators is to destroy the person, to cripple her soul and her body. . . . They consider themselves the masters of human life. . . . To break the body and destroy the person’s health is something they succeed in. Sometimes they also manage to break the spirit, so the person dies although she remains alive. She dies to humanity. However, even though we were physically shattered, most of us remained strong in spirit.6

From the moment they were arrested, the women were completely defenseless against the lawlessness and violence exercised against them by the NKVD officers who carried out

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

330

interrogations, the guards, the escorts, and others working in the repressive system. On the one hand, they were “enemies of the people” who had no civil rights and could not challenge any abuses or even openly illegal actions by government officials. On the other hand, their lives depended entirely on the will of these same people, who could, at their own discretion, either worsen or ease the conditions of the prisoners. Any attempts to openly resist, protest, or disobey were brutally crushed, and rebellious women could expect even crueler treatment, worse conditions, and more suffering. Once the sentence was passed and the cruelty and unbearable tortures seemed to be behind them, the women faced other horrors in the transit prisons and convoys that transferred them to the place where they were to carry out their sentence. Political prisoners were moved in freight cars that had not been adapted for human passengers and had neither windows nor toilets. The trip itself could take from a few days to a few weeks, while the prisoners suffered hunger and thirst, cold or sweltering heat, depending on the season, overcrowding, and the abuse of the escorts. There was no sanitation whatsoever, leading to inevitable diseases and complications. But no medical help was provided. Moreover, during the transit and at the transit points, female politicals constantly faced violence from prisoners who had been sentenced for regular crimes. The criminals could rob the political prisoners with impunity, taking from them not only valuables but also clothes, footwear, and food, in addition to humiliating and physically abusing them. All this was treated with indulgence by the guards and escorts. The only way that female politicals could survive the trip was through mutual support—and the occasional demonstration of humaneness on the part of the escorts. In the camps, the women felt the dehumanizing impact of the system full force. The lives and basic needs of political prisoners were under total control, while the women were deprived of pretty much all rights and resources, making them completely dependent on the will of the management of the camps and sub-

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

331

jecting them to the lawlessness of the guards, the escorts, other workers, and the criminal element. The women understood well that to slowly lose their purely human traits put them at risk of turning into a slavish mass of creatures that operated entirely on instinct: The staff didn’t consider us people.7 We walked like livestock being led to the slaughter. I, too, felt that dumb mood of submission. . . . We were livestock: we couldn’t write, we couldn’t complain. . . . Misinformed, numbed by hunger, work, and the lawlessness of the brutal overseers, we placed our hopes only in God and sometimes became like children.8 Merchants would drive up and take people away to work like so much cattle.9 The escorts would be uptight, yell, and curse. They wanted to drive us quickly into the freight car, like livestock.10 At every step, they tried to make it clear to us that we weren’t people. . . . It’s hard to say what a person might feel when they’ve already spent ten years in prison. . . . You become indifferent to everything. You go wild.11 Exhausted, hungry, driven to despair, and having lost all sense of human dignity, the wretched women would try to snatch a piece of bread from someone’s hand. They didn’t stop to think whose ration they were trying to take away—and along with it, that person’s life. There were cases where someone was killed for a piece of bread.12 The prisoners resembled, to an extreme degree, very hungry and very greedy animals.13

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

332

The fear of losing one’s human essence, the threat of moral decline under the pressure of inhuman circumstances, and the risk of falling to the level of the survival instinct are expressed in many memoirs where the women reflect on how they themselves and people around them changed in the camps. Оksana Meshko recalls: For the first time at the Ukhta transit camp I got to see camp people, and I lost something of myself there. I became terrified, life was losing its appeal, and I loved it so! . . . At the infirmary, I saw an impenetrable swamp, such moral degradation that I was horrified at the baseness of people when they lost their resemblance to God and stood naked in their fear of dying, determined to survive at any cost.14

Nadiia Surovtsova expresses similar fears that she would lose herself: At the camp, I began to lose sight of myself, my intellect, and my appearance. I did, of course, still have my world view. . . . but I had already lost my self—the one that I had been all my life, the one that, in some sense . . . stayed in the camp. I had been trampled. Both by my own [people] and by strangers.15

The working mechanism for dehumanizing prisoners and crushing their individuality was depersonalization. In the camps, the prisoners’ names and surnames were taken away from them and replaced with numbers. In nearly every description of their prison appearance, the women immediately remember those numbers that they were forced to sew or inscribe on their clothing: “Wretched felt boots, patched-­up cotton trousers, on the right knee of the prison robe was the number—and on the hat with earflaps. Mine was L‑316. A patch was cut out of the shoulder of our bushlaty or outer jackets, and our number was sewn over the hole.” 16 Indeed, the women were sharply aware of the direct

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

333

link between the issuing of a number and their loss of status as an individual, a citizen, and a human being: The person did not exist. There was just a number burned with whitewash on the clothing: on the back, on the chest, on the bottom of the skirt, and on the hat. Four numbers.17 They would call us by number. . . . There were no names and no surnames. There was no person. There was a number according to which the person was called up for work every morning.18 We were treated as though we were nonpeople. No one called us by our names or surnames. They just called the number.19 We counted as numbers in that huge, harsh system. There were no individuals.20 I had to sew the number I had been given, O‑912, onto my bushlat by myself. We weren’t people here, we were numbers.21 We were issued sack dresses, and on every bit of clothing we had to sew on a patch with a number: on the right knee, on the left arm and the left shoulder blade. It was white with a black number written on it. My number was B‑357. We were no longer people, but numbers.22

This number may not have been imprinted on the body, as in Nazi concentration camps, but it was nevertheless imprinted in the memories of the prisoners and haunted them all their lives. As Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka recalls: They would photograph us, and instead of surnames, we were told to sew numbers onto our bushlaty. I stitched on a patch of white cloth with a huge black number: P‑104. Even after I was free, in my

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

334

sleep I kept hearing “Number P‑104, hands behind your back!” or “Number P‑104, march in step!” for a very long time.23

The system of identifying the prisoners with numbers was so aggravating that sometimes the women were prepared to suffer punishments and restrictions for refusing to wear them, as Raïsa Rudenko writes: Senior Lieutenant Podust announced that she would stop at nothing to force us to wear them. And she kept her promise. The entire year, she took everything away from us: visits, parcels, and the prison shop, and the most active among us she would send to the punishment cell.24

The women understood the purpose of these numbers and did what they could to preserve inner freedom: “They took away our surnames and gave us numbers, but they could not take away our willpower, which was in our souls and in our blood, and with it we would walk this difficult path.” 25 Within the first weeks of being arrested, Surovtsova already understood that the prison system was designed to destroy her individuality as well as her body, so she decided to preserve herself—and that would be a victory over the system: “I decided to survive. . . . I needed to preserve my body and soul. . . . To die would mean to disappear and never to have the last word. . . . The only possible way to protest politically was to survive.” 26 Even if the physical bodies of the imprisoned women suffered inevitable agonies and losses, the women considered their inner freedom, their human dignity, to be the last bastion that they had to preserve at all costs and defend against the destructive impact of the dehumanizing regime. Vanda Horchyns´ka (Demchuk) recalls: “The heavy work that drained all our strength, the bad food, and the unbearable living conditions made us too weak, too unable to effectively resist the camp management. . . . But our tormentors were ultimately unable to break us.” 27 When she was being held in a solitary cell in the remand prison, Oksana

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

335

Khrashchevs´ka “understood that in order to survive your spirit had to be strong.” 28 Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak also very quickly recognized that only with conscious, focused effort would the women be able to preserve their human identities: We learned defensive behavior every day, every minute. This saved us from going insane. It reminded us that we possessed a treasure that, if we withstood, no one could take away, the cruelest torturer could not imprison—and this was our human, our personal dignity. And so we cherished this indestructible treasure in each of our hearts, even as we grew accustomed to and adapted to the prison regimen.29

HUMANENESS BEHIND BARS Fortunately, humaneness and empathy were not entirely lacking among those who represented the repressive Soviet system, such as interrogators, prison guards, transit escorts, and camp managers—and nearly every memoirist writes about instances in which these qualities were displayed. Indeed, they recall each such incident with gratitude in their stories about what they lived through. Even when making broader generalizations about those who were on the other side of the fence, the women nevertheless attempt to be fair in their estimations, mentioning and describing the exceptions that sometimes proved decisive to their personal survival. Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko mentions an interrogator who hid her poetry in his own office during searches.30 Oksana Kamins´ka-­Iurchuk writes about an illiterate guard who passed along a book of Volodymyr Sosiura’s poetry to her.31 Oleksandra Blavats´ka puts in a good word for a young captain in the remand prison who took the risk of passing along a comb, toothbrush, and toothpaste from her mother.32 Pozniak (Skrypiuk) remembers the name of a duty guard who felt sorry for her and allowed her to sit down and nap briefly during a punishment that required

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

336

her to stand sleepless in the punishment cell. She also recalls a few prison staff, including two overseers who supplied food to women who were exhausted by interrogations and hunger, acknowledging: “Even among bad people, there are decent ones. . . . And even in a difficult moment, God sent me good people who supported me at least morally.” 33 Onetime underground courier Hanna Plechii expresses gratitude toward a simple KGB cleaning woman who was an involuntary witness to how the young woman was tortured by thirst. The other woman took pity on Plechii and, risking punishment herself, gave her something to drink.34 Meshko writes about a prison overseer who took her anguish to heart and helped her meet with her sister and find out what had happened to their mother.35 Dariia Husiak remembers an officer as well as a whole slew of ordinary workers in the prisons who showed empathy and humaneness toward the female politicals, supporting them with food, vitamins, and medications. The former prisoner gives these people enormous credit because such manifestations of personal humaneness could potentially have cost them dearly: “They were afraid, afraid of one another because, by violating their own rules, they exposed themselves to prison. They could have been tried for that.” 36 Mariia Lavriv-­Skrentovych mentions several young soldiers working as escorts who tried to keep the girls’ spirits up and brought them bread.37Anna Martyniuk tells about a number of guards who secretly brought her milk for her infant during a transit and in the transit prison, concluding: “There are decent people everywhere.” 38 Halyna Kokhans´ka writes about the overseer who quietly added some bread and salo when checking through her belongings prior to transit, about the escort during her transit “who had not lost his humaneness” but made sure that the thirsty women were given water, and about the camp watchman who gathered wild flowers for her.39 Sometimes even the simplest signs of compassion and affection were more important than anything, and memories about

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

337

such gestures remained with the women all their days. In her writings, Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk) recalls with warmth one group of escorts who, compared to others, distinguished themselves by their humane attitude toward the prisoners: The best convoy was a group of boys from Leningrad. They allowed us to warm ourselves by the fire. “Girls, sit down. Sing us a song, girls. What were you arrested for?” The boys were so well brought up and good looking. . . . Leningrad boys were really decent, all of them young. They would always ask: “Girls, what are you doing here? Well, sing, Ukrainian gals, sing any old song for us.” Sometimes, we would sing them some folk song and then sit with them and chat.40

The women’s memoirs testify to the fact that not only ordinary workers of the repressive system would show humaneness from time to time. Even among the higher-­ups, there were individuals whom the onetime prisoners remember positively. Iosyfa Zholdak remembers a guard in the Lontsky Remand Prison in Lviv: “We called one guard, an older man, ‘father.’ He felt pity for us.” 41 Kokhans´ka similarly recalls: The camp supervisor, Captain Lincewicz, was a Pole . . . and was the most humane supervisor that we had known until that point. Where he could, he tried to ease the plight of the women. For us, this was something extraordinary. In the zone, he replaced all the male service personnel with women. He would often fight for his people with the mine authorities. . . . He spoke with us like we were normal people, not criminals. Thanks to his efforts, we had a passable library, where before our camps had had none at all.42

Stefaniia Holyns´ka (Oleshchuk) also has good things to say about the director of a mine, Kornev, and the director of a transit camp, Krasnov, who, in one way or another, displayed humaneness toward the prisoners.43 Even deeds that seem minor and almost

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

338

comic at first glance—such as that of a guard who, on learning that a prisoner suffered from arachnophobia, cleaned away a huge spider in her cell—not only gained the gratitude of the prisoners, but caused them joy at the realization that some individuals were capable of acting kindly: “There turned out to be no spider, but my soul smiled and sang with happiness, with the joy of realizing that being human is eternal.” 44 In recollecting the humaneness shown by a Chekist who passed along word of her to her mother back home, Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna seems to sum up her experience of suffering in prison: “Everything was forgotten—the tortures, the crazy anger of the interrogators and the guards, while this spark of kindness was imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life.” 45 Numerous women’s histories contain stories of compassion and support from ordinary people who helped the women in prison, during transit, or in the camps. Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna shares an incident when conscripted soldiers inadvertently witnessed the suffering of the hungry, frozen prisoners in a convoy. Ignoring the armed escorts, the boys immediately shared their food with the women. She quotes an older woman in the convoy: “A real person always remains a person, no matter what their work, no matter what uniform they wear.” 46 Ol´ha Matseliukh-­Horyn´ remembers an extraordinary incident on a construction site near Inta, where civilian builders quietly asked the women prisoners what they needed and brought them what those women considered the most valuable: paper, pencils, and envelopes. They also supported the women morally: “How incredibly happy we were, the next day, when we found, under a pile of shovels, everything that we had asked for. . . . Our joy was boundless. This ordinary human kindness warmed us for a long while in that northern chill and restored our faith in people.” 47 A piece of bread given, a letter sent, clothing tossed at a column of prisoners, even a good word from a complete stranger—these moments remained in the memories of the political

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

339

prisoners. After all, against a background of complete indifference, fear, cruelty, and alienation, these incidents gave the women hope. Even a seemingly small gesture of compassion could give the prisoners back their faith in humanity. Looking back at a moment when a passing woman risked her life to come up to a column of convicted women simply to straighten out the kerchief on the head of a prisoner whose hands were in shackles, Stefaniia Koval´-Nadorozhniak writes: “This incident supported my spirit and lifted my mood. I felt that I was no longer alone.” 48 URKI, BLATNYE, AND BYTOVIKI: RELATIONS BETWEEN THE POLITICALS AND THE CRIMINALS One of the most aggravating problems that the women who were political prisoners ran into was dealing with the criminal classes: the hardened criminals, or urki; the common criminals, or blatnye; and the petty criminals, or bytoviki. The first two groups tended to include recidivists who had stolen, robbed, swindled, raped, murdered, and so on. They constituted a relatively small group among all the Gulag prisoners, averaging about 15 percent of the population, and, by 1952, their proportion had fallen to around 5 percent.49 With the third group of prisoners—those who had been sentenced for relatively petty crimes such as pilfering at work, speculation, misappropriation, violations of labor discipline, or passport rules—the politicals had serious run-­ins, as these prisoners were far more numerous, especially in the postwar years, when they accounted for 50–66 percent of all prisoners in the Gulag.50 The urki and blatnye were the privileged classes. They rarely, if ever, worked in general labor, “delegating” the fulfillment of their production quotas to the politicals under threat of physical reprisals. They got the “privileged” leadership positions in the camps, such as foreman, warehouse manager, and taskmaster, which gave them access to additional resources. Through the open abuse of their positions, they were fed much better, wore better clothes, and had better living conditions.51 Almost every

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

340

memoir has at least one story about how the urki, blatnye, or bytoviki (with the tacit consent of the escorts, overseers, and camp managers) physically and mentally abused the female politicals—who, as “traitors of the motherland” and “enemies of the people,” were considered the lowest caste of prisoners. Blavats´ka offers a general comment on the attitude of the criminals toward the politicals: “There were bytoviki with us in the work crew. This unbelievably nasty bunch did not work at all. Instead, they tormented and mistreated us, robbed us, and took our personal belongings, especially the parcels that our people had received from home.” 52 Oksana Vintoniv writes in detail about the situation of the bytoviki and their attitude toward the politicals: In 1949, we were merged with the ordinary criminals, and they abused the political prisoners. They were given better work: they worked as taskmasters, and they would take crews out to work sites. In short, they assisted our camp management. Everywhere, they were the ones carrying out the supervisory work. . . . It was very hard on us. . . . The women would come into the barracks and walk off with anything they took a fancy to, simply stole things, and we had to keep quiet. At the work sites, they did no work, and they ate at our expense because everyone was given the same rations, yet they basically did nothing, just freeloaded. They had appropriate nicknames, they smoked, and they allowed themselves everything. Even if we got some book from the library, they could just steal it from us, use the pages to roll cigarettes, and we couldn’t even complain to anyone about them. We were afraid that they might beat us, so we did everything they said. Our girls would not get into fights with them but were afraid of them, simply afraid, caved in, and that was that. They could overeat compared to us, go into the canteen and take food for themselves, steal our bread. They could do what they wanted because they were stronger than us.53

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

341

In addition to issues of mistreatment and theft, the male criminals were a considerable threat to the female politicals in terms of sexual abuse. Zholdak recalls with horror her own experience: The worst people in the camps were the blatnye. They wanted your stockings? They took them. They wanted your ration? They snatched it. They would rob and force. As soon as I arrived in Vorkuta, two blatnye said that they would rape me. I went to another barrack and asked a woman if I could sleep under her bunk. The men looked for me, but they didn’t find me. We breathed a sigh of relief when the blatnye were separated from us.54

In fact, the very lives of the female politicals were under threat. Blavats´ka describes an incident when the bytoviki tormented one “political” Ukrainian woman in their barrack so much that she threw herself into the well and drowned.55 Most shocking to the political prisoners on first encounter with female recidivists were their brash, provocative behavior and their extremely foul language: Their range of vocabulary was extremely narrow. The women swore no less impressively than the men, but with more brutality in their voices. Because women are more brutal than men. They can rip someone to shreds out of sheer hatred. Enraged women are like an elemental force. You can’t tame them. It was amusing the way two such “ladies” could tear clumps of hair from each other’s heads as they rolled on the floor. . . . Yet an hour later they’re sitting together on the bunks, eating an onion, and sharing what’s probably someone else’s stolen ration.56

Although most stories come down to complaints about how helpless and unprotected the political prisoners felt themselves in the face of the brutality of the urki and bytoviki, an occasional recollection describes a situation where such aggression received

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

342

a concerted rebuff.57 Stefaniia Kostiuk (Protsak) remembers how, in the transit prison in Lviv, the bytoviki were giving the politicals a hard time: “Our girls had food from home and personal possessions in sacks, and they stole it all. So I said, ‘Time to give them what for.’ So we stood in a circle, and they attacked.” 58 In her memoirs, Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) includes a story about a camp in Vanina Bay near the Sea of Okhotsk, where the blatnye organized a group attack in the middle of the night with the intent to rob a barrack into which a group of new political prisoners from Galicia had been settled. Much to their surprise, they met with an organized counterattack, because some other women had warned the newcomers about such a threat.59 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna reports about two different incidents, one in a transit prison in Kyiv in fall 1949, and the other at the Karabas transit station in Kazakhstan in spring 1953. There, too, the Ukrainian women organized themselves and successfully repulsed an attack by female criminals.60 Mariia Pyrih has a similar story: They went after our bags, taking our shoes and our best sweaters, “because you are now on Russian territory,” imagine. Well, we went after them and fought. . . . And they charged in again in the evening and . . . again went after our bags. But I say, you know what, let’s take our blankets and throw the blankets over them and grab sticks and hit them wherever we can. . . . They’ll be afraid of us.

And we beat them so badly that they were afraid of us after that.61

Even if we were to postulate that the incidents in these memoirs describe not so much real as desired outcomes, the very fact that the memoirist imagines a situation where the criminals were successfully resisted is telling. The main point in these stories is the concerted and decisive response of the Ukrainian women. Although the enmity between the politicals and the criminals tends to dominate in the women’s memoirs, the former prisoners still feel it necessary to recall instances where there was cooperation and even help on the part of some members

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

343

of this privileged group of camp prisoners. Poliuha (Masiuk) remembers with gratitude a few minutes of happiness when she had a chance to chat with her brother, who happened to be imprisoned in a neighboring camp: “The forewoman turned out to be a bytovik called Svetka. Thanks to her, because she had connections with the civilian personnel, I was able to meet with my brother. . . . Svetka arranged with the escort and took me with her to supposedly pick up some coal in the pit.” 62 Ievdokiia Kotelko (Kapko) in her memoirs writes about celebrating Easter in a camp, for which the Ukrainian women put together an improvised altar with an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The crew of recidivists, though endlessly overbearing, nevertheless behaved respectfully toward the religious practices, including morning and evening prayers, of the Ukrainian women. One Easter morning, the overseers tried to drive the Ukrainians out to work, but their forewoman, Sukhoruchka, herself a criminal, volunteered her crew to fulfill the quota instead of them: “These girls aren’t going anywhere. My crew will go to unload. How can we leave the Mother of God all alone? . . . Girls, you sing, sing away, and pray for us.” 63 Blavats´ka’s story about the terrible derision of the bytoviki toward the politicals shifts into a story about how the bytovik forewoman Pasha organized for this exhausted prisoner to be transferred to the design bureau. This move effectively changed Blavats´ka’s future in captivity and guaranteed that she would survive.64 Despite the disgust and disdain for the bytoviki, urki, and blatnye that permeate the memoirs of Ukrainian women politicals, a number of recollections also suggest an effort to find something more humane in these fallen women. In some stories, the first shock of coming up against their brutality and aggressiveness, and the profound offense at their cruelty—in stealing and humiliating—slowly evolves into descriptions of incidents when common criminals demonstrated compassion for politicals

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

344

and helped them out in difficult situations or manifested other decent qualities. For instance, Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) starts out by telling about the terrible things that the urki in the camps did against the politicals, from abuse and theft to even murder (the last in a game of cards). But she reveals a different side to this criminal world after the watch in one camp somehow shoots an urka: The blatnye immediately took her body back to their barrack. . . . Strangely enough, these women, some of whom had been jailed more than once, wore crosses on their chests and somehow, in their own way, combined murder, theft, crime, and cursing—with faith in God. They dressed their murdered friend, obviously in stolen clothes, called on the “nuns,” whom they ordered to pray over her the entire night . . . then came up to each of us and asked that we remember the soul of the dead woman.65

In writing about the camp infirmary, Barbara Skarga testifies without irony: “the urka nurse’s aide was a joy for the staff. When he was around, no one dared steal from the sick, and the urka himself preferred to do this in other wings of the hospital, not in his own.” 66 In Khrashchevs´ka’s memoirs, a group of blatnye who had caused real suffering to a female political in the freight car during transit suddenly turned out to be sensitive to Ukrainian songs and koliady: “The urki were enchanted by singing. They would listen, holding their breath. When the singing ended, someone in the group would yell out: ‘Sing some more’ without adding any swear words. . . . Then the urki themselves began to sing, too. Their songs were all very melodramatic.” 67 Khrashchevs´ka, once a student at the Medical Institute in Kyiv, worked as a nurse at the camp. More than once, she found herself in a risky situation, one on one with a criminal element, and she recalls their code of ethics: “I was saved by an ironclad rule that the urki followed: medical personnel were off limits.” 68 This same moral code shaped the special attitude that the blatnye

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

345

had toward children, which Blavats´ka witnessed when she and several other newly released political prisoners with children were being transported in a car together with criminals: As soon as children showed up in the corridor, the blatnye gave them whatever they had: someone gave a stick of sugar, someone else a bit of a cookie. . . . The blatnye stopped cussing. Instead, in the evening they called the head of the escort and asked whether “the angels are already sleeping,” and getting an affirmative answer, gave themselves free rein. Choice foul language rang out until morning. In the morning, as soon as the “little angels woke up,” the swearing stopped for the entire day.69

It seems that as the groups began to interact more and get to know one another, the initial enmity toward the politicals on the part of the indoctrinated urki and bytoviki, and the contempt of the politicals toward women from the criminal world, gradually subsided. Several memoirs clearly suggest that a level of understanding developed among the women. In writing about her sadness over the death of a young thief during a violent fight, Khrashchevs´ka notes: “The urki may be criminals, but they are still people.” 70 Recalling the moment that she was released, Kostiuk (Protsak) writes: “I was accompanied by a group of girls. Among them was one bytovik. She said good-­bye to me thus: ‘Stefa, you might be Banderite scum but you’re one of us.’” 71 SUPPORT, SOLIDARITY, AND SISTERHOOD COMPASSION AND CARING AMONG WOMEN PRISONERS In the extreme conditions of prisons and camps, the women made considerable effort to retain their humanist values, to prevent moral decline, and to uphold basic social norms. Mutual support, compassion for their sisters in misfortune, care for the weakest,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

346

and help for the ones in greatest need in a situation where every single life was, in fact, under threat—these were the greatest manifestations of humanism, self-­sacrifice, and humaneness. In prison, where the women were first confronted with an inhuman attitude, they supported one another, shared their miserly rations and clothing, healed wounds, cheered one another up, and used any opportunity to ease the suffering of a friend. The women’s recollections of this experience are particularly poignant and filled with genuine gratitude and sympathy. Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) gratefully recalls an unknown woman in an overcrowded cell who gave her, a hungry detainee, a piece of bread: “Thank you, stranger. You convinced me that there are People in this world, that even in prison one has to have faith in people.” 72 Budnik-­Kekish suffered unbearable torture during her interrogations in the Krem’ianets Remand Prison, yet she remembers the care of other women who had also been arrested but who tried to ease her condition: I was tossed into the cell, and the door slammed behind me. Here some girls ran up and held me up. They spread out everything they had because they knew just how painful it was to lie on a hard surface after having been tortured. Slowly they lowered me to the bedding, holding my arms with their hands: I could not lie down on my own at that point. . . . That night, no one slept until dawn.73

When she found herself back in her cell, worn out from being tortured, Dariia Koshak-­Svystel´nyts´ka says, “some women, also detainees like me, unwrapped my kerchief, combed out my hair for the first time in so many days, and fed me sour milk with a spoon. There were ribbons of skin in my mouth and wounds on my lips. For days, I didn’t take anything into my mouth.” 74 The detainees were all more or less in the same situation, so they really could not do much to alleviate one another’s suffering. Caring for their friends most often amounted to psychological support and empathy. The psychologically hardier girls who had

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

347

been trained in the nationalist underground were especially caring about the suffering of others and, through their kind words, helped them not break. In her recollections about Anna Kotsur, Halyna Holoiad (Savyts´ka) (writing as Marta Hai) describes her behavior in the Drohobych Remand Prison: In prison, as in the free world, although crippled by torture and half alive, she found the strength within herself to think about others, always about others. . . . When the girls were brought back from interrogations half dead, delirious with fear and pain, Nusia would put their heads on her lap, and talk and talk.75

Occasionally, in the prisons and camps, some prisoners ended up in somewhat better circumstances than others. This could mean lighter work assignments, or greater freedom of movement and correspondence, or better access to resources. Sometimes such prisoners used their “privileged” status to help those who were less fortunate and to support their friends. Kateryna Vitko-­Stakh recalls such mutual support among female politicals in Poland’s Fordon Women’s Prison: Paraskeviia Hamivka was imprisoned with us in Fordon. We called her “granny” because she was a good, caring, watchful older woman. She worked in the housekeeping department of the prison. . . . She had the opportunity to meet with us girls. She would often give us something or organize the “prison post,” which was really a risk for her. She often gave us sauerkraut, which we desperately needed . . . as many of the girls were suffering from scurvy. “Granny” cared about us and helped us wherever and however she could. There were many older Ukrainian women and grandmothers in Fordon . . . they would also do everything so that it would be easier for us young women to bear and endure captivity.76

Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna writes about the girls who worked in the sewing workshop in the camp. This was considered to be a privileged

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

348

position compared to hard labor outside the zone, and these luckier women tried to help their sister prisoners: “These women would often pass food along, and sometimes even desperately needed vitamins and even some medications that they would get through the civilian personnel while sewing their clothes.” 77 Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) mentions her savior Mariika Maksymyshyn with enormous gratitude: after Maksymyshyn broke her leg, she was assigned to dish out food in the kitchen and would secretly get extra food to those who were on penalty rations and were starving—at great risk of being punished herself.78 In short, the women did their best to not lose their capacity to empathize in the Gulag camps, despite conditions that were truly inhuman: However stupefied we became, we were still people, though we were persecuted and tied to the yoke, but we never lost our humanity. We helped one another in bad times as much as we could, tried to lighten one another’s grief, and supported one another morally. There was little enough that we could share because we were all equally destitute, but when it was necessary, we shared the last piece of our ration of bread. If one of us had to stay behind in the barracks because she was sick, she would give almost every bit of warm clothing that she had to the other girls—kerchief, hat, mittens, felt boots—everything, because they were heading out for a full fourteen-­hour shift in the bitter cold.79 Everyone tried, as much as possible, to show compassion. Captivity taught us to be as human as possible, in the broadest sense of the word! 80

In just about every memoir, we can find stories about the compassion, caring, and desperate effort that the women would offer to ease the suffering of other women who were crippled, sick, or debilitated by hunger.81 In the absence of material resources, this kind of support was mostly psychological in nature. Ol´ha Stets-­ Ivanchuk recalls how she suffered unbearable cold in the tent:

Figure 5.1. “For a long remembrance of my gray days in a distant land. To my never-forgotten Parents, from your faithful daughter Hania.” Inscription on the back of a photograph sent to her parents by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), from a camp in Taishet, 21 March 1954. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

350

My entire body ached, and my bones were twisting with severe pain, when my faithful friend Vira Koroliuk . . . picked up a small stone, brought it into the tent, and put it on the stove. She found a piece of cloth and wrapped it. She then came up to me and said: “Olia, take this little stone and . . . hold it in your hands. Then your whole body will heat up, and you won’t feel such terrible pain.” I held the stone in the palms of my hands. My body began to warm up, and the pain began to go away. Tears fell from my eyes. But these were tears of enormous gratitude for such human kindness.82

Another time, two women used the heat of their own bodies and actually saved an unconscious friend from freezing to death in a transit convoy.83 Perhaps this sort of support is why those women who survived the prisons and camps most often remember the names of those with whom they shared the hardships of life in prison and are very careful to name each of their sisters, adding short information about the individual woman, including where she was from and what happened to her later.84 Female politicals who had spent more time incarcerated and were better adapted to life behind bars would share their knowledge with those who were there for the first time. Surovtsova recalls an old nihilist with whom she ended up in the same cell: She had enormous experience being imprisoned . . . and she was not generally lost, the way most of the other women in the cell were. She never moaned and groaned. She organized her days in prison and was reserved but kind to those around her, helping with advice that was always businesslike and useful.85

Such knowledge was invaluable if a woman wished to survive in the camps. Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna describes her first days at the Intlag transit camp: “Talking with friends from previous transits, we found out about the daily routine and the overall regimen of this specialized camp, about the dangers that threatened each of

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

351

us should any of us fall into the hands of a mean guard.” 86 Dariia Korchak recalls her friends with gratitude, too: In the logging crew, I was welcomed by girls from the Lviv area. . . . They taught me how to work in a way to preserve my health, and advised me to always remember that there were many more years to my sentence, and so it made no sense to be bothered by the constant yelling of the escorts, “Work! Work, or I’ll start shooting!” 87

The more educated women also tried to offer advice to those who were not aware of the law, to help them defend their rights. Mariia Teslia-­Pavlyk remembers two former embassy staffers whose good legal advice made it possible for her to get her sentence reduced.88 For many women, even the young girls, the net effect of torturous interrogations, overwork, and unsuitable living conditions was chronic illnesses that brought acute pain and weakness. Yet these chronic issues were not considered to be enough of a reason to relieve the individual from daily labor requirements. Other women prisoners were compassionate toward these suffering women and tried somehow to ease things and to help them. Ol´ha Hodiak kept being driven out to work although she suffered from aggravated sciatica. She tells about how her compassionate friends would hold her by the arms as they walked along the road to the work site for several kilometers.89 Other women had similar stories: There were girls whom we took by the arms to work because we all had to go. They didn’t have a fever, and pinched nerves and sciatica didn’t count.90 Because I suffered from arthritis, this work caused me unbearable pain. . . . I still couldn’t get out of bed when I was dismissed from the infirmary and sent to work, walking four kilometers [2.5 mi.]

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

352

there and back to the new mine shaft. The girls simply took turns carrying me.91 When we were led from the zone to work . . . we always put the oldest women in the first group so that we could help them along the way, take them by the arms, and sometimes even carry them.92

Typically, the physically stronger country girls helped the less fit city women meet production quotas: This very classy girl was not used to physical work. . . . We village girls tried to dig the trench a little deeper. . . . I often would run to her, and, if not with a pickax then with a sledgehammer and a wedge, I would help her dig a little deeper. It was obvious that her arms were not used to this kind of work.93

Surovtsova recalls a German girl who not only met her quotas in the sovkhoz fields but also helped a friend who had been weakened by disease.94 This kind of female solidarity and mutual support sometimes crossed ethnic boundaries, with Polish women finding ways to share food with the Ukrainian women, although this was prohibited. Karwańska-­Bajlak remembers such instances with enormous gratitude in her memoirs: “Some of our Polish companions in this misery could see that the Ukrainian women were suffering from a shortage of food and would sometimes make small parcels with food. . . . And sometimes there were tears in both their eyes and ours—the mark of the inimitable human heart.” 95 No matter how difficult the situations or circumstances got—and sometimes things seemed impossibly hopeless—the girls and women helped one another. Because of her deteriorating health, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna was supposed to be sent on the “consignment of death” to the Abez camp for the disabled, which had a bad reputation. She was saved from this fate by the woman in charge of the sewing shop, who claimed that the sick prisoner was actually a professional seamstress and thus a

Figure 5.2. “A memento for Mariika. May this picture remind you of the days of our life together, for you after our separation. Never forget.” Inscription on the back of a photograph that Mariia N. gave as a memento to her friend from a camp in Kengir, 5 April 1953. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

354

valuable worker.96 Meshko was sent to the camp infirmary but received no professional medical treatment at all. She was saved only because the women knew something about folk medicine, in particular phytotherapy: “The women from western Ukraine brought herbs from the fields beyond the zone and began to treat me with tisanes. . . . That’s how these healers, these folk herbalists, treated me, and I recovered a little.” 97 Similarly, in the camps not far from Inta, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna remembers: “Those who worked outside the zone poked around for frozen berries under the snow cover and, hiding them from the guards, brought the berries to the infirmary for those who were very sick . . . often even those who were hopelessly ill began to get better after eating them and recovered.” 98 When it was a question of how to share the skimpy food on which they depended to survive, the girls were exceptionally willing to sacrifice to care for their sister prisoners. Hanna Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka writes: There were girls who were physically strong, and there were those who were debilitated, who just lay on their bunks. I gave [some food] to those who were lying down, but they categorically refused it: “Give it to those who are still walking.” But those who were still walking would say: “Give it to those who are already lying down.” That’s how strong in spirit the women were.99

Other former prisoners described similar scenes. Since foodstuffs were a universal currency in the camps, a food bribe could even make it possible to resolve any number of issues. Ol´ha Moda-­ Pokaliuk, who was crippled and unable to do any general work, recalls how, in the depths of despair, she was saved by two sisters in misfortune: “They both gave away their parcels received from home to arrange for me to work within the zone. I will be grateful to them for the rest of my life because conditions were such that everybody wanted to eat, but they gave away their food in order for me to get better.” 100

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

355

Lacking suitable clothing in the harsh climate, the women suffered terribly from the bitter cold. Time and again, the memoirists mention the practice of sharing warm clothing with those who were more inclined to become hypothermic. As Surovtsova recalls: The disgusting, cold punishment cell became completely unbearable after flooding, but they continued to put women in it. When someone from our room was about to head there, everybody would dress our “traveler”: I, of course, gave my white shawl, someone else might give a fur jacket, warm clothing, better felt boots. But even so, they really froze there.101

In studying the strategies women employed to survive in the ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust, Judith T. Baumel noted that groups of women provided stronger mutual support (as compared to groups of men): women’s groups coalesced more quickly, were more extensive, and lasted longer. The level of internal conflicts was also far lower than among the men. Given women’s greater vulnerability, this stability increased their level of safety.102 MUTUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT Despair, despondency, and depression overwhelmed almost every imprisoned woman at one point or another. Meshko describes this state well: “I no longer felt acute grief or fear. There was only hunger and fatigue, and the painful, slowed-­down state when a person is taken over by a spiritual nihilism because of physical wasting and the apathy that it brings.” 103 Viktor E. Frankl wrote about apathy as a psychological defense mechanism among prisoners, one that helped them stop feeling the daily physical abuse in Nazi concentration camps.104 However, women who spent time in the Gulag considered apathy

Figure 5.3. Handmade greeting card on the name day of a friend at a camp in Nevelsk, 30 September 1954. Collection of the Lontskyi Prison National Memorial Museum, TL 282.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

357

to be extremely dangerous, a threat to survival itself. Skarga writes: Apathy was the beginning of the end, the resignation from humanity, the direct road to the prison disease, a strange illness that transformed the person into an automaton that went where she was told to go, did what she was told to do, and drew nothing from within, as though she had lost her sense of self completely.105

Thoughts about suicide, as the only form of protest against a relentless, unavoidable, slow death came to many prisoners, and some of them succumbed, as Zholdak acknowledges: “Some decided themselves that it was time to die. Milia hanged herself. Hanna was taken down from a noose in the outhouse. One girl threw herself into a large tub of water that stood in the middle of the zone in case of fire. There were two times when I wanted to die, too.” 106 Because of the intolerable tortures she was subjected to during the investigation, Kateryna Mandryk-­Kuibida began to think of ways to kill herself.107 Nadiia Krutiak (Rudnyk) confesses that at one point when she was in the camp, she found out that her parents had died, and she fell into despair: “These were terrible blows of fate. I didn’t want to live anymore.” 108 Anna Marunchak recalls: “I thought to myself: will I endure this test? I wanted to kill myself, because I no longer felt I had the strength to suffer. One day, I came close to throwing myself under a rail car with gravel, but the voice of my son stopped me. I had to live, for his sake.” 109 Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk admits: The girls were so exhausted that it felt like they weren’t going to make it. I was also overtaken by depression, but I tried to hide it. Sometimes all you wanted was to cry your heart out, just once, so that no one could see or hear you. But this was almost impossible. . . . It got to the point when I lay down on the terribly worn

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

358

sheets and silently began asking God to please not let me get up again in the morning.110

Meshko describes her state when she was on the verge of complete physical collapse and life lost all meaning: I found myself feeling a loss of spiritual force as well. I watched the hardworking ones, the ones who wanted to survive, no matter what, contemptuously. . . . My alienated and fatalistic behavior in such tight quarters, when a person could not find even a moment or two to be on her own, did not go unnoticed. I no longer wanted to wait for a slave’s death. . . . Some good people, countrywomen, did what they could to keep my faith up.111

She goes on to recall a young teacher from Uzhhorod who argued that conscious women had no right to give up and die because they bore responsibility for the others whom they had once raised up for the fight. Likewise, Kateryna Zaryts´ka, who spent twenty-­ five years imprisoned, was always remembered by her cellmates with warmth and gratitude for the support and compassion she invariably demonstrated toward her sisters in misfortune, sharing with them the food that she bought in the prison shop or received in parcels from home.112 Indeed, the women’s stories include countless examples of psychological support. The memoirists emphasize that their friends in misfortune helped them time and again survive the worst moments, raise their spirits, and withstand the situation morally. Mariia Hrytsynina-­Kysil´ underscores the role that talking with their sister prisoners played: “The only pleasure was the fact that we could share a word or two with girls from our home country. We supported one another in every way possible.” 113 Zakydal´s´ka describes the mutual emotional support of detainees in the Drohobych prison, where “each would tell about what she had gone through and what she had endured during her interrogation, and we together would share both our grief and that of others.” 114

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

359

The words of other former prisoners echo like a refrain, describing the moral support the women provided to one another in almost identical words and phrases: However hard it might have been, we did not let ourselves fall into despair but supported one another’s spirits.115 How grateful I was to Kalyna for having extended her hand to me at a very critical time, when I had fallen into a deep depression— that was the bridge to the saving shore.116 I was so thankful for her kind words. They seemed to give me wings.117 No one showed their humiliations on the outside, so as to not affect the others. . . . We tried to think of some kind of activity to distract us from gloomy thoughts.118

It seems that the spontaneous practice of offering moral support to those whose spirits had fallen and were giving in to despair was widespread among the female politicals. Skarga describes this regular, combined effort on the part of the women, to help one or another of them come out of a depressed state: How many times it happened that, on coming back to the zone, one of the girls had had enough. She didn’t want to go to the bathhouse. She would lie down on her bunk, indifferent to everything, dirty and covered in brick dust. How much patience was needed to persuade her that this effort was necessary, that she needed to wash herself one more time. That her dirty undershirt needed to be changed for the sweater hidden under her pillow. That she needed to eat the disgusting oatmeal kasha. . . . We would persuade her gently, then sharply, to prevent her from falling into apathy and decline.119

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

360

The political prisoners may have wanted to compensate for the harshness and brutality of those who represented the state by being humane and compassionate with one another. In this way, they nurtured a humane attitude in themselves and prevented the moral decline that the circumstances kept trying to drag them all into. In reflecting on her time in prison, Karwańska-­Bajlak notes: We shared our prison life in accord, I would even say, in harmony. . . . In those difficult prison conditions, we tried to bring some kind of harmony: kindness, mutual respect, attention to personal problems, consolation, and advice. I think this had a very positive impact . . . on the spiritual state of all of us.120

This sense of a common fate, of belonging to a “community of suffering,” helped the women overcome both physical and psychological difficulties together. This can be seen in the constant use of the pronoun we in personal recollections of what the writers had gone through: “Our strength began to ebb, and together with it, our mood. We suffered in silence, and we thought about freedom and about our Ukraine.” 121 Typically, the girls with more experience in the nationalist underground felt a certain moral responsibility for ensuring that others did not lose heart. Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, who had once been the area leader of the women’s network of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), writes: “Extremely psychologically worn down myself, I nevertheless held on and supported other girls, so that their spirits would not flag and they would behave bravely during interrogations.” 122 Nevertheless, she was understanding of those who were unable to withstand all the trials: Do not judge harshly those who gave up, who fell apart, who took their own lives, or deliberately crippled themselves by freezing their feet or hands. It’s so important in a depression to support the person with a wise, sincere word or deed. . . . As the leader of the women’s network of OUN, I always had to be morally on point

Figure 5.4. Underage political prisoners after release from the camps, 1956. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

362

or protect someone from an unjust fate, without regard to any unpleasant consequences for me.123

The women who were stronger in spirit and had leadership experience acted as leaders in captivity as well. Thus, Oksana Vorobii writes in her memoirs of Olena Stepaniv, who served as an officer in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen during World War I: “She was very hardworking by nature . . . she was very demanding toward herself and others, and was quite strict in her own way. . . . We girls from Lviv clung to her. . . . She was strong in spirit, and she instilled that strength in us, her friends in fate.” 124 FAMILY-­LIKE RELATIONS The relationships that formed among the women in captivity were basically familial, predominantly sisterly. Because they endured all the difficulties together and often slept two to a bunk, they became even closer than family members. The basis on which these family groups formed varied—by ethnicity, religion, ideology, and even basic human appeal. More importantly, belonging to such a quasi-­familial group was critical to survival in the camps. Kokhans´ka recalls her cellmate and friend Milia Pasichnyk, who cared for her when a chronic illness became acute: “Milia took care of me as though she was my real sister.” 125 Other memoirists also write about such close relations: We became like real sisters, because today even our closest family doesn’t understand many things, and no one was closer then.126 We said our farewells with the girls, who had become like family to us.127 In spirit, we had become very close. . . . Our tie was so strong and enduring that in the worst moments it was enough to just think of her, and I would feel fresh strength come from somewhere and the determination to keep living despite it all. . . . Like real sisters,

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

363

we tried to stick together, slept on a single bunk, and shared every little piece of bread.128

Other recollections of friends in captivity are also framed in familial discourse. For instance, Ol´ha Hrosberh-­Nakonechna compared a caring cellmate and friend in a transit prison to her own mother.129 Zakydal´s´ka similarly remembers a woman with whom she had been in the camp infirmary: “This woman was an exceptionally kind soul. She could console me like no one else in heavy moments. You never forget people like that. She was like a mother to me.” 130 Karwańska-­Bajlak mentions an older woman who shared her bread with the younger women: “We were always hungry. Our young bodies needed proper nourishment. Our aunties came to the rescue, for that was how we called the older women in the prison.” 131 Mariia Vahula refers to one older woman, who fasted every Friday and gave the younger prisoners her dinner, as “my granny.” 132 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna writes about the mother-­and-­daughter relations that developed among older and younger prisoners, both in the remand prison and, later, in the camps.133 Given that prisoners formed small groups of two to five individuals who were close friends, they really did seem like little families. These women could completely trust one another, depended on one another for mutual support, and felt responsibility for the well-­being of the others. Together, they would find and share resources, and they slept near one another, exchanged clothing, and shared everything. Some, like Mariia Bryndzei-­ Lekhyts´ka, go so far in their memoirs as to call these little groups a family: “We became very close friends, forming a small family of five.” 134 Teslia-­Pavlyk describes these relations very clearly: “We protected one another and lived like a single family.” 135 Scholars have noted a tendency, across all nations, for women to form small mutual-­support groups in which relations were much like a family, in both the Gulag camps and the Nazi concentration camps. Baumel explains this phenomenon using the concept of a feminine “ethic of care,” which is shaped by socio-

Figure 5.5. Women politicals after release. Photo by Hanna N., given as a memento to her friend from camp, 15 May 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

365

cultural influences: established norms for family relations and the traditional practices of motherhood. The scholar notes that the familial style of relations that formed among prisoners in the camps, whether sister-­sister or mother-­daughter, not only were a means of mutual support but also helped the women re-­ create “an illusion of normalcy, creating a system that fostered a positive role identification within what was generally an illogical, immoral, and ultimately negative world.” 136 For this reason, in almost every memoir by former women prisoners, we find frequent references to the friends with whom they overcame the hardships of incarceration: Every day, we would support one another with words, recollections, advice, and consolation. We did not just happen to be walking along near one another—we walked together. Our three worlds created a constellation of harmony.137 Friendship helped us endure all these horrors—our readiness to help one another in difficult moments, and the awareness that we were all suffering the same fate. What’s more, we were all there for the common ideal of fighting for freedom.138

Besides making it easier to endure physically, such invented families made it possible to communicate and find emotional support, the need for which was at least as strong as the need to eat. I understood what a great joy it was when, in a distant, foreign place—never mind in captivity—you meet a dear person with whom you can freely talk about everything, share your most secret thoughts, and make plans for the future, when you will be able to remember your time together once you’re free again.139

Telling their stories to their friends, writes Veronica Shapovalov, helped the women maintain their sense of self and preserve their individuality.140 This sense of belonging to a “family” allowed

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

366

the women to carry out traditional female roles, especially that of caregiver, which was another factor in preserving their gender identity. After all, scholars have noted that one of the most powerful types of community is a moral community—”an extension of the bonds of kin and friendship to all those who share a common fate with us.” 141 By belonging to such communities, the Ukrainian female prisoners became stronger. CAMP SISTERHOOD AFTER RELEASE The long-­awaited release from a camp did not always bring with it a feeling of freedom. As a rule, it meant mostly that the women faced yet another difficult challenge. The first problem that former prisoners had to confront was the lack of funds to return to Ukraine. Second, not all former prisoners had the right to return to their homeland, as most sentences handed down to politicals included, in addition to incarceration in camps or prisons, several years of exile afterward. This meant that the women were forced to settle in the regions where they had carried out their sentence, which involved looking for housing and work locally, and arranging a new life in a community that was completely unfamiliar to them. Some prisoners managed to save up a little money in anticipation of their release, or to acquire some clothing. Too often, though, the women found themselves outside the camp gates with no means to survive—and nobody in authority was interested in their further fate: In general, all those who were released left the camp in whatever they had on, with no money, no housing—in short, without any means of surviving. . . . Some of them would regularly come to the bakery fence . . . and beg for bread because they had nothing to buy it with. Nor was it just our Ukrainian women who came, but Russians and Lithuanians as well. . . . Girls and women were released, escorted outside the zone, and that was that. No one thought about

Figure 5.6. Women politicals after release from a camp in Kazakhstan, 1956. Ol´ha Diakovs´ka, center. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

368

where they were supposed to live or how they were supposed to pay for food until they found a job and got paid.142

It was at this stage, during and after release, that an exceptional solidarity manifested itself among the politicals. The connections that had taken shape among the women in the camps based on their common experience proved to be long lasting and active even beyond incarceration. As Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk testifies: Somehow, the duty escorts near the gates looked at us strangely, like, here are cons saying good-­bye like they’re one another’s nearest and dearest. But wasn’t that the case? Misfortune brought us together, and there were no other nearest and dearest. . . . And so we parted, going our different ways, wherever fate tossed us. But we would never forget what we had endured together in that difficult time, and today, any bit of news about any of the women is dear to us, as though they were the closest person for us.143

This kind of friendship lasted for years and even a lifetime. Even while imprisoned, friends tried to find out about one another’s fate and arrange correspondence after one of them was moved to a different camp. After release, the former prisoners themselves would often provide the first shelter and support to their friends. They prepared housing and clothing in advance for those who were slated to be released. They would collect money for a trip home, supporting the women being released both materially and morally. In her memoirs, Zakydal´s´ka writes about how her sister prisoners prepared her for release and freedom. They secretly sewed some clothing for her and gave her a gift of twenty-­five rubles, explaining that “here at least they give you a ration of bread, but out there, no one’s going to give you anything.” 144 Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recollects how she and other girls were able to spend a few months each after their release living with other

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

369

former prisoners, until they found themselves some work and housing.145 Assistance from former sister prisoners was more often individual, but sometimes former prisoners worked together in an effort to help those who had just been set free. Some practices are described by Kateryna Andrusyshyn: Whoever was set free needed clothing, food, and so on. How to start living again? Some would go and get married right away, others still thought about things, trying to figure out how they needed to be, going forward. Someone proposed sending girls as bridesmaids to such weddings, so that they would donate for general purposes money made on selling wedding boutonnieres to guests. So we began the work of making the boutonnieres. We looked for paper, which needed to be painted, we made the little flowers and leaves, and we waxed it all. . . . At the beginning of November, there was a new proposal: we needed to put together a vertep and go singing koliady, make some money. . . . After koliady, we counted all the money and split it up immediately, where it had to go and to whom. . . . We sent one hundred rubles at a time. None of us ever took a single kopek for herself.146

Scholars researching the history of the Gulag note that the reintegration of former political prisoners into Soviet society was anything but easy, both for the women and for society itself. As Nanci Adler writes, Gulag returnees were not just individuals, they were also living memories that could not be denied. But they often were denied, because people could not find a comfortable way of dealing with them. There was pervasive ambivalence at all levels of the government and society with regard to these survivors.147

Clearly, Soviet society was unprepared to receive those who had been repressed. After all, they were living testimony to what was

Figure 5.7. “For a long remembrance to my friend Nusia from Doma and her husband, Mykhas´. Don’t remember when you look, but look when you remember.” Inscription on the back of a photograph of Doma N., given as a memento to her friend from a camp in Magadan, 23 March 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

371

going on in the country, and their presence made it impossible to hide the truth about the Gulag.148 The common experience of former political prisoners, coupled with the lack of understanding and the prejudice that they encountered after release, pushed them to establish their own environment, even once they were free. Most memoirs of former politicals emphasize how strong and significant the bonds formed while incarcerated were for them. Indeed, they preserved these relationships for decades after they were released, visiting one another, offering moral and material support to their friends, and worrying about their health and well-­being.149 Camp friendships resembled sisterhood more than anything and basically lasted for their entire lives, Kokhans´ka recalls: “Nina and I had gone through a lot, both there, in the camps, and later, after we were released to our homeland. Even here, we never lost contact, right up until she died.” 150 Moreover, women from different parts of Ukraine met and endured together in the camps. Kateryna Melish (Mel´nyk) recollects her most dedicated friends: There, we got to know our girls from different corners of Ukraine: Ira from Dnipropetrovsk, Mariia from Kharkiv Oblast, and Olia from Kyiv Oblast. We became friends with a girl from Volhynia called Slava. She and I, and many others, kept corresponding until not long ago. They’ve all died at this point. I’m probably the only one left.151

Vladislav Pocheptsov suggests that people sentenced to the Gulag for political crimes, both men and women, formed a new identity as a political prisoner, which connected them to an imaginary community called the Kolyma fellowship. Based precisely on the common experience in the camps, this community was unique with regard to all other Soviet citizens.152

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

372

AN UNWOMANLY APPEARANCE PRISONER GARB AND CAMP UNIFORMS Most memoirs of women who had spent time in the Gulag testify to an awareness that the authors’ female identity was being undermined and threatened. One by one, they lost their feminine traits. The first thing that arrested women experienced upon being sent to prison was body searches and the removal of all potentially “dangerous” elements of clothing—including those elements that were essential to a woman’s clothing. Blavats´ka describes this process: At the Lontskyi Prison, the reception of a new detainee began with a check. It looked like this: the woman had to undress completely, and they carefully examined every item. They tore off and confiscated all belts because, they claimed, a person could hang herself with them. They tore out all metal buckles from garter belts because a person could cut her veins with metal or attack a guard and injure him. But when it suited them, they simply confiscated anything that they liked.153

In fact, in recollecting their arrest and interrogations, as well as the courts and camps, the women describe changes in their outward appearance and their dressing habits. This tendency indicates the significance to them of this side of everyday life as prisoners. The renowned dissident Meshko, as one example, describes her first interrogation: “Disheveled, without any of the elastics holding all the bits and pieces of a woman’s underpinnings, no metal clips, no hairpins—that’s how I was escorted by the convoy to the interrogation room.” 154 Surovtsova also recalls how nervous she was when she was being interrogated:

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

373

At first, I would lose track—and here’s why: dressing in a hurry, I managed to put on mismatched stockings. At that time, women wore short skirts, and so my legs were visible from my shoes to my knees. And so my collocutor, despite my gray hair, would hold his gaze on those wretched legs of mine and, I thought, at the mismatched stockings. That bothered me terribly. I had been cut off from life not that long before, and I still felt myself a woman.155

Khrashchevs´ka recalls similar feelings of discomfort when she was led to her cell by an escort after a body search: My hair in disarray, dress disheveled, stockings falling down, and torn shoes slipping off my feet without their buckles. Could this be me, the neat, modest twenty-­year-­old girl?! I couldn’t stand it. I took my hands from behind my back and tried to pull up my stockings. “Where are your hands, bitch?!” the escort shouted at me and hit me in the back with the butt of his rifle.156

Ievheniia Khomii-­Kamins´ka describes how embarrassed she felt over the ugly shoes in which she had to stand before the court: “I looked pretty funny, or, should I say, pretty pathetic, because instead of nice ankle boots on my feet, I was wearing torn kirza, the heavy army boots, with floppy uppers.” 157 The women had firmly adopted the gender norms of their culture, which required that a woman always pay special attention to her external appearance, and so the impossibility of ensuring a proper appearance bothered them greatly. Having the usual accoutrements of women’s wear taken away from them was often a turning point in their biographies, when life began to change forever and the system started its concerted work of erasing their gender identity. The memoirists recall with sadness how, step by step, they lost their markers of femininity. They go on to describe the desperate efforts they made to preserve at least something of those attributes that marked them as women and allowed them to feel that they really were women.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

374

However, to preserve any attributes of womanhood in the prisons and camps was an extraordinarily difficult task, given the conditions under which prisoners were kept. One key disappearing marker was hair and a proper hairdo. Although it is not mentioned that often, hair was highly significant. The women write that while they were imprisoned during their investigations, they would comb out and braid one another’s plaits, and do them up before every appearance in court. Koval´-Nadorozhniak recalls a trial of a group of women, including her, that took place in Moscow in January 1954: Her hair was light blond and woven with tiny curls in a wreath round her head. Before the trial, we tried to arrange the hair properly, in order for her to look presentable. But Asta had actually torn some hanky into strips and used them to curl her hair. So she ended up with tiny curls.158

Similarly, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna describes how, while she was half-­ dead and exhausted by torture and hunger, her friends prepared her for the court hearing: “Before the court, they braided my plaits, tied them with bows, and blessed me: ‘True beauty cannot be judged!’” 159 Karwańska-­Bajlak reports that while the investigation was going on, the women in a Polish prison instituted some traditions among themselves: every evening, they would wrap their hair in curlers, and in the morning, they combed it into a hairdo. On the day before a trial, they were especially careful about their appearance in court: We prepared properly, fixed ourselves up, and made ourselves nice hairdos. . . . Women’s nature made us care about our appearance, no matter what. We wanted to look our best, to be our prettiest. We curled our hair and even borrowed clothing from our Polish sisters in misfortune.160

Figure 5.8. Women politicals after release. Photo by Maria N., given as a memento to her friend from a camp in Kengir, 5 April 1953. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

376

Documentary photographs taken at the end of a prison sentence and especially immediately after release typically show the women with their hair done in the styles of the times. Yet, to preserve their hair in captivity was actually a very difficult task. The camps were almost completely unsanitary, and lice were a real scourge; when these parasites appeared in a woman’s hair, her head was completely shaved.161 Additionally, the poor nutrition and various diseases meant that the women’s hair often simply began to fall out: “I remember Olia, a beautiful girl that half the camp was in love with. She had gorgeous hair and loved to braid it into dozens of plaits. In time, though, she lost weight and lost her hair.” 162 Khrashchevs´ka also complains: “The half-­melted, greenish-­black stinky soap washed hair badly. It was hard to comb out afterward and had no shine.” 163 For some women, this attribute of femininity had exceptional significance, so they put considerable effort into preserving their braids. Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) recalls her friend Mariia Maksymyshyn: She had beautiful braids that went down to her knees. While the rest of us, exhausted from the hard day’s work, would lie down to sleep, she would spend a long time brushing out her hair, rubbing kerosene into it to protect this treasure from lice—and she managed to preserve her braids until the end of her sentence.164

Khrashchevs´ka also took good care of her hair in the camp, braiding it and arranging her plaits carefully every day. She had decided for herself: “To remain a human being, not just morally but physically, too, I paid attention to my looks and my overall appearance.” 165 One of the more psychologically painful procedures for the women was having their personal clothing taken away in exchange for a prison uniform. The dark color, the shapeless cut, the roughness of the fabric, and the ill-­fitted sizes turned the women into a homogeneous gray mass of sexless creatures. Most often, the clothing issued to the prisoners was far from

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

377

new and was not suited to the harsh climate and environment. Mariia Makohon-­Duzha shares her recollections of the clothing given to women prisoners in Kolyma: The “uniform” that we were issued in the camp consisted of canvas skirts and blouses, all in black, quilted trousers, quilted inner jackets, rough outer jackets called bushlaty, hats with earflaps, and felt boots with rubber soles made from car tires. The boots were very heavy and often the wrong size, so it was very hard to walk in them. They tended to deform the feet. . . . In spring, it became even worse. The boots were taken away, and we were issued ancient shoes that had been patched and repatched. . . . Because of all the holes, rivulets of water kept leaking into the shoes.166

Zakydal´s´ka similarly describes the clothing issued to her when she arrived at the camp: “We get prison garb: a hat with earflaps, big patched mittens, a black dress made out of burlap, a rough bushlat, quilted pants, leg wraps, and felt boots that are several sizes too big. Everything is old, used, and dirty.” 167 This clothing made it hard to recognize the prisoners as women. They themselves understood perfectly well what an absurd caricature they made, as Vira Korpan describes her appearance during a transfer to Vorkuta: “Sitting there in shot-­up overcoats, hats with earflaps, and breeches, we looked like nothing more than stuffed creatures meant to scare off crows, and not like girls.” 168 Various prisoners expressed similar feelings about their appearance in the prison garb: They dressed us like scarecrows in the garden.169 We were in men’s clothes, wearing shoes that were sizes too big.170 We were awful to look at. . . . It’s all very hard to bring up. Not every prisoner was able to handle these conditions.171

Figure 5.9. Samples of prison garb worn by women in the camps, n.d. Rear: Nataliia Popovych’s dress, TK 4949; left: vatnik (quilted jacket), ТК 4951; center: Ol´ha Duchymins´ka’s blouse and skirt, TK 4215, TK 4214; right: dress and kerchief, ТК 4213, ТК 4217. Collection of the Museum of the Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

379

They dressed us in old clothes, and we began to look like freaks. We laughed and we cried.172 I was no longer a girl. I was a black crow. Black hat, black face from the wind, from the frost, a black coat, and a number on my back.173

The clothing that was given to the women in the camps was not selected based on size and height, which caused additional problems of the prisoners: We were issued winter clothes. . . . We started to put them on, and nothing was the right size. Some things were too small, some were too big. So we exchanged the clothes among ourselves, taking things that fit us better. The quilted trousers were very thick, so it was uncomfortable walking in them.174 Nobody asked anyone’s size, not those who issued the clothes, nor those who were wearing them. Later on, of course, we exchanged things among ourselves.175

Many women prisoners were even less fortunate. Numerous memoirists recall being forced to wear clothing that was obviously removed from Red Army soldiers who had been wounded or killed: We were fitted out in torn, dirty bushlaty and quilted inner jackets with traces of bullets and bloodstains, quilted pants that were equally dirty, hats with earflaps, and for our feet, huge chuni, loose boots made out of the sleeves of quilted jackets, and galoshes made of sections of car tires, all of it held together with bits of wire.176 They gave us used clothing from the front. The military outfits had holes from bullets and shrapnel, and dried blood. . . . We looked terrible.177

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

380

Two days later, they gave us some clothing. Everything was old—it had been worn by soldiers at the front because it still had bloodstains on it.178 Quilted trousers served as my winter clothing. They were ancient, dirty: a bushlat, a written-­off old soldier’s overcoat that had been cut to the knees, old felt boots with soles made of tire rubber. The felt boots, valianki, were very heavy, and both were for the left foot.179

However, the most typical winter footwear provided to prisoners were the soft boots called chuni: The commission gave me felt chuni and kordy, thick rubber galoshes, made possibly of tire rubber, which we had to put on over top the chuni to keep them from getting wet. I remember to this day how good it was that someone stole my own boots. Otherwise, my feet would have been frozen for sure, because those boots weren’t made for this kind of cold. . . . Now I walked around in chuni, and people laughed at me, saying that I looked like a partridge.180

The reliability of Soviet statistics about the level of provision of clothing suited to the season, the climate, and the kinds of labor the women were involved in is very questionable, given that the Gulag administration itself admitted that camp managers provided conflicting and incomplete information about the state of affairs in the different subunits.181 In general, the prisoners suffered from a constant shortage of clothing and footwear, as is evident in numerous memoirs by former political prisoners and even in official documents.182 For example, budget funding that was allocated to provide for prisoners in 1948 covered only 32.5 percent of the real needs of these camps for clothing and underwear, and 44 percent for footwear.183 Because of this shortage, good, warm clothes and sturdy shoes were hugely valued, and were something that only

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

381

those at the top of the prison heap could boast of. These were the pridurki, or “jerks” in prison jargon, who came from the ranks of hardened criminals. Most former prisoners consistently emphasize two features of their prison garb: its identical, colorless appearance (grayish-­ black standard uniforms), and the presence of a huge prisoner number, either sewn on or written in paint on the back and other visible places. “We were dressed in identical black cotton gowns with big, white numbers bleached with whitewash onto the upper back. Black stockings and huge—size 42—artificial leather army boots, and a bushlat with the same white number.” 184 By some miracle, a number of prisoners came back to their homeland after release with samples of camp clothing that they later donated to local museums (Figure 5.9). These make it possible to see what the typical outward appearance of the prisoners must have been like. This kind of dehumanized, uniform, colorless, shapeless, and indistinguishable clothing on a huge number of women created the impression that they were socially homogenous. Meshko very accurately conveys this feeling in her memoirs: The zone did not fit into any existing notion of civilized society, such as a settlement, a community, a commune, a collective, a group, a family, whatever. It was a kind of mass human unit of the female sex. . . . Despite everything, we managed to remain individual humans of the female sex.185

Besides being monotonous, colorless, and shapeless, camp garb was also extremely worn and almost impossible to keep clean. There were very rarely any opportunities to launder it, as Khrashchevs´ka recalls: “We hadn’t had any opportunity to launder our clothing for many months already, and the heat treatment, prozharka, only cooked in the dirt. It was disgusting to have to put on these hardened rags.” 186 Іryna Senyk bitterly recalls meeting in the camp with her sister, who pointed out her dreadful appearance:

Figure 5.10. Photo of Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), sent to her parents from a camp in Taishet, 21 March 1954. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

383

“Irunia, how miserable you look! You’re all in tatters! And you look so tired!” With the heavy daily work, I had not even noticed that my body was in greasy, secondhand trousers that stank of someone else’s sweat and were permeated with someone else’s dirt, that my feet were shod in size 42 wooden shoes, that my quilted inner jacket was singed and greasy, and the earflaps hat on my head was torn. This sisterly “Irunia” echoes in my heart to this day.187

The prisoners felt real joy and relief when they had the opportunity to not wear the prison garb toward which they felt such revulsion. In her camp diary, Matseliukh-­Horyn´ describes such an occasion in winter 1952, sharing her feelings in this regard: I was awakened by joyful cries that today was a day off. . . . To rest was to not have to work physically, but also an awful lot more. For one thing, it meant not wearing that heavy quilted clothing, because in addition to knit T-­shirts and pants, prison gowns, and our own sweaters, which we were allowed to wear in the wintertime, we had to put on quilted pants, an army overcoat, and on top of that a bushlat. On the head goes a flannel kerchief made out of leg wraps for valianki, then a hat with earflaps, and on top of that a huge, warm homemade kerchief. When you were wearing something like this, it was hard to make the least move.188

In her memoirs, Militsa Stefanskaia, a onetime prisoner at Karlag, describes the feeling of happiness on the day she received a parcel from home with civilian clothing that included dresses, skirts, and boots—and permission to wear them. Dressed like a free woman, she felt like her life in the camp had suddenly become much better.189 The rare occasion to wear colorful clothing in prison gave the women considerable pleasure. Skarga writes about one such incident: One summer, our supplier, an officer who had been at the front— they were always the best—and a very cheerful man, bought for

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

384

those two thousand women several dozen rolls of colorful cotton fabric, explaining to his higher-­ups that he’d been unable to find that much monochromatic fabric. How much happiness this brought! The dressmakers sewed all the dresses according to a single pattern, but at least you could measure it and choose a color. When we all stood up for the review, we looked like a flowering meadow, much to the horror of the bosses.190

The ordinary civilian clothing that the women had kept since before their arrest had enormous symbolic meaning for the prisoners, as can be seen in Hoshko-­Kit’s penetrating recollections. She describes a ritual of meeting with the past, when, once a year, the prisoners were allowed to take out and check personal effects that had been taken away from them when they arrived at the camp and kept in a closet that was otherwise inaccessible to them: In the morning, our crew stands in line with beating hearts, waiting to get their hands on their sacks as quickly as possible, those beloved items that remind us of the past. . . . With trembling hands, each of us pulls out the dress in which we parted with freedom. . . . My neighbor holds up a pair of shoes with high heels, so small they are, and surprisingly funny. A pink girl’s dress hangs, wrinkled, but the owner of the dress is gray, yellow, old. . . . “How old were you then?” I ask, pointing to the dress. “Twenty. Today I’m over thirty.” . . . A funny, wrinkled little hat hangs from a string that once probably belonged to an elegant lady. But she, the owner of the little hat, sits in her black garb like a lump of black soil, looks at it, and sees nothing.191

Even clothes from home that were not suitable for use—or that were destroyed in the high-­temperature disinfection treatment— meant a lot to the prisoners, as Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) writes: “They gave us back our ‘roasted’ bundles, too, although they turned out to be completely destroyed, but we were anyway so

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

385

happy that these spoiled but dear things tied us to the past, to freedom, as though with an invisible thread.” 192 REPAIRING, SEWING, AND DECORATING CLOTHES At those camps where uniforms were for a time not mandatory or where they were in short supply, the women were able to preserve their civilian clothes. Still, they tended to wear out fairly quickly under the circumstances and needed repair. In the prisons, where detainees were forbidden to have needles, the women made needles from fish bones and other materials that were available to them. To get the thread they needed to repair clothes, they carefully pulled threads out of rags.193 Stefaniia Kvas recalls: “We weren’t allowed to have needles or buttons there, nothing was allowed. So we made buttons out of bread—it was like clay, anyway, and dried hard as a rock. We’d take a fish bone and sew with it. For thread, we’d take anything we had and unravel it.” 194 During their convoys and transfers, the prisoners were also searched from time to time to expose and confiscate forbidden items, so a sewing needle was a real treasure in prison, as Mesh­ ko writes: The process of shaking us down was not only humiliating in and of itself, but it was burdensome. You had to toss and shake out everything you had on the floor. All your pathetic belongings. The overseer trampled among them, picking through, feeling things up, and then you had to put them all back in your sack, tie it up again for the second, or third, or tenth time. They were on the lookout for a knife, a needle, or a mirror.195

In the camps, responsibility for minor repairs of clothes belonged to the prisoners themselves. In the Gulag Rules for Internal Procedures of 16 May 1945, the list of rights and duties of prisoners included that they “personally handle minor repairs to clothing and bedding.” 196 A bit earlier, on 8 March 1945, the Gulag camp

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

386

and colony managers were sent instructions regarding the organization of living conditions for prisoners that included “providing the orderlies of barracks the necessary quantity of rags, needles, and thread for the prisoners to carry out proper repairs to clothing and bedding.” 197 In practice, however, the need for clothing and its repair was far higher than the resources available. Worse, the imprisoned women did not receive basic female elements of underwear. As Meshko recalls with irony: “All the women . . . were completely relieved of that burdensome detail of feminine toilette—the brassiere. Each woman had to worry about it on her own because they were not included in the miserly list approved by the Gulag for ‘outfitting in prison style.’” 198 Therefore, the women made their own undergarments using whatever materials were at hand. Karwańska-­Bajlak mentions a friend who “sewed each of us nothing but bras or bustiers. Demand in the women’s sector was huge, and Anna proved to be a real master of this craft.” 199 Since, in practice, the women were given no materials to make this necessary element of a woman’s underwear, they had to apply their own ingenuity and pragmatism. Surovtsova writes about the modesty of the women, who used their access to cloth rags intended for patching sacks to replenish their own wardrobes and household items: These rags were one of the basic motives that made us go and work. . . . Naked and tattered, we threw ourselves with enthusiasm on the supply of rags. These coarse, dirty cloths that none of us would have ever picked up on the road in the past turned out to be so useful in these difficult times! We sorted the rags, shared them out equally, laundered them, bleached them, cut them with a knife that we had for cutting patches, and turned them into all kinds of conceivable and inconceivable “everyday items.” Comforters, pillow slips, towels, napkins, dresses, all of it beautifully embroidered with colored threads unraveled from T-­shirts. We even figured out a way to sew bras for ourselves.200

Figure 5.11. Women politicals after release. Photo by Iuliia N., given as a memento to her friend from a camp in Magadan, 28 July 1954. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

388

Sometimes, friends who worked in the sewing workshops would help with clothing, using remnants of fabric, as Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna explains: “We would take these remnants and sew sleeveless T-­shirts and shawls, or embroider icons, portraits, and napkins, and we would pass them all to our friends in the zone.” 201 The desire to preserve at least the basic markers of femininity forced the women to dedicate considerable time, energy, and ingenuity into turning leftover cloth at the camps into something that at least remotely resembled women’s clothing. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls: “Spring came, and we took off our overcoats. We took the trousers and began to sew ourselves skirts, and the military smocks we used to make ourselves blouses. And once again, we looked like girls. Only the shoes didn’t quite match such a costume.” 202 After Zakydal´s´ka was robbed, the other women immediately made sure she had clothing: “An older lady quickly unraveled her quilted trousers and professionally sewed the outer fabric into a skirt, using the lining to make a blouse. And in no time at all, I was dressed. There are no words to convey my gratitude.” 203 Blavats´ka similarly recalls: The women got used to doing everything they could to enliven their hopelessly gray, sad appearance at least a little bit. So we would take the bedding that we were sometimes issued, tear a strip of fabric off it, and sew collars with it. We learned to unravel the spun cotton wool blankets that we were given and knit this yarn into socks.204

In general, the women who knew how to sew helped the others solve any problems with clothing: The dress in which I was arrested finally fell apart after frequent heat treatments and sleeping in my clothes on the bunks. Mariia Volodymyrivna, a seamstress from Kyiv, made a skirt out of it. She then took a blue man’s shirt and white sheet and made two pretty

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

389

blouses out of them. A woman in the infirmary also embroidered Ukrainian designs on a white blouse made from white parachute silk.205

Poliuha (Masiuk) mentions the way that Ukrainian women skillfully maintained their feminine appearance: I have to say that Ukrainian women distinguished themselves from girls of other nations. We were able to adapt ourselves and give even this terrible garb a better look. Not too long afterward, of course, our backs were decorated with our personal number as well. I was O‑012. I’ve kept it to this day.206

Stefaniia Dzendrovs´ka-­Berkut also notes: “In order to look better, we had to resew everything.” 207 Poliuha (Masiuk) separately points to the pragmatism and special skills of the Ukrainian women to give a more feminine look to even that monstrous camp garb, in contrast to other prisoners: They gave us these horrible felt boots, rubber soled and heavy, these bushlaty and hats with earflaps. But the Ukrainian girls, they always knew how to deal with things, how to adapt to all of that, to this wretchedness. We immediately retailored those dreadful black gowns. We retailored the overjackets for ourselves. And we never wore those hats with the earflaps. But those English girls who were there with us, and the German women who were there. . . . God, did they walk around looking poor and miserable! They didn’t seem to know how to do anything. So whatever awful stuff they were dressed in, that’s how they went around.208

Many Ukrainian prisoners tried to maintain even the clumsy prison uniform in decent condition. Vorobii writes about Stepaniv: “Austerity and elegance were part of her nature. Her camp garb was always in good order, like a military uniform.” 209 Skarga also remembers her sister politicals: “The very next day, the sacklike dresses became more tailored, and a little embroidery

Figure 5.12. Photo of Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), sent to her parents after being released from camp, 5 March 1957. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

391

was added to the collar and the sleeves. There was some kind of irrepressible drive to give aesthetic form to the gray uniforms and things among these exhausted, often hungry, and weak women.” 210 Having worked in the camp kitchen during the best period of her incarceration, Kokhans´ka recalls: My wardrobe was worse than modest. . . . I had only one navy skirt that Darka Fedora had given to me as a gift in the transit prison, and two blouses that the girls from the preliminary detention cell had given me. I could exchange my bread, sugar, and coupons for some clothing. . . . I felt really ashamed to exchange bread and sugar for things that the other girls were forced by hunger to give up. . . . But that’s how I managed to exchange yet another skirt and two blouses. The girls knitted me a sweater out of an old knit suit, and they bleached in chlorine the calico leg wraps that we were issued and sewed me yet another blouse.211

Many women write with awe of certain things that they managed, by hook or by crook, to keep and carry through the various camps. It sometimes happened that this item became lifesaving, when the woman found herself in a difficult situation: she could exchange it for services, for minor privileges, for the support of an influential individual, for food, and so on. In the camps, clothing could be exchanged for bread and other foodstuffs. It could help a woman survive by saving her from starvation.212 In the early 1950s, there was a noticeable easing of camp regimens, and the prisoners were allowed to half-­legally purchase fabric to sew themselves certain clothes: “I bought some white staple with a dark-­blue stripe for a blouse and navy rep fabric for a dress. Liuba sewed them up nicely. I sewed my number on top, but I was afraid to put it on.” 213 In the last months before their release, especially by the mid‑1950s, the women and girls became particularly enthusiastic about expanding and improving their wardrobes: “They prepared to go out into freedom: in their free time they would sew, embroider, knit, and make all kinds

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

392

of pretty things from almost nothing, from scraps of fabric and cheesecloth.” 214 Working in the sewing workshop toward the end of her term, Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) was overjoyed at the opportunity to quietly take a bit of fabric for herself from there: “We began to sew ourselves up, to think more about our outward appearance, and those who were getting ready to be set free began to collect their ‘dowry’ in their suitcase.” 215 Interestingly, for a woman to lend clothing to a sister prisoner in order for her to look decent for an important event in her life was normal practice among the prisoners. For her first concert with the KVCh, Blavats´ka was given clothing by a bytovik called Auntie Pasha: Auntie Pasha dressed me up in her formal suit, but most importantly, gave me her so-­called English boots to wear. But for the entire concert, the poor woman stood in the wings and watched to make sure that her boots didn’t disappear somewhere by accident. And as soon as the curtain went down, Auntie Pasha rushed to relieve me of all her treasures.216

Poliuha (Masiuk) remembers gratefully a friend who did up her hair when the still-­incarcerated girl was given permission in 1955 to have a short visit with her future husband, with whom she had nurtured a love for years while imprisoned: “All my dearest friends gave me a real send-­off for my date. They dressed me in a new dress that Lionia Syniuta had received in a parcel, and they did up my hair.” 217 The prisoners apparently considered it very important to leave their prison experience and their “convict” look back at the camp, in order to once again appear like “real women,” looking good, once they left its bounds. The need to preserve their femininity even in the inhuman conditions of the camp can be seen in the admiration with which the former prisoners later recalled their sisters in misfortune who managed to miraculously preserve

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

393

some elegance. This is how Hoshko-­Kit writes about Nataliia Barvins´ka in the Mordovian camp: Elderly Mrs. Barvins´ka, the wife of Barvins´kyi the composer, lived in our barracks. Tiny, stooped, gray, and dressed just like the rest of us, she somehow managed to give even our prison garb some kind of “elegance” by tying a bow around her neck with a soft bright scarf. She happened to be issued a huge, faded yellow bushlat on its third round, meaning that two other prisoners had used it before her.218

Worn down by hard labor, hunger, and the cold, Ukrainian women imprisoned in Vorkuta nevertheless cared about their appearance, the German Walli Schliess recalls: Everyone tried to dress up on Sundays. Initially, we were only allowed to wear camp garb, but every woman tried to comb her hair more nicely and to iron her wrinkled clothing. When we were finally allowed to wear our own clothes—well, then they pulled out their absolute best on Sunday.219

Teslia-­Pavlyk narrates: “We most often embroidered our collars, that is, the white collar was embroidered with a very narrow pattern. When we went out for walks, we would pin it to the prison garb, emphasizing with this our exactitude and the fact that we were Ukrainian women.” 220 Poliuha (Masiuk), too, writes about these white embroidered collars.221 Olga Adamova-­Sliozberg also recalls a woman who “laundered and dried a white collar and sewed it to her blouse every morning.” 222 Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) explains this obsession with white collars: “The blouse had to have a white collar, which seemed to separate off the dark prison uniform.” 223 A typical daily habit of women is the use of perfumes. Obviously, in the prisons and camps, the women were deprived of this pleasure, which makes all the more striking an episode in

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

394

Kokhans´ka’s memoir. She and some other prisoners had received some eau de cologne in their parcels from home. Since it was prohibited, any eau de cologne was usually confiscated when the prison staff went through the parcels. Therefore, the woman recalls with gratitude the one time when a guard, who liked her, secretly returned this confiscated treasure to her.224 Surovtsova spent many months in a solitary prison cell and managed to gain for herself the right to buy eau de cologne in the prison shop with her own money. She explains the special significance that perfumes had gained for her and the rest of the women prisoners: In prison, the acrid smell of powdered carbolic acid was very unpleasant. You just wanted so much to get rid of that odor, at least in your own cell! But here the supervisor was powerless, because eau de cologne contained alcohol. I was mad at him and wrote to Moscow. At the SPO, the Secret Political Department of the NKVD, permission was given, and from that time on, the supervisor, much to my pleasure, allowed me to buy eau de cologne. I would pass on things that I needed much more when money became tight, but the one thing I bought for the longest time was eau de cologne. Associations with smells for me were the strongest . . . and the unforgiving thick walls faded before the scent of freedom. All these trivialities might have been a joke—except that they helped to live.225

By using fragrances, like other attributes of traditional femininity, the women reminded themselves of who they were and what world they belonged to. In this way, they preserved the thin thread connecting them to the society from which they were removed, which prevented them from losing their lives’ beacons. It is important to understand that all this womanly concern about hair, clothing, and perfume was not for the purpose of attracting men, with whom contact was in any case extremely restricted. Maintaining their feminine appearance served a

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

395

different goal for female prisoners. It was one of the elements of the familiar “normal” aspects of life that they had lost and another fulcrum that helped the women remember who they were. Otherwise, they risked dissolving in the dehumanizing melting pot of the Gulag. Despite extremely limited resources, the Ukrainian women managed to find a variety of ways and means to preserve at least some aspects of femininity. These practices can also be seen as passive resistance to the rules and regulations of the Gulag to protect and preserve their threatened gender identity as prisoners. ARRANGING LIVING SPACE AS A FEMININE ACTIVITY One other manifestation of traditional femininity in daily camp life was the practice of arranging living space. Obviously, the interior of the barracks or their alternatives—tents and dugouts—had nothing in common with either the traditional country house or an urban apartment. But living there for long periods of time, ranging from months to years, the women inevitably began to see this shelter as home and to treat it accordingly. As Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk writes: “It was time to go home . . . we were already calling the zone ‘home.’” 226 Following traditions that they had absorbed since an early age, about what a living space should look like and what a woman is supposed to do to keep it in a proper state, the women were used to the idea of arranging, cleaning, and decorating the interior, keeping houseplants, and that kind of thing. As prisoners, they tried very hard to re-­create and preserve relative hominess both within and around their barracks. In telling about the horrors of camp life, Marunchak adds, not without some pride: “Even in these difficult conditions, the women and girls from western Ukraine showed what good homemakers they were because they knew how to arrange daily life around them.” 227

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

396

Despite the total lack of sanitary conditions in the prisons and camps, the women often write about their efforts to overcome the chaos and establish some order. In fact, tidying and maintaining cleanliness in the living premises had more than just a sanitary purpose for them. Karwańska-­Bajlak explains how cleaning was one of the means to arrange their lives, not just their living space: We shared our prison fate in accord, indeed, I would even say in harmony. We took turns, and we cleaned. We cared about keeping things clean, even in those terrible conditions. One thing that made life easier for us was that we had a toilet and a water tap. . . . The duty to clean and keep the place in good shape belonged to those in the cell who didn’t work. Every day, we took turns washing the floor and cleaning the slop pots since the big cells were not hooked up to sewage.228

Teslia-­Pavlyk remembers similar arrangements: “Our cells were always ideally clean. Even the heads of the ward noticed this, and we were praised by them several times.” 229 Indeed, keeping the housing barracks clean was probably the top concern of the women, as Slobodian-­Kovaliuk recollects: Before us, these barracks had housed male recidivists. The space was dirty. Everywhere on the bunks you could see bloodstains. No point even mentioning the state of the floor. . . . We sat the first night on our bags. The next day, we were allowed to tidy everything up. They brought us two blowtorches to singe fleas, and we steamed them with boiling water, brushed down the bunks, and whitewashed everything. In the evening, the camp overseer Hrusha came by and was satisfied with what he saw. He actually thanked us.230

In their memoirs, some former prisoners openly contrast the cleanliness that female politicals insisted on maintaining, with the dirt that dominated in the barracks where the common criminals

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

397

lived. Skarga, for instance, compares a barrack organized by politicals with the neglected and chaotic criminal barracks: The women are very tidy and do not spare their hands to constantly launder blankets and straw mattress bags that were sometimes also filled with wood shavings, and to clean the place. Where the women have been sentenced under Article 58, meaning the politicals, there is no mess. . . . I was sent to a barrack that was filled with urki. . . . This was truly a scary place. The stench hit you in the face. The bed covers dirty and torn, as the better ones had long ago been stolen, sweat-­smelling rags hanging everywhere, and muddy, misshapen boots.231

Scholars researching the experience of women in the Gulag emphasize the special meaning of cleanliness for the female prisoners. Shapovalov claims that “maintaining personal hygiene played an important symbolic and ritualistic role in preserving the sense of personal dignity and even a certain superiority over others.” 232 Indeed, Polish women, western Ukrainian women, and women from the Baltics in their memoirs all contrast their own cleanliness with the absence of any practice of personal hygiene among the Russian women. In her memoirs, Poliuha (Masiuk) tries to explain this: Even in the barracks you could tell where a Ukrainian woman slept. On what passed for her pillow was an embroidered cover, and on the wall an embroidered “rug” made of leg wraps. I managed to keep a similar little rug made of leg wraps with a basket embroidered on it, with beloved flowers that reminded me of Ukraine— cornflowers, daisies, and poppies—as a reminder of those dreadful times. That’s how we tried to beautify our barrack life.233

Again, maintaining cleanliness inside the barracks and personal hygiene was important not just for sanitation. It also had a certain symbolic meaning for the women, as they tried to hold on

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

398

to some sense of normalcy and habits from their former lives, to remain feminine, and to fulfill the “female” housekeeping functions in what was now their home: The barrack was clean. The girl on duty had a mania for cleanliness, just poisoned life with her obsessive demands. She was constantly scrubbing the plank floors and straightening coverlets and tablecloths. On the one hand, this was terribly boring, but on the other, it not only maintained a certain external coziness, but stimulated inner balance as well.234

The barrack residents tried to change the interior, to make it homier, to decorate it in such a way as to make it look more like an ordinary residence. In a story mentioned earlier, Zaiachkivs´ka-­ Mykhal´chuk tells how, one time, the residents of a barrack decided to draw on its inside walls: The girls whitewashed the walls in sections, and our girls came up to me, saying: “Draw something of ours, something familiar.” . . . So I made a frieze . . . and on the walls I drew some pictures from our beloved, unforgettable places. Using soot and lime, it’s possible to get the different shades you want. We had no paintbrushes, but we had our braids.235

This kind of initiative was obviously well outside of what was permissible in the camp rules, and the girls really did risk punishment. However, the camp management was good about it. Having spent several years in prison, mostly in a solitary cell, Surovtsova also recollects how she tried to make her space more homelike, adding the familiar elements that make an interior cozy: “I embroidered some sacking that came with a parcel from my mother, using black and white thread that I had bought at the prison shop. I embroidered an entire table runner to put on my table, and somehow the cell immediately became much homier.” 236 She

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

399

was proud that her tireless efforts to maintain cleanliness and comfort in her cell were even noticed by the prison wardens.237 Similarly, Zaryts´ka, who was held for many years in the Vladimir Central Prison, wrote a letter to her family describing how she tried to “domesticate” her cell, turning it into an ordinary living space: “I covered the locker where I keep food with a blue-­and-­white napkin and, as I put it, introduced some aesthetic around me.” 238 Poliuha (Masiuk) also describes the ingenuity of the Ukrainian girls, who decorated the interior of the barrack and made it look a lot more like a real dwelling: Meanwhile, us all being in leg wraps, our girls pulled some threads out, embroidered with them, and hung some kind of little runner on their bunks—I still have all those embroideries. Next thing you know, they’ve taken some gauze and made pillow covers with them. And so we already adapted somehow.239

Others were less fortunate. Rudenko tells with some bitterness how the women in her barrack tried to bring some beauty to the grayness of their living space, making the effort to raise some flowers in makeshift flowerpots. However, the camp overseer was looking for a way to punish her politicals for refusing to wear identifying tags stitched with numbers on their chests. She not only destroyed all the plants before the girls’ eyes but punished the “florists” even further by moving them to an uninhabitable shed next to the garbage dump. Still, these stubborn girls refused to let their spirits flag and began to organize their new “yard”: Within a month, there was no trace of our garbage dump. Now there were pretty pathways and beautiful flower beds. . . . Soon the yard, fertilized with slops poured into its holes, bloomed lushly and brightly. Then various officers started to come to us again, in order to marvel at what beauty we had made of the awful garbage dump. They called our zone a little paradise, everything had become so nice around us.240

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

400

Another prisoner recalls how they dreamed of flower beds and a vegetable patch while cleaning up the yard.241 Similarly, Zaryts´ka, who ended up in camp for the last years of her twenty-­ five-­year sentence, also desperately tried to plant and raise flower beds: “We tried to make a cozy, beautiful corner even there.” 242 As Senyk writes: “Thanks to Darka Husiak, Halia Dydyk, and Katrusia Zaryts´ka, we had our flower bed. We planted a few onions and nasturtium, while dandelions showed up on their own.” 243 Kostiuk (Protsak) tells how the manager of their KVCh, a Jew from Lviv, brought them some flower seeds when the prisoners asked him: “The girls seeded a flower bed. In the spring, it beautified both the working area and the living spaces.” 244 The women recall with pride how “their territory” looked so well put together: “In summer the zone boasted a variety of fragrant flowers, planted by the caring hands of the women prisoners. Everywhere things were clean and tidy, also thanks to these hardworking women’s hands.” 245 The women not only arranged and embellished their own living space in the barracks and the area outside—the yard and the zone territory—but they even tried to bring order to the public spaces, as Surovtsova recalls: Our bathhouse was half collapsed and really disgusting. But there were some new boards lying around near it. . . . It occurred to me to offer to fix up the washroom. . . . There were more than enough hands to help. The work went into high gear. And pretty quickly the new bathhouse, gleaming with its yellowish freshly planed larch, beautified a corner of the yard.246

So, barracks and the territory around them, regardless of their actual state, gained a new meaning for the prisoners. The women transformed them into a surrogate home, which they treated as their own living space and took care of accordingly. The recollections of Ukrainian women who were political prisoners unambiguously confirm the conclusions of one of the

5. Humanity and Femininity in Captivity

401

most experienced scholars studying personal memoirs about the Gulag, Irina Sherbakova: “In short, the only real form of resistance was the determination to preserve their individual humanity. Without any doubt, there were times when it was very difficult not to turn into a wolf pack that was ruled by the merciless law of camp life: ‘You die today, I die tomorrow.’” 247 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna used this very idea as the title of her memoirs about camp, A my lyshylysia liud´my (But We Remained Human Beings).248 The truth is that camp overseers were not really able to constantly monitor every step the prisoners took or to control them every minute and everywhere. This inability allowed the women to win back some space and time, however marginal, that functioned according to rules and rhythms that the women themselves set. This was where they formed their own communities and nurtured their own culture.249 The women made use of their gender-­based notions, knowledge, and skills to organize their living space and their personal appearance in the camps, in line with what they considered to be normal and proper. The practice of replicating the main elements of a “normal” life in the camps needs to be seen as the women’s gender-­based strategies for survival and for resistance to the dehumanizing Gulag regimen. Ruth R. Linden, a leading Holocaust scholar, identifies four factors that helped people survive: knowledge and information, practical skills, affiliations, and attitude.250 Although the first and last of these are not gender specific, the practical skills and affiliations had a significant gender aspect. There is no question that these women’s everyday skills were one of those extra resources that fostered survival. Meanwhile, the nature of their family-­like self-­help groups increased the chances that every participant in such a group would make it. Such ordinary, seemingly trivial—in the bigger picture—things as cleaning up or worrying about personal appearance proved to be effective means to counter the destructive impact of the regimen on the prisoners’ physical and mental health. When a person

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

402

was incarcerated, this kind of activity gained a completely new, and not just practical, meaning: it helped the women preserve and manifest their feminine gender identity. It also encouraged solidarity with other women and the formation of mutual-­support communities. And this was key to survival in the camps.

CHAPTER 6

BODY, SEXUALITY, AND LOVE

Figure 6.1. Ukrainian political prisoners after release. Photo by Doma N., given as a memento to her friend from a camp in Magadan, 23 March 1955. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

THE DESTRUCTION AND PRESERVATION OF WOMEN’S BODIES BEHIND BARS Women’s experience of imprisonment is significantly affected by the nature of their bodies and bodily functions. That said, women’s bodies and sexuality are among most taboo aspects of their memoirs. Ukrainian women extremely rarely refer to these subjects. Even when they break the silence, they tend to heavily self-­censor, most often by couching the subject in a few terse phrases, hints, and euphemisms. In part, this is the result of traditional norms of behavior, according to which it was considered improper for women to discuss such intimate matters. At the same time, the women’s camp experience, as related to their bodies, may simply have been too painful and traumatic—and possibly linked to feelings of shame and guilt. This would have pushed the women to avoid recollecting these aspects.1 It is no secret that, in the inhuman conditions of the Gulag, worn down by hunger, overwork, and disease, the prisoners did not much resemble ordinary women. In fact, the women themselves were quite aware of this: We were exhausted, and looked more like shadows of people than like people.2 We were terrible to look at.3

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

408

All the women, the “workhorses,” were black and yellow, exhausted even before they were transferred. In four months here, they had become completely black.4

Former prisoners, both women and men, write about the loss of feminine features among the women prisoners, the erasure of their external gender differences.5 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn openly wrote about the way that living in a camp disfigured women: The body becomes worn out at that kind of work, and everything that is feminine in a woman, whether it be constant or whether it be monthly, ceases to be. If she manages to last to the next “commissioning,” the person who undresses before the physicians will be not at all the [same] . . . she has become ageless; her shoulders stick out at sharp angles, her breasts hang down in little dried-­out sacs; superfluous folds of skin form wrinkles on her flat buttocks; there is so little flesh above her knees that quite a big gap has opened up . . . her voice became hoarse and rough and her face is tanned by pellagra.6

Former female prisoners also testify to the fact that amenorrhea was common among the women in the Gulag.7 Needless to say, this physiological aspect of a woman’s body is very rarely mentioned in the context of daily life in the camps. After going over hundreds of memoirs of Russian women, Veronica Shapovalov found only three such references.8 In captivity, the woman’s body came close to losing its female form altogether and becoming asexual: “Girlish beauty wilted very quickly.” 9 This sad transformation of individual women into a monotonous mass of the female gender is vividly described by Oksana Meshko: Slowly but surely, all the prisoners in the Banderite barracks began, before my eyes, to resemble one another internally. But maybe it seemed that way to me because of that facial color, like red

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

409

copper, from the endless Ukhta winds. I never saw anything like it anywhere else, this tan color that terribly deformed the face and its expressions, and the eyes of those hungry, beaten people.10

Polina Benoni and Vasylyna Salamon use almost the same words to describe what struck them the most about the appearance of the young women who had already been in the camp for some time: Three girls came up to us . . . from Ternopil Oblast. They had been here for almost a year. . . . They looked awful, terribly thin. Their faces were reddish-­black from the frost, wind, and sun, covered with dark spots and fuzz, like young boys.11 We were horrified. They were brown colored, they were all frostbitten, and they had all these brown spots [on their faces].12

Aware of the inevitable destructive impact of imprisonment on their bodies, some women prisoners decided to exert effort to avoid or at least minimize the ruinous consequences and did what they could to keep their bodies in shape. Nadiia Surovtsova realized in the first weeks of her arrest that the prison regimen was designed not just to break her mentally, but also to wreck her physically. To survive, she decided to put together her own daily routine, and she kept to it almost without exception all the years that she was being held, in both prisons and camps: I had my own regimen to counter the outside one. One, I thought, anticipates my death, physical or spiritual; the other will preserve me as a person in case I manage to survive until the day I can walk out of here. . . . I decided to survive. . . . I had to preserve my body and soul. . . . To die would be to disappear, never to have the last word. . . . The only possible political protest was to survive.13

Every day, Surovtsova not only rose early, but also did exercises, walked briskly around her cell and during outdoor breaks, carried

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

410

out simple water procedures to improve her endurance, read a lot, actively engaged in self-­education, embroidered, cleaned and decorated her cell, and so on. In time, she herself acknowledged that “thanks to this approach to life, [she] managed to preserve [her] health and, what was more important, to suffer relatively little damage to [her] psyche.” 14 The memoirs mention quite a few cases where the women made efforts to normalize their personal lives, to establish their own rules of behavior and a daily routine that would give their lives some sort of rhythm and meaning. This created a certain sense of control over their lives, which helped the women preserve their physical and mental health. Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak recollects: We learned self-­defensive behavior every day, every minute. This kept us from going crazy. It also reminded us that we had a treasure that, if we withstood, the worst torturer in the world would not take away from us or imprison: our human, personal dignity. And so each of us sheltered this indestructible treasure with her

heart, even as we got used to and adapted to the prison regimen.15

Since the women understood that the system was designed to destroy them, they saw survival as a way to resist that system. Surovtsova recalls: “I so desperately wanted to survive, to survive and to see my husband one more time. . . . I sensed that survival would not be so simple and that I would have to ‘survive’ for a long and boring time.” 16 In this unequal struggle, the desire to survive was the main driver and motivator, as Vanda Horchyns´ka (Demchuk) testifies: “The desire to survive to spite all the devils kept us going, although every day death walked among us and relentlessly took many from our ranks.” 17 Indeed, concern about their own health was a key to physical survival. The women deliberately maintained their bodies in acceptable physical condition. Halyna Kokhans´ka recalls that, when her leg was injured, even during the investigation in prison, she worked over her gammy leg:

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

411

My left leg was giving me trouble. I had poor control over it. We were never taken out for walks, but I needed to move. So Liuba found a way out. She began to teach me to tango. . . . In time, after this kind of workout, my leg began to obey me better. . . . I needed constant gymnastics, and I tried to do exercises whenever I could.18

Nataliia Popovych remembers how, when they were in the Lontskyi Remand Prison in Lviv together, Olena Stepaniv got her cellmates up every morning to do stretches and fortify their bodies with cold water.19 Similarly, Teodoziia Vynnyts´ka tirelessly encouraged her cellmates in the Bryhidky Remand Prison to do exercises to keep their bodies in good shape: Every morning, she did movement exercises and persuaded others that physical culture was very important in the life of every person. . . . In prison, a person has to care about physical strength, increase it, and become hardier, in order to not fall down on this great path, not to be left behind in the snows of icy Siberia, but to come back. . . . Mrs. Vynnyts´ka would drag all of her cellmates off their bunks and force them to follow her lead in doing these awkward exercises. Soon, everyone was keen to start engaging in this very vital form of exercise.20

Thus, despite the terrible conditions, the women took care of their bodies, even in the camps: “They would wash thoroughly in the bathhouse. Many would douse themselves with water and snow. They would engage in gymnastics, take care of their faces and their hands, and all this after a ten- to sixteen-­hour work day, often at really hard labor.” 21 None of the memoirs really say just how the women took care of their skin, but even a hint about this in a memoir suggests that concern about preserving their bodies took up a significant portion of their camp routine. In their recollections, former political prisoners of both sexes note that the physical and mental state of women in Gulag camps

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

412

was comparatively better than that of the men. Solzhenitsyn, for example, shared his observations: “With astonishment I saw that they were not so thin, not so emaciated and pale as we were. Equal prison rations for all and equal prison torment turn out on the average to be easier for women. They do not weaken so quickly from hunger.” 22 At the same time, Solzhenitsyn admits, women had a much harder time in the camps than the men did, mainly because of the unbearable sanitary and hygienic conditions. Yet, the testimony of women prisoners disproves such male assertions. In their memoirs, the women often comment that they considered themselves both mentally and physically hardier than the men—and, in fact, they were. According to the women, the male prisoners had a harder time in captivity, they suffered more from the lack of food, and they were less able to take care of their daily needs such as housing and clothing, and their personal hygiene. Anthropological research in other contexts into the impact of long-­term starvation on women’s bodies compared to men’s bodies has led to similar conclusions: women’s bodies deteriorate less rapidly from hunger. Because of their smaller size and relatively lower energy needs, as well as the higher proportion of fat in their bodies, women typically last longer when faced with a critical shortage of food.23 The memoirs of former Ukrainian women prisoners confirm these observations. Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­ Mykhal´chuk writes: The boys . . . suffered worse than we did. The women somehow endured everything more easily. Maybe we were abused less. . . . We girls, being still young, somehow held on, but along with us, they would chase out to do the labor men who were old, wrecked, beaten during interrogations, and they had to suffer this lawlessness in their old age. . . . Our men were dying.24

This same kind of assessment is repeated nearly word for word in other memoirs:

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

413

The men were in even worse condition than us girls. We were able to endure the hunger more.25 And here [in the Inta camp], for the first time since we entered prison, we saw men. Oh, my God! How worn out these people were. Scrawny, shaven—simply pitiful. We thought that we were a lot more like living beings than they were.26 Here we saw the living dead for the first time. . . . They stood by the walls of the canteen and were barely able to say “Bread.” They were terrible looking. And it was all men . . . from this kind of food and hard labor, people died, but especially the men.27 People were sickening en masse. An epidemic of typhoid fever began. In our women’s zone, 300 out of 360 of us lay sick. And yet the girls somehow held on, while many of the men were cut down. Many a young man was left behind in that wasteland.28 Hunger was eating people alive. . . . There were rumors that our boys were dying like flies, unable to survive on the starvation rations. The women were more resilient.29 All of us were extremely exhausted, but it was terrible to look at the men. They would sell everything they possibly could through the fence just to get a ration of bread.30

Uliana Honchar-­Bakai points out yet another factor that damaged the physical condition of many of the men: their addiction to tobacco: The women in the zone lived a bit more easily. They engaged in crafts and remade their prison gowns into housecoats. The men were worse off. Those who smoked would often exchange bread for makhorka, coarse tobacco. They wouldn’t wash their shirts,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

414

they only used heat treatment, prozharka, on them, and the shirts gradually turned brown.31

Nearly every mention of meeting up with the male prisoners is accompanied in the women’s memoirs with comments about their pathetic physical and mental condition: Ragged, dirty skeletons—they were called walking dead, goners— from the men’s barracks milled around in the transit zone, like a bad dream with dead-­eyed zombies. . . . It was disgusting to look at them—it made you want to throw up: yes, it’s not very aesthetic to say that, but it was a scary imitation of humans. . . . The men’s escort every which way drove these worn-­out workers . . . with their drooping shoulders and heads bent under mosquito netting, black with dirt.32

Not just the Ukrainian women but also women of other nations came to the same conclusion. German Elinor Lipper claimed that the women were more resilient than the men and adapted better to the unaccustomed physical work and living conditions.33 Ada Voitolovskaia, a Jewish prisoner, writes in detail in her memoirs, comparing the reaction of women’s and men’s bodies to hunger: However hard it was for the women, they survived the camps with fewer losses. The men suffered more from hunger, scurvy, dysentery, and starvation diarrhea. They were more exhausted and debilitated. Their physical resistance was poorer, and their mortality rate higher. The male body needs more food, yet the rations were identical. Scurvy and dysentery took on threatening forms among the men. Where the women’s legs, arms, and chests were covered with the typical rash of scurvy, their gums bled and their teeth grew loose and crumbled, the men tended to swell, their legs would not bend at the knee, nor did the joints in their arms. The swelling was visible, as was the bluish tinge of their faces. Many lost their

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

415

teeth altogether, and their eyes faded. They were more consumed by feelings of hunger and despair.34

How true was it that women endured the difficulties of imprisonment better than the men? We cannot establish this beyond a shadow of a doubt at this distance in time, but it seems significant that there is no confirmation of the opposite in any of the women’s memoirs. Some scholars of women’s experience in the Gulag presume that women endured imprisonment more easily—only in a very relative sense—than men for two main reasons: first, women’s bodies were more easily able to endure the lack of food, while the miserly portions and poor quality led to extremely damaging consequences for the men; and second, women demonstrated greater mutual care for the sake of survival in extreme circumstances. One key reason why the men suffered more acutely from the interrogations and imprisonment was the different status of men and women in a patriarchal society. Given the gender discrimination that women normally experienced in their communities, they could more readily tolerate the humiliations and even the physical violence. Their generally inferior position had not changed except to become worse. By contrast, being imprisoned was a radical change in status for the men, from domination to submission, which they may have perceived unconsciously as a form of castration. In other words, it was a loss of masculine identity for the men.35 Felicja Karay researched survival strategies in the extreme conditions of Nazi concentration camps and came to the conclusion that flexibility and adaptability were major advantages for both individual and group survival, and Jewish “women proved to be more adaptive than men.” 36 It seems that Ukrainian women also adapted themselves to the inhuman conditions of the Gulag more easily because they needed less food and were more used to taking care of themselves and others. The physical and emotional decline that the men often found themselves in obviously roused compassion in the women, who, sentenced to many years of imprisonment, also sharply felt the

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

416

need to care for others and to carry out their traditional nurturing role. Dariia Husiak tells about how she and Kateryna Zaryts´ka, who were imprisoned together, tried to save a portion of their miserly prison rations to pass on to their brothers in arms, who suffered terribly from the lack of food.37 Ievheniia Andrusiak recalls how, as a junior nurse in the camp infirmary, she would give the hungry male patients the bread that was left over by the sick women.38 Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk) describes how the women even made a “cake” for the men at Christmas: “We dried some rusks, grated them, and added whatever people had gotten in their parcels for flavor. What a nice thing we were able to do for the boys for the holidays!” 39 SEXUAL ABUSE A woman’s body turned against her from the very first days after being arrested and during interrogations. In their memoirs, former women prisoners time and again write about tortures that included sexualized abuse in the form of partial or complete exposure.40 They testify that prison personnel forced the women, especially the young detainees, to expose themselves during the investigation phase as a form of torture.41 The humiliation and shame that the women felt when this happened was intended to traumatize them psychologically and break their spirits. Having analyzed the experience of Romanian female politicals, Gratian Cormos divided the sexual abuse of women prisoners into several categories: (1) verbal violence, such as offensive words, humiliating jokes, vulgar comments, and foul language; (2) voyeurism, violations of privacy such as by forcing women to undress in public and peeping in the bathrooms; (3) physical sexual abuse, from feeling up to rape; (4) forced birth control, such as involuntary sterilization and abortion; and (5) vaginal searches.42 Every one of these forms of sexual abuse is mentioned, with a greater or lesser degree of detail, in the Gulag memoirs of Ukrainian women.

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

417

The integrity of a woman’s body would be violated the minute she was arrested. Already in the prisons, during the preliminary investigations, it was made clear to the women that they had no right to privacy. Many former political prisoners recall that covert peeping and overt staring by the male guards while the women were engaged in their intimate hygiene was a widespread practice that most women experienced personally. “He had been looking through the peephole in the door while I washed,” 43 recalls Kokhans´ka, about a guard who commented on her wounded body after she showered. Oksana Khrashchevs´ka was shocked when she discovered the following: “there were no doors on any of the toilets, and the duty guard stared, without even thinking of turning away. . . . I once wanted to go to the slop bucket, but even as I quietly, quietly lifted the lid, the peephole was opened and the ‘all-­seeing’ eye of the overseer appeared.” 44 Surovtsova describes an incident that took place in the prison in Iaroslavl. Concerned about other possible victims of voyeurism, the angry woman decided to complain to the prison administrator: “He’ll simply do it to a younger, less experienced woman, and I thought to myself, again, how it would feel to be a defenseless, naked young woman under the watchful, rude, and predatory eye. . . . And I never saw this overseer again.” 45 Another way of humiliating the women was withholding the normal supplies for intimate hygiene, especially during menstruation. Former prisoners mention this side of their experience very rarely, complaining about the lack of any kind of hygienic supplies and even the possibility of washing themselves.46 Khrashchevs´ka recollects how the women were issued only two mugs of boiled water a day in the prison, leaving them with a serious dilemma: should they quench their thirst, or should they wash themselves: In the evening, they gave us another mug of boiled water. And no matter how thirsty we felt, most of us politicals left it for hygienic purposes. Initially, the urki laughed at us, but eventually they,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

418

too, began to do this. We so much wanted at least the minimum of normal living conditions.47

Both at the time of their arrest and imprisonment, and later, during the transit to the site of their long-­term incarceration, women prisoners were repeatedly searched, forced to undress, and made to stand in a naked state for lengthy periods of time in the presence of male guards while their cells were searched. Not only were women made to undress completely, but cavity searches were common, under the pretext of looking for hidden “forbidden” objects.48 Nadezhda Grankina writes in her memoirs of a similarly degrading experience in the Suzdal City Prison: The duty guard came in and announced that any attempts to resist would increase our punishment, up to and including being shot. We did not understand what we were supposed to be resisting. The guard left. Next, two women in uniform came in and began to search. They looked in our hair, in our mouths, between our fingers. We were told to get undressed. Those women left, and two more came in. One of them had a rubber finger on her pointer, while the other held a glass of some kind of fluid: “Take off your underpants and lie down.” We were horrified and huddled in a corner like sheep, saying nothing and trying to hide behind one another. In the end, a young girl, an Austrian, stepped out. She shook her head and said, “OK! This isn’t scary!” and lay down on the table opposite the peephole. The peephole rustled the entire time. This was a gynecological search. And we had to get used to it. We had all been brought from prisons with such ferocious regimens that nothing was prohibited with regard to us. This kind of search was plain savagery.49

Moreover, searches were an inevitable part of daily camp routine. They were typically carried out at night, without warning, also in search of “forbidden” items. The list of such items included dozens of everyday and religious objects. In her memoirs of the Gulag, Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya writes:

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

419

The nighttime shmon—a meticulous search—was the most degrading and most oft-­repeated procedure. “Up! Undress completely! Arms up! Into the corridor! Line up against the wall!” Naked, we were especially terrible looking. But in the country of the blind, the one-­eyed man is king, and so, compared to the rest, I was still a hero. For now. Hair was unbraided. What were they looking for? What more could they still take away from us? Well, they could: they pulled out all the ties from the nuns’ skirts and from our underpants.50

Women who were newly arrived at a camp were directed to the bathhouse for what they called sanobrabotka, a “hygienic work over.” There, they not only had to undress in the presence of male guards, and to walk around the room naked, while the men made rude jokes and leered at them. They also had to undergo the completely humiliating procedure of having every bit of body hair shaved off of them.51 Kokhans´ka describes this procedure with revulsion: Once more to the bathhouse and the prozharka. We were driven naked into the bath, but they did not release the water in the showers until we had all undergone the sanobrabotka. Male “hairdressers” would shave off all the hair on our bodies. After this degrading procedure, each was given a tablespoon of some kind of stinky, brown liquid in her palm that was supposed to be soap. When we were all ready, they turned the water on: first cold, then scalding hot. . . . After this kind of shower, we were kept for another two hours, soaking wet in the cold bathhouse, while our things were undergoing the heat treatment. And we were only allowed to stand. The walls were damp, slimy, covered in mold. Under our feet were slippery wooden slats.52

Indeed, the main thing that the women recollect about the sanobrabotka is the process of having their privates shaved, which was both shocking and embarrassing: “You’re being shaved. Hands

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

420

on your head, your head flushes with heat, you avert your eyes because this kind of procedure is shameful. They usually had the men do it.” 53 Since there was no way to avoid this procedure, the women sometimes did what they could to at least reduce its degradation. Volodymyra Kobryn-­Senyk recalls one episode: When we were brought to the Lontskyi Remand Prison in Lviv, they took us to the bathhouse. . . . They forced us to undress completely and hand in our things. . . . The bath and the disinfection cell were both operated by men. . . . Yet another unpleasant experience awaited us: the sanobrabotka, which was also done by men. That’s when I announced that I knew how to shave with a shaver and would do it myself. Our “washers” agreed. But I had never held a shaver in my hands. I did a good job of pinching the girls, but no one complained.54

The women prisoners experienced this procedure many times because it took place on a regular basis in the camps. Mariia Vislapuu (Hryb) recalls her experience in the mine shafts of Voroshylovhrad (today, Luhansk) Oblast: The procedure was mandatory because pubic lice were spreading around. The administration issued orders that the women should only be shaved by men. . . . They did this on purpose to humiliate us. Just like men escorted women to the toilets. The toilets were open, and there was no way to hide.55

Forced shaving caused enormous psychological pain as well as helpless fury, which Anna Cieślikowska, a Polish woman from Lviv, describes: “The personnel were all male. You had to overcome the shame and humiliation, clench your teeth, and control yourself, to endure the dirty jokes calmly and not spit at those hideous faces, or punch them between the eyes.” 56 The young virgins among the women suffered through this horrible procedure with even greater pain as, for them, public

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

421

nudity and shaving were a total shock. Mariia Shustakevych bitterly describes how it felt to her: That con ordered: “Girls, move it!” And my sister and I began to undress completely. It was a terribly shameful experience. I was undressing for the first time in front of my own mother, never mind strangers. . . . This was terribly degrading and embarrassing. We couldn’t look one another in the eye. Like cattle to the slaughter, we had to come up to her, and she did what she had to do without ceremony.57

Oleksandra Blavats´ka admits: “At the age of twenty and with my obviously puritanical upbringing, this was a real shock.” 58 Poliuha (Masiuk) explains why the girls took this procedure so badly: “The girls were so offended and upset that they cried. . . . The civilian nurses were quite surprised that all the newly arrived Banderites turned out to be virgins on examination.” 59 Obviously, this procedure was one element in the systematic breaking of the prisoners’ spirit, which Kersnovskaya notes well: It seemed that our physical suffering should have made us unfeeling toward everything around us. And yet, it did not! When they forced us, after the baths, to file past the soldier guards naked, the young girls, who, even after what they had experienced in the convoys, had not lost the remains of their femininity, continued to writhe in embarrassment at the men’s shameless ridicule and obscene gestures.60

Because of the depth of shame that the women lived through in the Gulag, most of them continued to be unable to openly talk about this experience, referring to it only in euphemisms and allusions. In writing about the fact that only men worked in the women’s bathhouse, Surovtsova notes: “Even the usual ‘smearing’ of unmentionable parts with a rag soaked in disinfectant was done by some brute near the door.” 61 Iaroslava Kryzhanivs´ka-­Hasiuk

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

422

also recollects the sanobrabotka: “I won’t write out this word because just thinking of what these men did gives me the chills.” 62 Despite the outrage and pleas of the women, this part of turning an individual into a “con” could not be avoided. The women were forced to stand equally naked (“we had to undress completely”) while being sorted for transit.63 This was where managers from various camps would select a quality “workforce,” meticulously inspecting the physical state of each woman and evaluating her fitness for manual labor. For them, this determined whether production quotas and plans would later be met.64 Some scholars say that the forced public nudity was essentially the first stage of rape, as it violated the integrity of the woman’s body and treated the woman’s sexuality as an instrument of humiliation.65 Repeated nakedness in front of others was intended to destroy any sense of privacy in the woman. In short, to bring home that nothing belonged to her anymore, not even her own body. SEXUALITY AS BOTH RESOURCE AND RISK INVOLUNTARY PROSTITUTION In the camps, the women’s bodies and sexuality became a kind of resource that could help them survive. Scholars say that involuntary prostitution—what was often called “sex for barter”—and ongoing sexual relations with a man in the camp who was in a position of power were the main survival strategies for some women.66 Women would give their bodies in exchange for food, lighter forms of labor, better quality clothing, better housing, and other small benefits, or simply for a feeling of relative safety—in short, to avoid unwanted attention from other men or violent gang rape. Nikita Petrov presents considerable documentary evidence to this effect, including internal documents of the Gulag system referring to the punishment of guards and members of camp administration for abusing their power and forcing female pris-

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

423

oners into sexual relations. The obviously widespread nature of such abuse forced the Gulag administration to include a separate provision in its April 1936 decree titled On Measures to Improve the Work of the Forced Labor Camps: “Severely punish all those who force women into cohabitation or otherwise create such conditions for women that they become completely dependent on the camp management.” 67 Sexual harassment of female prisoners by the male guards and staff was obviously widespread in the camps, although reports about it are rare and restrained. Having been provided with power and resources, both material and administrative, the men took advantage of their position to degrade the women and to dehumanize them even more. Given that the prisoners had absolutely no rights and were completely dependent on the camp leadership and staff, a refusal of sexual advances was likely to lead to vengeance on the part of the spurned man. This could mean being sent to do much heavier labor, getting smaller rations, being sent to the punishment cell, or worse. Under the circumstances, it was the equivalent of suicide. Kersnovskaya recalls an incident when the camp physician, after making sexual advances on a young prisoner called Lesia who was working as his nurse, openly threatened to send her out to do hard labor for rejecting him.68 Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) personally experienced something similar when the mine foreman “made the situation perfectly clear: ‘Live with me and you get to stay here. If not, back to the mines!’ My answer, ‘No,’ put an end to easier work.” 69 Similarly, Oleksandra Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk ended up logging after the head of the Vakkhanka camp in Kolyma was unable to force her to have sex with him.70 In fact, sexual violence against the prisoners was impossible to stop because the men who had been given power over them felt complete impunity. As one example, in describing cohabitation with a man who was influential at the camp, Tamara Ruzhentseva indicates that she was forced into this position: after she refused him on his first attempt, she was severely beaten. Basically, she

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

424

had no alternative but to be his mistress, to overcome her own moral principles and at the same time get a slew of benefits that were key to her survival in the camp, as she writes in her memoirs: “I gained weight, and I walked around in beautiful boots. I no longer had to wear God-­knows-­what kind of rags. I now had a new quilted jacket and new trousers. Really, I was dressed to the nines. I even had a new hat. And I ate completely normally.” 71 While Khrashchevs´ka was in the infirmary, a doctor tried to rape her several times. Moreover, not everyone approved of her refusal to satisfy the medic’s sexual urges, she recalls: “Only the nurse’s aide looked at me somehow judgmentally. . . . She quietly said, ‘If you had listened to the doctor, you wouldn’t be starving. . . . You’re stupid, really stupid. You’ll be sorry you did this and not just once.’” 72 To avoid unwanted sexual contact, some girls resorted to trickery, taking advantage of the men’s horror of venereal diseases: An urka was pestering her, insinuating himself. The girl initially shrank away, then seemed to accept his coming on, adding that she could not hide the fact, she had to tell him that she was . . . sick. This trick usually worked: the urka let out a stream of disgustingly foul language, turned on his heel, and left. But I also know of other cases where they decided to kill the supposedly sick girl, so that she wouldn’t infect anyone.73

Another prisoner, Stefaniia Shuplat (Bodnar), was forced to fight off the advances of a foreman.74 Kateryna Maksymovych tells about how hard it was to resist the tempting proposition of the head of a collective farm when the man offered the exhausted girl food and freedom of movement in exchange for sexual services: In the middle of the night, the supervisor called me. . . . On the table was some bread, a bottle of vodka, and a sausage. I had not seen this kind of food for seven years at that point. . . . I sat down and gripped my knees with my hands to control myself. The boss

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

425

proposed getting me a pass so that I could freely leave the special quarters. In return, he proposed that I come to him from time to time. There were plenty of girls in the camps who would give themselves over for a piece of bread. I answered him: “I don’t need your pass. I won’t come to see you.” I was afraid that he would transfer me farther into Siberia. He didn’t.75

For some women who were on the edge of survival, however, this kind of choice was acceptable, and its pragmatism outweighed traditional moral imperatives.76 Meshko was amazed that even pregnant women were prepared to trade their bodies: “They would find themselves new ‘admirers’ for useful purposes. These women here were in great demand.” 77 The situation was worsened by the fact that there were significantly fewer women in the camps than there were men, so they were seen as a scarce resource. This, in combination with the unlimited power of the men in the camp management and security details, permitted these men to ‘dispose’ of this resource for their own purposes: to reward the men underneath them, to incentivize them, or to deprive them of access to it.78 Surovtsova mentions a few instances of trafficking in women. One time, when a few prisoners were being sent off on a “business trip,” komandirovka, to cut hay at a sovkhoz farm, she writes: The agronomist chose as his concubine a plump, rosy-­cheeked bytovik called Klava. The rest behaved modestly. From time to time, somewhere from neighboring work sites, men would show up, bringing requests, and then his concubine would be “loaned” to them for other work. Parties and other activities took place in an abandoned, half-­derelict hut. This Klava was designated our unit leader.79

Another incident took place during an overnight stop of a walking transit, when the women discovered that, “with the commander’s consent, one of the convoyed women spent the night with the foreman, to make sure he had a good time.” 80 For some women,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

426

such a situation was quite acceptable and even desirable. In this way, they had certain advantages over the rest of the prisoners. For others, however, the thought of it was horrifying. The camp staff and guards often abused their positions by pushing the women into prostitution by “calling them out for night work” or “to clean their living quarters,” for which they promised the women a “generous” reward.81 Kersnovskaya remembers how, when she was in a penalty cell, and after an entire day of labor, all the women were called in to wash the floor in the security detail’s barracks. In fact, it turned out that the women, who were generally criminal elements, were needed for sexual services, for which they were given some treats.82 Many a woman was faced with propositions of that nature. Valentyna Starik-­Palamarchuk recalls the horror that gripped her when she understood just how defenseless she was in the face of the sexual harassment of the men in power at the camps: The overseer . . . came up to me and said: “If you’re willing to be my woman, I have access to the kitchen, and I can give you half a pail of soup every day if you want.” And this is when I was overwhelmed by horror. . . . I suddenly saw a terrible abyss and no way out. Another woman came to my defense: “No, no,” she said, “that’s my daughter.” He answered: “Watch out that some thug doesn’t grab you. You’ll be sorry.” 83

It was very difficult to avoid these kinds of relations, but sometimes women who had influential friends or defenders in the camp would manage to do so, as was the case with Kokhans´ka: The foreman told me that, if I didn’t agree to be his lover, he would transfer me to hard labor. . . . I refused the “honor.” After work, I went into the change room, and there, fortunately, was Fed´ko. I told him about everything, and he moved me into the zone, into the uniform repair shop.84

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

427

Nor was it only the guards or men of other ethnicities that tended to abuse the Ukrainian women prisoners sexually. In her memoirs of daily life in the camp in Vorkuta, Kokhans´ka mentions the immoral behavior of a former Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) sotnyk (commander), who abused the trust of the girls who were politicals, pretended to be in love, seduced them, and then dropped them.85 In addition to suffering sexual harassment and abuse within the camps, the women were also trapped in prostitution outside the camps. Barbara Skarga writes about this phenomenon: Meanwhile, ordinary prostitution flourished. It could only take place outside the zone, during work, everywhere where the women’s work crews interacted with civilian personnel. The civilian personnel were mostly drivers, sometimes engineers, specialists, and so on. Some women had no qualms about relations with convoy escorts or overseers, even. We watched these feats with complete indifference. . . . The oldest profession in the world always manages to find those eager to engage in it. The only thing that changes is the price. In the camp, a piece of sausage was considered excellent pay.86

What might at first glance look like the voluntary consent of a woman to give herself in exchange for food or clothing is really not a reflection of free will but an act of desperation, a way to survive in a situation that offers no other alternatives. Prostitution for the sake of survival is widespread in those places and those times when women are in extremely difficult material circumstances and are dependent entirely on the men who have all the power and resources in their hands. As to lesbian relations, Anne Applebaum claims—and some male memoirists confirm—that these were widespread in the women’s zones.87 However, in their memoirs, Ukrainian former prisoners extremely rarely mention this practice. Indeed, one of the only testimonies is a brief remark from Blavats´ka, who

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

428

specifically mentions the unusual nature of this kind of practice among Ukrainian women: In this international camp, I came across a phenomenon that I had never before had the slightest inkling of. I had no idea that something like this existed in the world. Lesbian love. As far as I know, in the northern camp where there were only Ukrainian women, this did not take place. Here [in Mordovia], we had fifteen–twenty lesbian couples. The camp rules not only forbade this, but such relations were persecuted mercilessly. Still, the foreign women engaged in it.88

Adi Kuntsman discovered that memoirists tend to describe homosexual relations, which were most widespread among the criminal element, mostly in negative terms, with a tinge of disgust. In her opinion, this suggests that they wanted very much to distance themselves from this environment psychologically and physically.89 At the same time, despite the prohibition of homosexual contact in the Soviet Union, the camp managers themselves tended to be fairly indulgent toward such relations. Persecution of heterosexual relations was far more common—most likely, say scholars, because of the economic impact of pregnancy.90 Conversely, some non-­Ukrainian memoirists who describe the scale of prostitution and lesbianism among the prisoners do mention Ukrainian women. Nadezhda Ulanovskaia writes: “The Ukrainians were mostly rural women and religious at that, resistant to moral degradation, and immune to all kinds of camp sicknesses—informing, stealing, consorting with the higher-­ups, and, ultimately, lesbianism, too.” 91 At the same time, many recollections note that the women did have close relations with other female prisoners. The memoirists often and openly mention tactile contact: they hugged one another, they stroked one another on the head, snuggled, slept next to one another, often under a single blanket, and so on. Still, there is no hint whatsoever of anything erotic in these recollections. On the

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

429

contrary, the women emphasize the mother-­daughter or sisterly nature of the relationships that included such completely chaste forms of touch. Ol´ha Matseliukh-­Horyn´ describes her feelings upon meeting with her friends in a camp for invalids: “They welcomed me with such a warm, tender, unobtrusive curiosity and concern. I had reached an oasis of pure, selfless love, as though in the embrace of a mother who was protecting me.” 92 To emphasize the moral superiority and decency of Ukrainian women who were political prisoners, some memoirists openly contrast the modesty of these women with the debauchery and immorality of the bytovichki and blatnye who deliberately used sexual relations with men for gain.93 Still, the fact that the Ukrainian memoirists never mention lesbian relations does not necessarily mean that they did not exist. Skarga, a Polish woman who once participated in the Home Army and generally wrote very favorably of the Ukrainian women and her relations with them in captivity, nevertheless does mention this kind of practice: I had already encountered this kind of love in my first camp. There was a young Lithuanian by the name of Grazyna with an obvious inclination toward sapphism. . . . She drew the youngest of our young Polish girls into the whirlpool of her pleasures. . . . Around 1950, the camp was filled with “twenty-five-year-sentence prisoners” . . . as at that time the lively, resurgent nationalist movements in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Estonia were being crushed. . . . Among those youngsters were many girls who were seventeen–eighteen years old, were typically from the countryside, from Ukrainian hamlets across Podillia and Volhynia. . . . It was sad to watch how some of the youngest ones suddenly forged intimate relations among themselves. True, there weren’t that many of them, and I suspect that they did not suffer any great psychological devastation, although they were filled with nigh-­hysterical passion.94

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

430

Moreover, Skarga acknowledges, “adult women and married women showed no inclination to this and endured forced celibacy fairly well.” 95 The Polish memoirist did not approve of lesbian relations, but she was also not categorically judgmental, referring to them alternately as “perverse” and as “love.” The overall tone of her writing is sympathetic. Skarga also acknowledges that, while these relations filled her with disgust back then, in time her attitude changed: Today, looking at it from a distance, I feel understanding toward those girls. They were desperately grabbing at some substitute love in order to forget themselves a little and feel closeness to another human being. Back then, however, I did not understand and, like others, often made fun of these couples in love.96

The former prisoners generally avoid direct judgment, even when they are aware of the moral decline of some women. Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko describes her experience: In Norilsk, the crews were around 85 percent women from western Ukraine. Morally, they were a step above the Soviet women. There were very few informers among the Ukrainian women, but some were still bribed and made mistresses of the bosses. Still, it’s not my business to judge them because I’m not God.97

Although the Gulag administration required camp management to keep prisoners strictly separated according to sex, in practice the prisoners found ways to connect intimately. Sometimes these relations took on orgiastic forms. Surovtsova recalls: Meeting with men was prohibited. But some types of work took place without escorts: the stables became a traditional, almost legal brothel, as did the dairy farm and many other work sites where the women could meet with the men. The women were bought and

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

431

sold, raped, and, less often, loved. By whom? The sick, the imprisoned, even the riflemen.98

In the extreme conditions of the Gulag, finding themselves on the edge of survival, women were sometimes forced to choose between the integrity of their bodies and food, clothing, benefits, or better conditions. In fact, for many this was a choice without a choice, because refusing sexual relations with men who were in powerful positions could mean death. For some prisoners, prostitution became a survival strategy in the Gulag. RAPE Given the administrative lawlessness that defined the Gulag camps, women were especially vulnerable precisely because of their sex, and most, if not all, of them experienced sexual abuse in one form or another.99 Still, only a few were willing to openly talk or write about this in their later recollections. With the men, it was a different story: the men’s memoirs more often tell about rapes that they happened to witness during imprisonment. In her landmark study of Gulag daily life, Applebaum quotes the memoirs of several men who were political prisoners—Solzhenitsyn, Edward Buca, and Lev Razgon—who describe the criminal element’s habitual practice of gang rape of women prisoners during transits, in camp barracks, and on job sites, while guards and camp staff looked the other way.100 Polish memoirist Gustaw Herling-­Grudziński describes several violent gang rapes of female prisoners by male convicts that took place with the tacit support of other prisoners and camp staff.101 Vladimir Kuzin quotes the memoirs of two other men, Sozerko Malsagoff and Boris Shiriaiev, about the specific practices of constant sexual violence against defenseless women by camp guards.102 Moreover, these and other memoirists report that the civilian personnel in the zones and camps tolerated sexual violence on the part of prisoners because they themselves—broadly

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

432

and with complete impunity—abused their positions and power, forcing imprisoned women to prostitute themselves. In her documentary writing, Elena Glinka paints a horrific picture of how male prisoners committed a massive brutal rape of women prisoners in the hold of a ship that was carrying them all to their place of incarceration, while the guards looked the other way.103 Still, this is, in fact, the only record by a woman that is so open and shocking in its realism. A similar instance of mass rape of women by male criminals is described by Polish political Janusz Bardach in his memoirs, which Applebaum cites.104 Indeed, this apparently fairly common phenomenon was even given a name—the Kolyma tram. It would not be overly presumptuous to assume that Ukrainian women probably found themselves in similar situations, but none of the available memoirs mention anything of this nature as something the writer herself experienced.105 Horchyns´ka (Demchuk) describes the transporting of female prisoners by barge on the Yenisey River from Krasnoiarsk to Norilsk. During this convoy, some women were gang-­raped by criminal elements. The memoirist, who was herself in this situation, reports that the rest of the women were able to fight off their attackers and get the Ukrainian male politicals to help them make sure that the overseers punished the guilty.106 Still, this is probably the only recollection of such an incident on a barge that regularly transported female prisoners. Horchyns´ka (Demchuk) mentions the actual crime in a single sentence: “The girls who were near the bulkhead became the victims of violence.” Her focus is, rather, on the fending-­off, exposure, and punishment of the offenders. In her study of women’s experience in the Gulag, which was based on a considerable body of mainly Russian-­language women’s memoirs, Shapovalov claims that, in the camps, the threat of rape was an unavoidable part of daily life for the imprisoned women. . . . Among the forms of violence, the subject of rape was the most taboo, and most of those who wrote about it

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

433

were witnesses, not victims. . . . The humiliation and shame, as well as fear of public condemnation and lack of understanding, were a personal tragedy that forced women to bury it all through the defensive mechanism of denial.107

The author was able to find about a dozen testimonies about rape and forced sexual relations. Still, they all reflect the experience of Russian or Russian-­speaking women. The absence of testimony and the avoidance or silencing of this topic in the memoirs of Ukrainian women might have been both deliberate self-­censorship and the consequence of subconscious defensive mechanisms to suppress the memory of the traumatic experience. It would be very difficult to see such gaps in narration as conclusive evidence that Ukrainian women did not experience this kind of sexual abuse. The women were at risk of being raped even at the investigation stage: Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Shandarak-­Brovchenko, Mariia Hrendysh, and Hanna Zelena (Abramchuk) all mention failed attempts by NKVD investigating officers to rape them during interrogations.108 One of the only direct testimonies of gang rape of a female detainee by investigators is in the recollections of Zonia Pyliavs´ka about what she witnessed in the Chortkiv Remand Prison in Ternopil Oblast: “They tied her hands behind her back and threw her on the floor. While one sat on her legs, the other knelt above her [and forced himself into her mouth].” 109 While rapes themselves are rarely recounted in the memoirs, there are a number of mentions of unsuccessful attempts to abuse and rape the women, confirming just how defenseless and vulnerable the women prisoners in the system really were. In one of the earliest general studies of women’s experience in the Gulag, Martha Chyz reported, based on personal recollections, that a few dozen young Ukrainian women personally experienced sexual torture, although she did not state what kind.110 There are also a slew of recollections of threats of rape in both the prisons and the camps, such as an incident described by Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk): “They led us girls under guard to the bathhouse to

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

434

wash, and the minute we had undressed, four men broke in. We started to scream and throw water at them. The overseers ran in and took them away.” 111 Surovtsova describes a number of incidents. In one, on the way to the bathhouse, “some other women joined [them], and they were completely terrified. Along the way, they explained that, a few days earlier, two young women had been raped in the bathhouse.” In another case, she and her cellmates almost became the victims of gang rape when the prison’s criminal elements tried to take apart the dilapidated wall of their cell in the middle of the night. At that point, it really struck Su­ rovtsova that the “unpleasant fate of the ‘tram’ awaited them.” 112 The story of Tamara Petkevych is illustrative: together with her friends, she became a witness to—and almost a victim of—mass nighttime violent rape by criminals who broke into their barracks. The only thing that saved them was that among the men there turned out to be political prisoners who were their countrymen.113 Just how high the risk was and how unprotected the women were become clear in a story told by Vislapuu (Hryb) about an urka in a transit camp who came unimpeded into the women’s barrack every night: He would pick a girl and lie with her. When one girl didn’t want to let him have his way, he cut her with a knife. So it happened that one night he came and lay down next to a nun. The light was on, and he raped her before our very eyes, and the guards paid no attention. I was just a few beds over from her, and I prayed. I was afraid that at some point he would get to me, too.114

Tamara Kryshtal´s´ka (Iemchyk) also tersely mentions such nighttime raids of the women’s barracks, as well as the ensuing pregnancies.115 Once in a while, there are stories about rape incidents heard second- and thirdhand. Former prisoner Mariia Fliunt shares a story in her memoirs that was told by her sister, who had heard it from another girl who was in exile in the Kolyma region:

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

435

When she arrived, she told me, saying: “There was such a gang there. They kept raping our girls. And any girl who resisted, refused to give herself, they cut her head off and put it on a stump, and that was that.” That was in the transit camp in that village, Susuman, where she had been exiled. There was a certain deputy director of a store, and he said: “Don’t touch that one. She’s going to be mine.” And later he said, “Slava, you have a choice: either you’re mine or else—you want to end up on a stump?” And she said: “What was I to do? I wanted to live.” 116

The rare and terse testimony of Ukrainian women about sexual violence as a part of the women’s experience as prisoners does not reveal all aspects of this phenomenon and its consequences. However, even these recollections, in combination with the memoirs of other women and of men, give a clear impression of the constant threat and risk that many young women in captivity felt, and the lack of rights and defenselessness of women prisoners against those who abused them. The abusers included other prisoners, employees in the prison system, and Gulag staff who enjoyed impunity and had free rein in the remand prisons, the transit points, and the camps. The issue of systemic, gender-­ based violence toward Ukrainian women in the Gulag needs further research. RELATIONS WITH MEN ERSATZ FAMILIES IN CAPTIVITY Although male and female prisoners were kept separate and had neither the right nor the opportunity to directly communicate, the need for this kind of contact was clearly present and persistent. Not only is this evident in the testimony of former prisoners, but the list of demands prisoners presented to the Gulag administration during the 1954 Kengir camp uprising included this point: “To allow free communication between men and women.” 117

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

436

The main reason why women sought contact with the male prisoners was the hope of finding their loved ones—a husband, a father, or a brother—or at least some information about what had happened to them. Beyond this, the Ukrainian women and men, who were mostly repressed for having participated in the nationalist underground, considered even those who were nominally strangers to be “one of them” in the ethnic, religious, and political sense. They felt a strong kinship through their common fate and, therefore, a strong sense of compassion for the sufferings of their fellow prisoners. Remarks about the fact that imprisoned men sought contact with women because they needed their emotional support can be found in various memoirs. Meshko remembers an incident in a transit camp: Some guy who looked like an old beggar began talking to me in a way that caught my eye. Feeling pity for him, I came down from my bunk and realized that he really just wanted to hear a good word from a woman’s lips, that he dreamed of this after enduring the long years of oblivion in imprisonment and being at the end of his spiritual and physical tether. . . . He turned out to be a Ukrainian from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, my age, yet destroyed to the point of savagery.118

Surovtsova was somehow designated as the cook on komandirovka, a remote assignment, and she spent an entire summer at a men’s haying site. There, she felt very deeply what her feminine presence meant to the male prisoners: I was supposed to return to the camp. . . . The boys looked crestfallen. They were used to me like a shadow of home comfort, although other than furnaces and bonfires, there was nothing between us. . . . Still, the occasional laundered shirt, a sewn patch, a button attached, and, most importantly, a few heartfelt words that don’t come along that often on the camp trail.119

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

437

This mutual need to receive and give care in the camps was sometimes achieved through de facto marriages. Solzhenitsyn wrote about women who were no longer young but who entered into relations with men: “These women did not seek passion, but to satisfy their need to look after someone, to keep him warm, to sacrifice their own rations in order to feed him up, to wash and darn for him.” 120 Needless to say, this need applied even more to young people. Surovtsova recalls: “I’ll just get married!” This camp saying covered those situations. After all, people were young and not always completely worn out, and life wanted its own. Obsessed, they would take advantage of fences, gaps in wires, taiga pathways, and yards—and so forbidden love flourished like wild thistles.121

The need for love and sexual relations didn’t simply die in the camps, but instead took on other forms and manifestations. Some of it may have been outside social and moral norms, but it never lost its emotional substance. In her memoirs, Hava Volovich, a Jewish woman born in Ukraine, notes the damaging impact of the camps on human nature: There was only one thing that these stock-­breeders from hell could not exterminate: the sex drive. Indifferent to regulations, to the threat of the punishment cells, to hunger and humiliation alike, it lived and flourished far more openly and directly than it does in freedom. Things that a free person might have thought about a hundred times before doing happened here as simply as they would between stray cats. No, this wasn’t depravity of the kind you might expect in a brothel. This was real, “legitimate” love, with fidelity, jealousy, suffering, with the pain of parting, and with the terrible “crowning joy” of love—the birth of children.122

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

438

Despite all the formal prohibitions, de facto camp families managed to take shape, and some of them were distinguished by strong, genuine feelings between the partners, even without regard to striking social differences—ethnic, educational, class, professional, religious, and so on. In some cases, they even developed between individuals of differing legal status, that is, individuals who were imprisoned and individuals who were free. Surovtsova describes an entire series of such families that, thanks to the devotion of the partners and their mutual concern, survived the hardest of times and even raised common children, including children born in prison.123 Skarga dedicates several pages in her memoirs to the relations of camp “marriages.” Such partnerships were based on mutual commitment of the two individuals, where the man was expected to provide his “wife” with material support such as food, clothing, and footwear, while the woman was supposed to fulfill her “marital obligations” in addition to offering day-­to-­day signs of care and concern. Although intimate relations were prohibited in the camps, couples always managed to find opportunities: Love blossoms in public, without any embarrassment. In half an hour, the deed is done. . . . The “married couples” take advantage of every possible opportunity and can depend on the discretion of their neighbors. No one informs on lovers. Because today the girl is yours, and tomorrow she’s mine. The women also close ranks. They warn about dangers and generally make it easier for one another to have those pleasant half hours.124

Although such camp partnerships would offer the women certain advantages and resources, including protection from unwanted sexual advances by other men, Solzhenitsyn was of the opinion that the main basis for such ersatz families, as a rule, was less sexual relations and more mutual support and care. The women, he thought, found particular comfort in caring for “their man.” 125 Skarga is inclined to think similarly: “Who would not want to

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

439

have someone close, someone who would smile warmly, say something tender, worry about them? In the coldness of mutual indifference, every warm word, every pleasant smile, let alone love, was invaluable.” 126 It is safe to assume that such partnerships gave women the opportunity to create or re-­create something that resembled regular family life, while the adopted role of wife helped them preserve their own gender identity. FRIENDSHIP AND ROMANCE BEHIND BARBED WIRE In the political prisoner subculture of the camps, secret internal correspondence had a special place. It enabled the politicals to keep contact with their parents, their comrades in the national struggle, their friends, and their lovers. It allowed them to exchange information, to share thoughts, memories, dreams, and more. Walli Schliess explains: We corresponded with other camps. This was a basic need for us. . . . And even if there weren’t any acquaintances, in time they were found. We wrote letters back and forth for years with someone without ever knowing what they even looked like. There were many ways to do this, although it was anything but easy.127

Even though communication was strictly prohibited, prisoners from different zones managed to find ways to correspond by exchanging notes, cards, and small gifts.128 Husiak recollects how the initiative to communicate through letters came from men in the neighboring zone: “The men would throw notes at us because every one of them wanted to receive some warm words from a woman. We corresponded with our boys and kept their spirits up.” 129 Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna describes the mutual longing for contact among prisoners thus:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

440

Over the high fence, notes, letters, and drawings would come flying at us, as well as works of art from great masters of the creative word, who had been thrown here for punishment. . . . The girls would catch these, their missives, with frozen, shaking hands, save them from the watchful eyes of the overseers and informers, read and reread them, learn them by heart, and pass them along to others to read.130

Through this exchange of notes, people would get to know one another and become close, trustworthy friends, maintaining open and regular contact over long periods of time. Zaіachkivs´ka-­ Mykhal´chuk describes how, thanks to a random attempt to find someone from her family in the neighboring men’s zone, an intense correspondence developed among the imprisoned women and men, who exchanged recollections of their time in the nationalist underground. Over time, correspondence allowed these relations to grow into a strong friendship between prisoners who “had not met even once in person, yet developed a strong trust in one another.” Wanting to keep the spirits of their fellow prisoners up, the girls would embroider shirts and secretly pass them along to the guys.131 Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) also writes about such a genuine friend with whom she corresponded: “Although we never saw each other and our life paths never crossed . . . every word of support was necessary in order to survive, to not break under the burden of life in captivity.” 132 Skarga writes about the significance of such correspondence: The quantity of correspondence that was thrown over fences every evening was remarkable. Nearly every woman wanted to write, every woman wanted a friend of her own who would write her some kind words. The girls who didn’t know anyone looked for contacts through intermediaries. The boys would also write: “Is there a Lithuanian girl among you from near Panevezys? I’d like to correspond with her.” And we would find a Lithuanian, and they

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

441

would get to know each other this way. . . . There were specialists at tossing among us. All it took was a small stone.133

Cases of real friendship and mutual support between women and men were not that rare and were not always related to sexual relations. Kokhans´ka writes about such a friend: “My memories of him remain the memories of a real, selfless friend.” 134 The memoirist recalls another situation, as well, when a guard fell so deeply in love with her that he was prepared to wait for her release in order to marry her then: He came up to me and, somewhat at a loss and shy, said that if I would give him my word to marry him after I was released, then he would wait for me and would not marry until then. I told him that I had twelve more years of prison ahead of me, and five years of exile after that—and who knew if I would even live that long. And anyway, it was impossible, given that he represented the penal system, and I was a prisoner.135

In both cases, the initiative came from the men, who, moreover, treated her with utmost respect although she was a prisoner. Sometimes camp acquaintanceships evolved differently: young people not only fell in love but even married secretly, and some such couples had children. All this was going on when the men’s and women’s zones in the camps were completely separated. Testimony from eyewitnesses and documents attest to the marriage of a number of prison couples during the Kengir uprising. Prior to that, they had corresponded for a long time.136 The story of Ol´ha Liads´ka is a classic example: After the uprising, I was already pregnant with Olenka. . . . We came to the special camp for mothers with children, and there, in February 1955, I gave birth to her. . . . I had gotten to know Olenka’s father in the camp. At that point, I had never seen Fedir himself. I had only met mutual friends. These friends told him about me, and he wrote me a letter. Later on, I went to clean the snow in the

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

442

zone, and that’s where we saw each other for the first time. . . . Fedir said that we had to get married. He was a Catholic. And so Fedir’s friend, being a priest, married us. . . . Fedir was actually a surgeon who had been imprisoned for “suspicion of espionage” in Berlin during the war. Fedir was released earlier, in 1955, and went to West Germany.137

In some cases, a genuine camp friendship grew into deep love, which, in turn, led to making a family after release.138 The story of Hanna Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka is very moving. She and her future husband met by accident in a camp in Norilsk: We prison girls . . . decided to bring to our comrades in ideology and the struggle in the men’s camp at least some small joy so that, for a moment at least, they could forget about the horrifying reality and fly home to their native land in their thoughts, to Ukraine. Each of us found some scrap of cloth and embroidered a handkerchief, with our own initials in one corner. Having prayed together, we sent the gifts . . . through one of the escorts—among whom there were some decent people.139

The men parceled out the gifts, and her hanky ended up with Iaroslav Skavins´kyi. The two prisoners began to correspond secretly, and when she left the camp in 1956, Hanna waited another six years for her beloved to be released so that they could get married—never having even set eyes on him. A similar story about an accidental acquaintanceship that grew from an exchange of notes into real love is depicted in Stefaniia Kvas’s memoirs.140 Poliuha (Masiuk) also got to know her future husband, Liubomyr, through exchanging notes that they would leave in secret hidey-­ holes in the bathroom.141 But there were also cases in which the girls deliberately avoided any romantic relations while imprisoned. Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna met her future husband, a doctor and a Belarusian political prisoner, in one of the Minlag camps near Inta. Initially, the girl ignored all indications that the man had fallen in love

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

443

with her: “I did not answer his notes and letters. Sometimes I wouldn’t even read them, because I thought that in these inhuman conditions, to speak about personal feelings and experiences was inappropriate.” 142 Khrashchevs´ka made a similar decision: “We agreed with Ihor, in complete seriousness, that there could not be any relations between us other than friendship. I promised myself that until I was free again, I would not allow myself romantic relations with anyone.” 143 Possibly such a position was partly motivated by the line of behavior that some girls in the nationalist underground chose to adopt, deliberately refusing any romantic relations, sexual ties, or steps to establish a family during the struggle for an independent Ukrainian state. Prison became an extension of this, as, for them, imprisonment was one of the stages of the struggle.144 However, Skarga explains the decision to turn down romantic relations as a purely psychological defense mechanism, the desire to avoid suffering the separation that was inevitable while incarcerated: “No, it’s better not to love. It’s better to preserve the cold in your heart and not to suffer separation. The prisoner thinks that love will bring some rays of brightness into the cloudy days. But when this ray dies, the night will become even darker and colder.” 145 STARTING A FAMILY AFTER RELEASE Tracking the life trajectories of female political prisoners shows that the absolute majority got married within the first few years after release. Often this event took place while they were still in forced exile, a period during which they were prohibited from returning to their homeland.146 The case of Slobodian-­Kovaliuk is fairly typical. She spent nine years in hard labor and after release married a man who had been imprisoned, just like her, in Kolyma, which is where their daughter was born.147 Kateryna Andrusyshyn writes: “In 1955, the massive release of Gulag prisoners began. . . . We stayed in Norilsk to finish building the

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

444

city and its factories. . . . How to start living again? Some would go and get married right away, others still thought about things, trying to figure out how they needed to be, going forward.” 148 Of course, when they were released, the former prisoners generally had no means of surviving—not even a ticket home. And so many women stayed for some time in the same general area, working for local enterprises, as Kokhans´ka relates: “Our girls worked as civilian personnel and were paid rather well. After the mass releases began, few of them came back to Ukraine. They stayed to work in the Vorkuta mines to provide for themselves. There, the pay was high, because there was a ‘North’ dividend.” 149 Young people of both sexes desperately sought contact after years of being deprived of the company of the opposite sex. Once the mass review of cases and the eased camp regimen were introduced in the mid‑1950s, young people were in a rush to establish contact, get to know one another, and start meeting secretly, as Kokhans´ka writes: Once all the watchtowers were empty, boys from all the mines would come out to the fence around our camp on Sundays, looking for landswomen and getting to know the girls. Some of them tore down the wire fence and made their way into the zone. On Sundays, nearly all the girls had permission to go outside the zone. They would go to town and to the township and meet with the boys there.150

Yet there were also other cases, when the former politicals found one another and married back in Ukraine. For instance, Iuliіa Budzanovych returned to her homeland after release. There, she was courted by a former political prisoner who had come home on a break from Inta, where he had settled and found work after being released. Despite the fact that the young people barely knew each other, she accepted his offer of marriage:

Figure 6.2. Former political prisoners S. Moisein and her husband, A. Dovzhuk, after release, Inta, 1956. Collection of the Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners, Ternopil Oblast.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

446

Everybody liked him, and so I didn’t have much choice. And so I chose my destiny. He went back to Inta and sent me money for the trip. . . . It was difficult to go back to that awful Siberia, but there was no other way out. . . . My husband met me very nicely. I arrived on 27 December, and we registered our marriage on 31 December.151

In her memoirs, Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka lists a whole series of families that were established by former Ukrainian politicals immediately after being freed: The mass release of prisoners began. Everywhere you could hear Ukrainian being spoken, and all my girlfriends were free. Having been imprisoned for ten years, the boys looked at the girls like icons. And so they began to make their families: Iryna and Iaroslav Koval´chuk, Olenka and Kuz´ma Khobzei, Iryna and Mykhailo Vivcharyk, Vira and Mykola Drozd, Dariia and Liubomyr Poliuha, Nadiia and Iaroslav Volians´kyi, Halyna and Iaroslav Hasiuk, and Halyna and Oleksa Brys.152

In rare cases, some women and men were able to preserve feelings that had grown between them before they were imprisoned, to carry them through prisons and camps, and finally, after being released, to make proper families. This was true of Olena Severyn and Kuz´ma Khobzei, who had met back in 1942 and had both participated in the nationalist underground—for which they were, in fact, imprisoned in the Gulag. They were able to reestablish contact and correspond while they were incarcerated in different camps. In 1956, when they were released, they got married, as Khobzei later wrote about his wife in his memoirs: “Our friendship grew into love, and we got married as landsfolk and like-­minded people with the same plans for the future. Our identical past and our common belief in a better future for our Ukraine helped us form a strong Ukrainian family.” 153

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

447

Paraska Protsak’s situation was similar. Back in the early 1940s, she and her husband had been members of the nationalist underground and had secretly married. Only fifteen years later, after the two were released from the Gulag, were they able to officially register their marriage and start a real family in Vorkuta, where their children were born.154 Kateryna Mandryk-­ Kuibida married Stepan Kuibida, whom she had met in the UPA in 1945; fate brought them back together again in Inta.155 Stefaniia Dzendrovs´ka-­Berkut’s fiancé was also a political prisoner, and they did not see each other for twelve years. They got married immediately after being released.156 Some women who had been imprisoned made families not just with former political prisoners but specifically with men with whom they had started a relationship back in the camps. A former supracounty leader in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Mariia Nych-­Strakhaniuk, tells her story: “My husband . . . was sentenced to twenty-­three years. We had met back in the Norilsk Shyriaev Prison. So I waited outside for him for twelve years. . . . We shared the same views, aspirations, and understanding. Prior to his arrest, he was a fighter in the UPA.” 157 Ol´ha Hrosberh-­Nakonechna notes: “Back in Mordovia, I corresponded with a political by the name of Petro Nakonechnyi. He was released in 1957, traveled to me, and we got married.” 158 Mariia Iakovyshyn’s story is quite similar to these. She met her future husband in the camp and waited for him for a number of years after she was released.159 Having lost many years while imprisoned, both younger and older people were in a hurry to live again and wanted to make up for what they had missed while incarcerated, as quickly and as fully as possible. Given the circumstances, it is probably somewhat pointless to talk about romantic feelings between betrothed couples. More than likely, the women and men were driven by the need to take advantage of what was possibly their last chance to live as fully human, to make a family, and to feel the comfort of their own home and the emotional support of a person who

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

448

understood them and shared the experience of captivity. They wanted someone with whom they could build their lives from scratch. Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls how it was with the newly released prisoners: We were no longer those merry, jokey girls and boys we had once been. Everyone was thinking how to live from now on. We got engaged, yet we talked not about sweet nothings, but about who was where, what we experienced, and I thought, who is he, that boy from another oblast, who is his family. . . . In the end, we were united by a common fate. . . . Whoever got married and got a little room was happy that they already had their own corner and their own window. Although we had to start our life together with a single spoon, it brought us immense happiness.160

Just how accidental, or even haphazard, was the choice of a partner can be judged from Surovtsova’s description of how men who had been released earlier and were working in the mines around the outskirts of the town “courted” newly released girls: The next day, the pilgrimage of suitors began. Cars would drive up, they would come to an agreement, and one after another the girls drove away to the mines. Once there was a mistake: some Man´ka was taken instead of an An´ka. . . . “Ah, doesn’t matter!” the boy wearing a cap waved breezily with his hand and drove off with Man´ka down the dusty road to the mine. . . . In another barrack housing only mothers with infants, there were equally strange scenes. A random suitor who had just driven up would show up in the room where the women were sleeping. “Will you marry me or not?” he would ask some girl he woke up, with barely a look at her face. “Well, all right,” she would reply, barely opening her sleepy eyes, and start to dress. Or else a categorical “No!” would come

from some sleepyhead, and he would turn in another direction.161

6. Body, Sexuality, and Love

449

It seems that, for many former prisoners, the matter of a conscious, well-­planned choice of a future husband was irrelevant. Mariia Vahula recalls one incident at a settlement in Siberia just after being released: After a few days, some middle-­aged guy walks up to us, from a village about forty kilometers [25 mi.] from Kazachinsk, a Belarusian who has been in exile for some time already and had a small farmstead. He found out that new settlers had arrived and was looking for a housewife. He found Hannusia attractive, and she agreed to go with him.162

There were even riskier marriages. One girl who was released in 1956, Hania Tkachuk from Iasinia, describes in a letter to her girlfriend how couples hooked up among young people who had just come out of imprisonment: We were brought by train to Altai in some village where they opened the women’s car and the men’s. The men surrounded the women’s car. As soon as some girl decides to come out of the car, a line forms, and fights almost break out as they shout: “Mine!” The girls stopped coming out, because there were only strangers near the car. Then they began to shout, “Boys, where are you?” That’s when our [Ukrainian] boys, who were more in number, pushed the foreigners away and also formed a line, getting whoever happened to come out, and took the girls away. Hania was taken by some nice-­looking boy from the Carpathians called Andrii.163

Basically, the women did not have the opportunity to get to know the men better and carefully choose a partner or future husband, but they at least wanted to make sure that their future would be linked to a Ukrainian man, whom they could trust more. A shared ethnicity, world view, and values had to provide the basis for family understanding.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

450

Still, possibly the most oft-­mentioned factor for those young people newly released from the Gulag was their common experience of incarceration. From the biographies of women who were political prisoners, we find out that most of them married the same kind of former political prisoner. The fact of having also experienced the camps and belonging to the “Kolyma fellowship”—the special counterculture of political prisoners that formed in the Gulag 164—gave young people the basis for better understanding in their newly formed families, replacing romantic feelings in the face of widespread rejection of former “cons” in Soviet society at large. The problems of reintegrating into a normal life, which all the former political prisoners ran into, sooner or later, were much easier to overcome together with a person who had experienced a similar situation and with whom one shared a common past and common identity.

CHAPTER 7

MOTHERHOOD BEHIND BARS: A CURSED BLESSING

Figure 7.1. “Guardian Angel, I pray to Thee, protect my daughter Myrosia. Prison memento, 1949.” Embroidery (fragment) by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923), made at the Chortkiv Prison, 1949. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

What did it mean to be a mother while imprisoned? The experience of motherhood as a prisoner differed from woman to woman and was often painful and even tragic. For the majority of women, the forced orphaning of their children was the most powerful stimulus to survive the Gulag. Yet there were also stories with relatively happy endings. Born in 1919 to a nationally minded Ukrainian family in Sniatyn, Transcarpathia, Ievheniia Andrusiak met her future husband, Vasyl´ Andrusiak, when she was nineteen. He was an active member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), eventually becoming a colonel in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Upon meeting him, she began to cooperate with the nationalist underground, and in 1944 she went into the deep underground. In May 1945, the couple married, and shortly afterward, the young woman became pregnant. During the last months of her pregnancy, she had to hide in a very small bunker, suffering from hunger. On 10 March 1946, she gave birth to her son at the house of villagers who supported the insurgents. Shortly afterward, she found out that her husband had been killed in battle even before she went into labor. For a few months, the mother and infant fled from persecution, but NKVD caught them in early August 1947. During interrogations, she was threatened: cooperate or lose her child forever. In the end, she was sentenced to ten years in labor camps, while her son was taken away from her and put in an orphanage. Yet Andrusiak never stopped trying to find out what had happened

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

456

to her child. Returning to him gave meaning to her life and was the strongest incentive to survive the Gulag. After her release in 1955, Andrusiak immediately renewed her efforts to find her son. For three more years, she incessantly wrote inquiries, complaints, and appeals to various government agencies and institutions, trying to pick up his trace. It turned out that her son had been taken in by the family of a KGB officer and had already moved to Russia. This did not stop the mother. The courts restored her rights to her child and allowed her to take the boy with her. At that point the boy had been raised in a Russian-­speaking environment for nearly nine years, and he had a different name, and different “parents.” It took Andrusiak considerable time, love, and patience for her and her son to become a real family again. At the end of her memoirs, Andrusiak writes: “I’m happy that the Lord brought my son back to me. He’s a good family man, treats his mother well, and never complained in any way that, because of me, he had never known a mother’s love.” 1 Indeed, it was her son who urged her to write about what she had lived through. Born in 1925, Oleksandra Blavats´ka belonged to a fairly well-­ to-­do intellectual family in the town of Bibrka (not far from Lviv), where her father was a judge. Her mother was actively engaged in the Ukrainian community. After World War II, while she was a student at the conservatory, Blavats´ka was arrested. Although she had had no direct ties to OUN, in June 1946, Blavats´ka was sentenced to ten years of labor camps. After a number of transfers, she found herself in a camp near Sillamäe, on the Gulf of Finland in Estonia, at the beginning of 1947. By lucky coincidence, she was designated to work as a copier in the prison construction office. There, the young woman met her future love, an Estonian by the name of Ivan Mets. Mets had been the director of a huge Soviet supermarket and was sentenced for embezzlement. Before long, their love bore fruit, and by the time Blavats´ka was moved to a camp in Narva, she was pregnant. In December 1948, she gave birth to their daughter, Vira. The child was very

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

457

sickly, but despite her state of health, she and her mother were moved in June 1949 to a camp in Mordovia. That fall, Vira caught scarlet fever and nearly died. Then Blavats´ka got it. When Vira was twenty months old, she was sent away to an orphanage. The mother tried to keep track of her daughter, corresponding semilegally with the staff at the orphanage where her daughter had been placed. Blavats´ka categorically refused several requests from strangers to be allowed to adopt her daughter. In late 1954, Blavats´ka found out that she was about to be released. Like many other mothers who were prisoners, she was moved to the transit camp at the Potma station, where they waited for their children, who were being sent from various orphanages. Blavats´ka recalls with some bitterness her reunion with her child: “Our meeting broke my heart because Vira didn’t recognize me at all. . . . That evening, we put Vira to sleep, and she covered her head . . . cried and kept saying, ‘I want the orphanage.’” 2 Understanding the enormous stress that the little girl was experiencing, the mother showed exceptional patience in order to gradually bring her to the Ukrainian language, which was unfamiliar to her, and to family life, which was equally strange. After many hardships, Blavats´ka was able to return to Lviv. Vira took care of Blavats´ka in her later years, until her death, and eventually published her memoirs. WOMEN WITH CHILDREN IN PRISONS AND DURING TRANSFERS In order to prevent sexual contact among prisoners, combat sexual abuse on the part of camp personnel, and reduce the number of pregnancies and childbirths in the prison system, the Gulag administration took steps to isolate men and women even more in 1947, but it was unable to solve these problems.3 The share of pregnant women among the female prisoners, especially in the postwar years, grew noticeably: from 1 January 1947 to 1 January 1949, it went from 1.55 percent to 1.76 percent.4

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

458

The situation was, in fact, getting worse. Based on a Gulag report from spring 1949, historian Nikita Petrov suggests this dynamic: on 1 January 1948, there were 10,217 women with children and 4,588 pregnant women in the Gulag prison system; one year later these numbers had more than doubled, to 23,790 and 9,300, respectively. The numbers were growing rapidly. Just over the course of 1947, the number of imprisoned mothers increased by 138 percent, while the number of pregnant women grew by 98 percent. As of 1 January 1949, mothers and pregnant women accounted for 6.3 percent of all female prisoners.5 The author of the report believed that this increase was due to the huge number of new prisoners who were mothers with small children or were pregnant at the time of arrest. By 1 January 1952, Gulag camps and colonies were home to 28,219 children who had been born to female prisoners, plus another 11,096 pregnant women.6 If we look back at March 1940, the Gulag had ninety institutions that supported 4,595 children of female prisoners.7 By 1949, there were 234 buildings specially equipped for children, known as children’s homes or orphanages. Special sections of barracks were less common.8 Paradoxically, although it formally prohibited and punished heterosexual relations in captivity, the Gulag system at least structurally supported pregnant women, mothers, and infants by providing better food, lighter work duties, and a network of children’s homes. Of course, the quality of these provisions, in practice, was often miserly and inadequate, but they were there.9 The conditions for pregnant women, childbirth, and infants up to the age of eighteen to twenty-­four months were regulated in Section 4 of the Instructions for the Health Service of the NKVD Prison System of the USSR, set out in a decree issued by the NKVD on 23 October 1940.10 Accordingly, mothers and children were to be kept separately, but necessary living and sanitary conditions were to be provided, along with appropriate nutrition and basic medical care to ensure the health and proper development of infants. In addition to providing clothing, beds, bedding, spacious

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

459

and warm rooms, regular hygienic procedures, and food appropriate to the age group, the instructions also required toys and daily outdoor walks. Importantly, this document gave imprisoned mothers the right not only to breastfeed several times a day, but also to spend time with their children: Imprisoned mothers shall be outside for walks in the open air in the courtyard together with their children, two times a day (mornings and afternoons). The open courtyards should have access to sunshine, to have grass and sand, and to be equipped with benches for sitting. Imprisoned mothers with children are allowed to sit with their children, to lead them by the hand, to play with their children in the sand, and so on.11

In practice, however, these requirements were ignored almost everywhere: the memoirs of women regarding their experience of motherhood in captivity reveal the inhuman attitude of the Soviet regime, not just toward the imprisoned women, but also toward their infants, who, at least formally, were free Soviet citizens. Possibly the most tragic fate for a woman was to be arrested when she was pregnant or had an infant in her arms. In Soviet prisons, such women, along with their children, were kept in general cells during the investigation process. In addition, their prison ration was not much better than what was given to other prisoners. Mothers in prisons were given neither special food nor any of the items necessary to take care of an infant. Teklia Bekar gave birth to her son while she was being investigated and recalls how it was: There were nine such “lucky girls” like me in the cell: young mothers who had just given birth. These cellmates began to help me whatever way they could. . . . I took my shirt off and my only blouse and tore them for diapers. . . . One of the cellmates gave me a shirt, another a dress. The worst was that someone like me, a woman just after birthing, with an infant that needed to be bathed, was

Figure 7.2. Child’s shirt sewn and embroidered by Iryna Bilins´ka for her daughter Tereza at the Lontskyi Prison in Lviv, 1947. Collection of the Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum.

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

461

given only a single liter of water a day. . . . And so I struggled with my little son in that cell for twenty days. . . . I went to court with my child in my arms.12

As Anna Hoshko-­Kit testifies, conditions were not any better in other remand prisons: Five months have gone by since I’m in prison with the child. My son is growing without any fresh air, sun, or milk. I dry the diapers that I made him from shirts torn in half on my own body. I wash the baby over the slop bucket while the women pour water on him. I couldn’t even sing him a lullaby before he slept. They told me: “Since your baby is breastfeeding, he doesn’t get a ration.” And so Bohdanchyk ate everything with me that I got: prison soups (balanda and borscht) or porridge.13

The memoirs of female political prisoners contain powerful descriptions filled with helpless despair at the inhuman conditions in which such mothers were kept and transported. Moreover, these conditions put the health and life of their infants in constant danger. When writing about the transfers, the women describe the same conditions nearly word for word: they were transported for considerable lengths of time, from a few days to a few weeks, together with their infants, in cattle cars with no sanitation, feeling constant thirst and hunger, and facing unbearable heat and airlessness in the summer and freezing cold in winter. They had to feed their babies with breast milk or primitive food like bread or crackers soaked in water, and dry the wet diapers with their own body heat.14 Sometimes women gave birth right in the cars, and the other women had to take care of the birthing and the newborn on their own, without any medical assistance.15 For instance, Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya helped a woman in labor on the train that was carrying women to their destination.16 Another woman, Nataliia Zaporozhets´, was sent in a convoy when she was in her eighth

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

462

month. After the long transit in a cattle car and in the bed of a truck, her child was stillborn.17 Women who were going through an investigation with an infant in their arms could not always count on the child remaining with them once their trial was over and the sentence was passed. Andrusiak’s baby was taken away immediately after her arrest and placed in a state orphanage, after which the child was adopted by strangers without the mother’s consent.18 After her sentence was handed down, Iryna Bodnar ended up in the Kyiv transit camp with her seven-­month-­old son, to whom she was led every day so that she could breastfeed him, until one day she was informed that the boy had suddenly died. The traumatized mother never was able to find out what happened to her child.19 The best outcome for both the mother and the child in this kind of situation was for the child to be passed on to relatives or friends for raising, in the hope that it would grow up among people who were close to it, in its own culture, and that, after being released, the mother would be able to take the child back. Some detainees, realizing the horrific prospects for their infant in captivity, tried at any price to send the child to freedom. Bekar was able to quietly hand her infant to her mother during her trial.20 Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna recalls one miraculous incident: One of the women gave birth in the cell. The overseers did not know about this. The woman asked her family to bring their care package from home in a big basket. The infant was five days old when the grandmother brought the parcel and secretly took the child home in the basket.21

Yet other mothers found it was extremely difficult to willingly separate from their child and give it to someone else to raise. Because of her very strong maternal feelings, Nataliia Kostenko twice refused to give her newborn son away, either to his father, who already had another family at that point, or to a civilian Polish nurse who was prepared to adopt the little boy. Kostenko

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

463

regretted her decision later, when she and the eight-­month-­old baby, together with other women, were transported for several weeks to Mordovia in a cargo car with almost no food or water: “It was extremely hot and airless. The children began to get sick and to get the runs. The diapers were small rags that we couldn’t wash. There wasn’t even anything to wash them with.” 22 In fact, in the remand prisons and during transit to their place of incarceration, mothers with infants were often in unbearable conditions that put the health and very lives of their children at risk. “MOMMIES” IN THE CAMPS Scholars have noted the ambiguous nature of motherhood in captivity, especially in the Gulag. Liubov´ Maksimova has analyzed women’s experience of motherhood in the camps and identified five main reasons why women got pregnant, either deliberately or involuntarily, and gave birth behind barbed wires: 1.

To ease the camp regimen through lighter work, better food, better housing, and so on.

2. To form a proper family with the father of the child after release from prison. 3. To fulfil the desire to become a mother, fulfill a woman’s role, and overcome loneliness. 4. As a result of survival prostitution for food, clothing, and so on, in a situation where there was no birth control. 5. As a result of sexual abuse—that is, rape.23 Based on the memoirs of Ukrainian prisoners, we can conclude that every one of these reasons was a factor, to a greater or lesser degree, in the camp experience of Ukrainian women. The

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

464

women who experienced motherhood in the camps talk about what they went through in a relatively terse and restrained way, considering the traumatic nature of the experience. Some women, those whose children remained free under the guardianship of their parents, sometimes share their feelings, describing their longing for their child, their worries about its fate, and so on. But most women whose children were growing up without their care quietly avoided the subject of maternity. One example is Oksana Meshko, who spent many years imprisoned in the Gulag and was tellingly dubbed “the Cossack mother” by her biographers.24 In her own fairly extensive memoirs, she wrote not a word about her maternal feelings and worries, despite having been separated from her only son, Oleksandr, who was fifteen years old at the time of her arrest.25 However, prisoners who were not themselves mothers but who, through force of circumstances, saw this phenomenon in the camps up close tended to write a lot and in great detail, describing the living conditions and the women’s care for their children, explaining the rules that governed how mothers could interact with their infants, and the further fate of these women and their children.26 Nadiia Surovtsova, who had no children but who spent many years in the Gulag, dedicates a fair bit of space to her thoughts about motherhood in captivity: What kind of women found themselves being moms? Frankly, very different ones. Some were young bytoviki who . . . would get pregnant, luck into easy work, nurse the child, and promptly have another one. It was another way to survive more easily. Older women also had babies, both villagers and intellectuals who were around fifty. These women were really desperate to experience motherhood. They forgot about the fathers and dedicated all their lives and all their love to this last child. . . . There were quite a few of these late-­life mothers, and it was painful to watch them. They resembled widows more than anything, but their husbands were

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

465

accidental and, for the most part, frankly, not the best sorts. . . . Motherhood meant a lighter workload, and so some women took this path deliberately. As the eventual amnesty for mothers showed, they had calculated correctly. But most women did not choose this thorny path.27

Iosyfa Zholdak describes various scenarios of motherhood in the camps in just a few sentences: I told Mariika: “Why did you let this happen? It’s so hard having a kid in the camp.” She gave birth. The Lithuanian Elza got pregnant with a Chinese cook. He gave her better food. Katrusia had a girl called Slava from a civilian employee. She fell in love with him, but they were separated. Nadia’s baby died because it was sickly. She cried over her for a long time. And Zhuravs´ka regretted dropping her baby from the bunk. She didn’t want it.28

One option for improving the child’s future when it was born in prison was to hand it over for adoption, which Tamara Kryshtal´s´ka (Iemchyk) mentions: “Childless couples would come in to adopt. Some women gave up their babies willingly, especially those who already had a family back home.” 29 Motherhood in prison remained, as a rule, the woman’s own problem. Both scholars and witnesses conclude that the men typically ignored the fact that they had become fathers. Only in very rare instances did they worry about the women or their offspring: “Fathers very rarely helped mothers with their children. Maybe out of one hundred men, only two or three acknowledged their poor, disadvantaged offspring.” 30 Because prisoners were continually moved from camp to camp, after giving birth a woman had little chance of seeing the father of her child again while they were still incarcerated.31 Scholars note that deliberate pregnancies with the idea that the work regimen would be easier was mostly common among women who were imprisoned for petty crimes and for a relatively short term.32 In fact, according to Gulag rules, pregnant prisoners

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

466

and lactating mothers were supposed to be given better food and to be relieved of the heaviest kinds of work and night shifts. Still, widespread abuse, inadequate supplies, and favoritism meant that, in practice, most mothers did not enjoy any of these benefits.33 On 28 August 1950, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR passed a decree according to which pregnant women and mothers with small children who had been sentenced for nonpolitical reasons would be absolved of punishment. As a result, by the end of April 1951, 100 percent of women in these two categories were released, as well as a further 98 percent of those who had children outside the camp or colony.34 Unfortunately, this resolution did not extend to women who were sentenced for political reasons, so conditions for the vast majority of Ukrainian mothers who were in the Gulag did not change at all. When it came to political prisoners, the most likely reason for getting pregnant, other than rape, was a conscious choice by the woman: her readiness and desire to have a child at any price. For example, Hava Volovich admits that the unbearable feeling of loneliness and the need to love prompted her to risk having a child in prison: The childbearing instinct is both beautiful and terrible. Beautiful if everything has been done to greet the arrival in the world of this new human being; terrible if this child is condemned, even before birth, to torment and suffering. But our reason was by then too blunted for us to think very carefully about the fate of our offspring. Our need for love, tenderness, and caresses was so desperate, that it reached the point of insanity, of beating one’s head against the wall, of suicide. And we wanted a child—the dearest and the closest of all people, someone for whom we could give up our own life. I held out for a relatively long time. But I did so need and long for a hand of my own to hold, something I could lean on in those long years of solitude, oppression, and humiliation to which we were all condemned.

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

467

A number of such hands were offered, and I did not choose the best of them. But the result of my choice was the angelic little girl with golden curls.35

Another prisoner, Tamara Petkevich, worked as a nurse’s aide in the camp infirmary. Four years before her release, she genuinely fell in love with a married civilian doctor, got pregnant, and dreamed about a future family. But this dream was not to be: the doctor took her son to his family and abandoned Petkevich.36 Shapovalov notes: “Motherhood gave women the most obvious option of a choice: a certain illusory control over their own lives. They were temporarily relieved of loneliness, and this let to yet another illusion: a family life in freedom.” 37 Barbara Skarga also writes about this fundamental human need for emotional closeness and love: “We want to remain human. We don’t want life to be extinguished. We protect ourselves against death, from emotional sterility. We want to think about someone, worry about someone, embrace someone.” 38 For some women, having a baby was a way to counter the dehumanizing regime of the Gulag and to remain a woman despite the circumstances, as Surovtsova writes: By sending women to camp, they effectively doomed them to solitariness. But nature took its own course, and, regardless of the heavy punishment, regardless of the physical and moral hell that awaited a mother, there began to be more and more children and the state had to take on the care of these unexpected nurslings. . . . They were taken away and settled into orphanages.39

Obviously, pregnancy, birth, and nursing in a camp environment had nothing in common with the normal practices of motherhood. Moreover, not every pregnancy was wanted, and not every woman who had a relationship with a man, voluntarily or by force of circumstances, was prepared to become a mother and give a child life in such inhuman conditions. As Surovtsova testifies:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

468

The number of abortions was huge, as might be expected. Initially, the women would try to get rid of the pregnancy: pulling heavy things around, jumping off heights, drinking henna, and, by hook or by crook, finding ways to abort, and dying. And if nothing worked or the woman was not brave enough, then they admitted it. In a month, they would go on break, give birth in the camp infirmary, and then begin the long-­suffering road of prison motherhood.40

As was typical in the Soviet Union, despite a prohibition on the termination of pregnancies, abortions took place half-­secretly in the camps between 1936 and 1955, as the memoirs of some women testify. Overall, the position of the Gulag administration regarding terminating a pregnancy among prisoners was contradictory and ambiguous. In some cases, women were forced to undergo an abortion; in others the management closed its eyes; and in some camps, a woman caught having an abortion could be punished by having her sentence extended.41 Based on the brief mentions of such examples, it’s easy to conclude that there must have been enormous risk involved, and that women were vulnerable in undertaking such a “procedure” in the absence of qualified medical personnel and appropriate conditions. Many women did, indeed, die as a result of illegal or unprofessional abortions.42 Meshko describes one such incident: “Our crew leader, a coquettish Polish girl, was forced to have an abortion . . . in the camp’s medical unit, where there was no gynecologist. But when they couldn’t stop her hemorrhaging, she was finally taken to the neighboring men’s camp, where there was an infirmary.” 43 Essentially, the Gulag’s women prisoners had also had their reproductive rights taken away. The decision to continue or abort a pregnancy was not always the prisoner’s to make, as the camp management could use its own discretion to punish her for an abortion or to force her to have one.

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

469

CAPTIVE KIDS HOW INFANTS WERE KEPT Children that were born in prison or were brought there as infants with their sentenced mothers were taken away and kept separately from the women in state facilities attached to the camps: orphanages, nurseries, children’s complexes, children’s barracks, shelters, and so on. Mothers in the camps were also kept separately from the rest of the prisoners, relegated to “moms’ barracks.” Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk) describes the regimen surrounding mothers and their interaction with their infants in a Gulag camp in Kirov Oblast: I saw a horrific picture. Here were mothers who had just given birth to babies. The maternity ward and the so-­called children’s shelter were beyond the zone, through barbed wire. The children were considered free citizens of the Soviet Union, while their mothers were “political criminals.” An escort would take the mothers outside the zone every three hours to nurse their infants, around the clock. The mothers come back to the barracks, boil water, and add a little sugar, because in another three hours they’ll have to go again. Some massage their breasts, others express the milk that the infant didn’t drink. . . . They didn’t even undress in order to get there faster and spend a little more time with their infant. In some mothers, the milk dried up, and they were unable to nurse. These women were sent back to the camp station from where they came—mostly logging camps.44

In the camps themselves, attitudes toward infants were special: they were treated as a reminder of the past and as the hope of the future. They were generally the focus of much love. Many women’s memoirs include stories about a sacrificial (to the point of fanatical) attitude toward these children among their mothers, as well as an extremely caring, tender attitude among other

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

470

women.45 Almost every mother hoped to get work in the nursery or orphanage in order to be closer to her child and to be able to take care of it. Despite the considerable emotional stress and responsibility, working conditions were better than in any of the general labor. The women stayed indoors, they were not physically overworked, they had access to food, and so on. When she was taken to work in the children’s kitchen, Kostenko writes, she tried very conscientiously to carry out every task, even taking on some of the work of the civilian personnel: “It was a really good place to be also because there was a tiny room set apart in the kitchen, and I was moved from the barracks to live there. It was quieter and cleaner, and, most importantly, I could see my child at all times.” 46 Although she did not have a child of her own, Surovtsova worked for a long time as a nanny in this kind of children’s complex. She describes her duties, the state of the children, and her attitude toward them in detail: The children were dressed, and it was breakfast time. Out of the kitchen, they brought pots full of steaming cocoa and an endless number of bottles of milk, cream, and all kinds of mixtures. In a healthy group, it was hard to deal with the sheer quantity. The feeding went on like a conveyor. Child after child sat on its knees and swallowed the necessary quantity of everything, whether it wanted to or not. The children were ideally fed, and there was always plenty of food. . . . After breakfast, we wrapped up the infants for a stroll. They lay on boards, sleeping peacefully in their sleeping bags, and were taken out even up to –35 °C [–37.2°F]. . . . Our work was stressed and saturated to the extreme. There was exactly enough time to take care of every child and make sure it was fed properly, washed, cleanly and warmly dressed, but tenderness was not part of the deal. The little moments when you could pat a blond or dark little head, when you could hug the poor little body, were all moments you had to steal from your free time, and there was no free time. And so, in that hour we gave the children all the

Figure 7.3. “Oh Mother of God, I pray to you to take my daughter under your care and not leave her an orphan. Prison memento.” Icon of the Mother of God with motherly prayer, embroidered by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923) at the Chortkiv Prison, 1949. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

472

tenderness and love we had kept in our hearts, and they, like tiny furry creatures, also sought us. But after supper came the night. We tucked them into their little cribs and turned off the light. . . . They all breathed quietly and evenly in their cribs, every one of them equally orphaned. It was clean and warm around them. And yet so lonely for me to understand that I did not even have such a camp child for myself. Those warm, sleepy children’s hands that hugged your neck, children who embraced you so trustingly—they did not belong to you, either.47

Of course, far from every prisoner who was a mother and found herself working as a nanny in the children’s complex was equally caring about all the ill-­fated children. Volovich’s child was in such nurseries, and she describes the duties of the nannies and their attitudes toward the children who were not theirs (in contrast to their own children, to whom they gave considerable care and love): I saw nurses getting the children up in the morning. They would force them out of their cold beds with shoves and kicks. For the sake of “cleanliness,” blankets weren’t tucked in around the children but were simply thrown on top of their cots. Pushing the children with their fists and swearing at them roughly, they took off their night clothes and washed them in ice-­cold water. The babies didn’t even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots. . . . One nurse was responsible for each group of seventeen children. She had to sweep the ward, wash and dress the children, feed them, [and] keep the stove going.48

Volovich believes that this indifference and heartlessness, to the point of cruelty, in combination with the indifference of the management and the critical lack of resources such as medications and proper nourishment, led to the very high rate of sickness and mortality among the infants in these institutions. She openly referred to them as “death houses for babies.” 49

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

473

Eugenia Ginzburg, author of a world-­renowned memoir about the Gulag, also worked as a nanny for a long time in this kind of institution for prisoners’ kids. She describes the environment very clearly: “The children’s home was also part of the camp compound. It had its own guardhouse, its own gates, its own huts, and its own barbed wire.” 50 Thus it was no wonder that these children—whether in their appearance, their development, or their behavior—did not match the propaganda about “a happy Soviet childhood”: Those unfortunate, unwanted children of prisoners, pale, sickly, and sad eyed. Even their crying was more like the mewling of a helpless, wrinkled little creature. Brought from camps all over the Soviet Union, there were about two hundred of these children under the age of two. For those who managed to survive, another “shelter” awaited.51

Ginzburg gives a detailed description of the poor developmental level and aggressive behavior of the children in the “kiddie plant”: Some thirty small children . . . were tumbling and toddling about the hut, squealing, gurgling with laughter, bursting into tears. Each of them was upholding his right to a place under the Kolyma sun in the perpetual struggle with his fellows. They bashed each other’s heads unmercifully, pulled each other’s hair, bit each other. . . . It would be wrong to say that the children were kept on a starvation diet. They were given as much to eat as they could, and . . . the food seemed quite appetizing. . . . Only certain of the four-­year-­olds could produce a few odd, unconnected words. Inarticulate howls, mimicry, and blows were the main means of communication. . . . In the infants’ group, they spend their whole time just lying on their cots. Nobody will pick them up even if they cry their lungs out. It’s not allowed, except to change the diapers. . . . In the toddlers’ group, they crawl around

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

474

in their playpens, all in a hip. It’s all right as long as they don’t kill each other or scratch each other’s eyes out. . . . We are lucky if we can just get them all fed and put on the potty.52

The available recollections of women prisoners about the state of infants in the camps are unambiguous. Although the conditions under which they were being kept varied in terms of material provision from completely unacceptable to absolutely satisfactory, the lack of maternal care and a living connection had an extremely negative impact on the psychological and emotional development of these children and their social and behavioral skills.53 Contact between mothers and their children was strictly regulated, restricted in terms of time, and affected by a slew of factors, including the child’s age and the kind of conditions the infants were being held in—whether within the camp in a “moms’ barracks,” or in a children’s facility outside the camp. The humaneness of the management, the type of work the mother was assigned to, and the mother’s behavior also played a big role, as a woman who broke rules could be punished through even greater restrictions on access to her child. However, the ultimate factor was the child’s age: for the most part, infants under the age of one were considered to be nursing, which meant that the mother visited with them several times a day to breastfeed, as long as lactation continued. Having herself been sentenced to a camp with an infant in her arms, Hoshko-­Kit recalls: In the camp, we were separated because I was “sentenced,” while my child was free: Bohdan was taken to the barracks where there were an awful lot of small children, while I was taken to the barracks for politicals. . . . We were separated by a fence, barbed wire, and soldiers with dogs. . . . Like the other mothers, I was allowed at six in the morning and at night after I had finished my work to come and feed him. Our children were brought out into the corridor. We didn’t get to see where they slept. We weren’t allowed to go in there. Mothers whose infants were less than a year old were

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

475

allowed to feed their children twice a day. . . . Once the child was a year old, the mother was allowed to visit it only on days off.54

With the women so overworked, it was not uncommon for their breastmilk to disappear within a couple of months of giving birth. That meant being transferred to a general barracks and being assigned general labor again, in addition to facing a sudden reduction in the time given with one’s child—in some cases even being prohibited from seeing the infant altogether.55 Camp management was primarily interested in meeting production quotas, so it tended to reduce the frequency and duration of maternal visits with infants to a minimum, using any possible excuse.56 Kostenko recalls: Those whose children were in the older group were allowed to see them only once a week, on a day off. But even that was good, and at least you got to see your child. We moms in the younger group had it even better. We were with our children every day after work, and we were taken to them during lunch break at work to nurse.57

Compared to the way maternity was handled in the camps, the conditions for women with infants in cellular prisons were somewhat more humane. Anna Martyniuk was pregnant when she was arrested in 1951, and her son was born in the Luk’ianivska Prison in Kyiv. Within a few months, he ended up together with his mother in the Verkhneuralsk Prison. She describes the conditions in this facility: The days and weeks went by. Our daily ration consisted of a half liter of milk for the baby and three hundred grams of bread. I got the same bread ration, but it had to last the entire day. For breakfast, we had a handful of whitebait and a mug of coffee, for lunch some cabbage soup (shchi) and a thin oatmeal gruel, and supper was usually another mug of coffee. In the mornings and the evenings, we were taken to the lavatory to wash up. Once a week, we went to the baths. . . . I nursed my baby for a year. . . . While he slept,

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

476

I asked to be able to go to the lavatory and wash up the diapers. I also asked for some of my clothes from home and sewed up things for my little son. . . . When we were taken to the baths, I was given a tub in which I bathed my child, after which I would wash myself under the tap.58

Another good example is the Polish prison Fordon. Located in the city of Bydgoszcz, Fordon had become a women’s prison where many Ukrainian women were held, mainly for the crime of cooperating with the Ukrainian nationalist underground. Fordon was organized with a separate wing for children who were born in captivity. The women prisoners took care of these children themselves.59 Ol´ha Brodiuk-­Dushenko spent the last four months of her pregnancy in the Polish prison, where she ended up giving birth to her son. In recollecting that period, she describes her conflicting emotions with some bitterness: the joy of motherhood and the pain of the difficult circumstances that the two dozen mothers with infants faced, lacking the most basic things.60 Kateryna Vitko-­Stakh spent her jail term in the Rzeszów Prison. She recalls the fate of one of her friends: This prison had a cell for mothers with children who had been born in captivity. This is where I met Mariika. . . . Oh my God, what a poor mother she was, how she suffered and struggled with that infant. All that was provided for the baby to eat was cold raw milk. There was nowhere that she could even heat it up a little, never mind boil it. . . . Outside the door, the desperate weeping of the child and the mother—the child from cold and hunger, and the mother in despair because there was absolutely nothing she could do.61

Obviously, neither in the Polish prisons nor in the Soviet prisons and camps could Ukrainian women politicals count on a humane attitude toward themselves or their children. Their common experience of suffering developed mutual empathy and drove them to help those who were having the hardest time of it. For

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

477

one thing, the exhausted bodies of the women prisoners were not always able to maintain lactation. Understanding maternal feelings and one another’s deepest worries, they even shared their breastmilk, as Pozniak (Skrypiuk) attests: If a mother had little milk, she would ask for some from a mother that had more than enough and would keep this in a bottle near her bosom so that it stayed warm and she could feed her child. The women would often trade their sugar rations for milk. . . . But they lived on good terms, helping one another in whatever way they could.62

Kostenko confirms this practice, writing about how the mothers saved one another, even during transfers: I had enough milk to drown in, but my son wouldn’t take the breast. . . . So I ended up nursing the daughter of a Lvivian woman, Ivanka Mis´kiv. Her milk had disappeared. So here I was, feeding a stranger’s child while mine screamed with hunger. . . . She would give me white bread crusts. I would soak them in breastmilk, and Ihor would eat a little from a spoon.63

Once they settled in the camp, Kostenko continued being a wet nurse for the others’ babies: “As before, I had a lot of milk and I kept nursing Ivanka’s daughter, and some other babies as well, whose mothers did not have enough milk. Soon they began to consider me a milk donor, and that meant a better food ration.” 64 Indeed, there are many memoirs of this kind of practice.65 MEDICAL ASSISTANCE AND INFANT MORTALITY Memoirs, official documents, and research confirm one thing: the conditions under which most camps maintained the children of women prisoners were unacceptable. As a result, not only were the children hindered in their physical, mental, and emotional

Figure 7.4. Embroidery by Anna Khomiak, made at a camp in Norilsk as a memento for her children, 1948. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

479

development, but sickness and mortality levels among them were very high. Indeed, too many babies born in captivity were fated to die before reaching their first birthday.66 This is unambiguously clear from the high mortality statistics in the children’s facilities, even though this dynamic went down over time: in 1947, 409 out of every 1,000 babies died; in 1949, it was 200; and by 1953, it was 46.67 Of course, camp management tended to suppress these numbers, hiding the true number of infants that had died. Evidence of this kind of practice can be found in reports from prosecutorial reviews.68 A “mothers’ cemetery” in the village of Dolinka, not far from Shakhtinsk in Karaganda Oblast, Kazakhstan, stands as a memorial to this particular crime of the Soviet regime. It is the final resting place of hundreds of prison children who died between 1931 and 1959 in various Gulag facilities for children. Dolinka had a “moms’ house,” where toddlers were kept up to the age of two or three. Because of the high mortality rate, children who died were buried in common graves, without coffins, and the place where they were buried was not always marked. Only in 2002 was the territory of these graves finally fenced in, a cross erected, and a memorial plaque put up, honoring the politically repressed. In 2003, the cemetery was given the status of an official memorial. Over time, confessional markers were also established: a Roman Catholic one and an Islamic one in 2003, and a Greek Catholic one in 2005.69 Minimal health care was provided to sickly children: there was a chronic lack of qualified medical personnel and medications. Hoshko-­Kit worked as a nurse’s aide in a camp infirmary for children. Her own child ended up in this facility, and she describes her duties and the condition of the children in considerable detail: I got up my courage to ask the “civilian” doctor whether she would allow me to work with the sickest children. . . . The hospital consisted of many small boxlike wards where seven to ten children were kept, depending on their illness. Each nurse’s aide had “her”

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

480

ward and was responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of the room and the children. Wake-­up was early every day, at 5:30 a. m. We picked up a sleepy child or even two on each arm and carried them to the toilets, where there were lines of potty chairs on which we would seat the children. It was a rush to wake up the next lot of children . . . to quickly wash them under a tap of cold water and carry them back to their “boxes.” While some children sat on their potties, the cots had to be made up and everything was supposed to be ready for feeding. . . . The children were given a watery porridge in mugs. Some children were so debilitated with weeping and sickness that they didn’t even want to eat. With that kind of child, we had to force at least a few spoonfuls of the gruel into their mouth. Meanwhile, the healthier child next to them held onto their mug strongly: they knew that if they spilled the porridge, there wouldn’t be any more. . . . The children in the hospital were given neither milk nor fruit. But everything was ideally clean and kept that way by the arrested mothers. The metal cots gleamed, the floor was white, the bedding was clean. . . . Except that it wasn’t children lying there but tiny martyrs. . . . We never heard any child’s laughter.70

Despite her empathy for the sickly infants and a genuine desire to ease their suffering, Hoshko-­Kit was all too aware of her own helplessness and powerlessness: the children were not receiving proper treatment, while the physically overworked nannies simply had no strength left to pay proper attention to each one of their tiny charges. That the medical treatment provided to the infants was inadequate is mentioned repeatedly in memoirs written both by the mothers themselves and by former staff at the children’s infirmaries. The diagnostics were poor, little to no effective medication was available, and the civilian physicians were at times completely unprofessional and uncaring. At one point, as Surovtsova describes, a terrible epidemic led to mass deaths among the infants at the children’s camp infirmary where she worked:

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

481

The atmosphere was constantly tense. The wards were quiet, with their little white beds and curtains. And in the cots lay the small, pale bodies . . . their mouths gasping for air like little fish. . . . One by one, the children would die, almost unnoticed, in a flash. Three to four days, and it was over. . . . We kept working as if in a kind of nightmare: not for a moment, not at home in the camp, nor in our sleep, did the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness leave us. Pneumonia, that eternal guest, kept mowing the children down . . . their pathetic, skinny little bodies writhed under our hands, pale skin bleeding, the scraping of needles, oxygen pillows, and mouths gasping for air, and then stiff little dolls with glassy, clouded eyes. . . . When a child was dying, the doctor would allow the mother to accompany its last hours, sometimes spending the entire night beside her baby. It was heartbreaking. Of course, the presence of the mothers made our work even harder. So we continued to work all the time in unbearable stress to make every possible effort. For the poor mothers, driven to despair, naturally, nothing we did seemed to be enough. On the other hand, all the suffering due to the procedures required by the doctor took place before their eyes, and they typically had no idea what we were doing or why we were doing it. We often found ourselves listening to their many bitter, undeserved accusations.71

It is likely that medical staff did do everything in their power to bring sickly children back to health, but limited resources made it impossible to save most of them. In other cases, however, it was unprofessionalism and indifference among the physicians themselves, in combination with the lack of medications and the general sickliness of the children being kept in camp infirmaries, that led to such high levels of mortality. Ultimately, the chances that an infant would fall sick and die in its first year were extremely high.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

482

SEPARATION FROM CHILDREN Losing a child in the camp was a horrific tragedy for most women. Because of the traumatic nature of such memories, very few personal testimonies of maternal despair are recorded in Gulag memoirs. But from her vantage point as a nanny, Surovtsova witnessed many such scenes: “The last moment came. The mother could not believe that her child was dead. Some fainted, some fought hysterically, some tugged at the sad little body, and some just turned to stone with despair. It was absolutely heartbreaking to watch.” 72 In describing the loss of a child, most memoirists limit themselves to terse, dry phrases that are completely devoid of emotion, as with Pozniak (Skrypiuk): “Mortality was extremely high among the children, and mothers buried their babies under escort.” 73 Nor did the suffering of the mother always end with the burial of her infant in the permafrost, as Surovtsova recalls: Sometimes in the spring, the snow would melt, the soil would settle, the little corpses would come to the surface, and the mothers would rush to the cemetery. More drama, stealthily opening little coffins with their blue, wasted, scary faces preserved by the permafrost, and a second funeral. . . . “Why did you abandon me!?” I can hear this wail ringing in my ears to this day.74

One way or another, children could not remain in captivity for long. Those infants who managed to survive the convoys or the camp nurseries and reach the age of one or two were ultimately taken away from their mothers. Depending on the circumstances, a child could be taken by the prisoner’s parents to be raised. But it was far more common for children of “enemies of the people” to be moved to state orphanages, where they were given new surnames, and where all traces of them could be lost forever. In Polish prisons, children were similarly taken away from Ukrainian politicals—in the best case they would be handed over to relatives,

Figure 7.5. “Guardian angel, protect my children, Ihor and Zenona.” Embroidery by Vasylyna Solomon, made at the Lviv Transit Prison for her children, 1950. Collection of the Lviv Historical Museum, ТК 4272.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

484

but in the worst case they were taken to an orphanage or given up for adoption.75 As Pozniak (Skrypiuk) recalls, “Children were fed until ten months, after which the child was left behind and the mother was returned to the camp. The children were kept here until they turned two and then sent to orphanages, with the mothers being given the address.” 76 The fear of losing a child forever, never knowing the child’s fate, wore the prison mothers down emotionally, Hoshko-­Kit writes, describing what she went through: “We were in constant fear of losing our child—how they would take it away, where they would take it, how it would be brought up? God! It was such an agony! None of us mothers thought about our own fate at all.” 77 Of course, the prison mothers understood very well that the best option for their child was to be raised in their family. Sometimes the women and their parents were able to get permission for a toddler to be given to the prisoner’s family for raising. Martyniuk and her imprisoned husband were lucky: after many requests, they were able to get this arrangement approved. However, this kind of resolution could also raise conflicting emotions in the mother: “I was happy that our child would not disappear into an orphanage, but I cried because I had to give up my dearest little son and was already worrying how he would do there.” 78 Even when the child was sent to family, the separation itself was unquestionably painful, despite the fact that this outcome was the most desirable. The moment at which the child was taken away was a real challenge and a truly traumatic experience for the women. Kersnovskaya witnessed such an incident: The first thing I saw when I went into the no. 8 barrack was this soul-­wrenching scene: a young mother, barely more than a girl, was fighting in the hands of a soldier and begging: “Let me feed him one last time! One last time!” But a decrepit old woman quickly trotted away, carrying the baby wrapped in a little blanket. The mothers who witnessed this were envious: “Lucky you, that you

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

485

have a grandmother. . . . What about us?” The baby was still free; the mother was just beginning her ten-­year sentence.79

From the recollections of women politicals who lived through this kind of experience, the painfulness of the moment of separation is quite clear—especially when the child was shipped off to a Soviet orphanage. Hoshko-­Kit describes one such tragic scene when toddlers were sent from the camp to a children’s facility: The mothers were allowed to take their children to the watch, where “free folks” would grab the infants from their mothers’ arms. It was an unbelievably horrific scene: mothers crying, screaming, howling like she-­wolves, biting at the arms of their “free sisters,” hugging their little offspring to their breasts. . . . The children’s voices blended into the despair of separation, expressed in a single piteous word: “Mama!” The terrible, desperate cries tore your heart apart, all of it mixed in with the crying of the children. . . . A woman who had been sentenced to ten years could hope to find out that some good womanly heart had been found, that someone might write to her about her child. But a woman who had been sentenced to twenty-­five years had no hope at all of finding out anything about her child or where it was, and had no idea whether she would ever be able to see the child again.80

This kind of scene repeated itself on a regular basis at the various women’s camps. Vasylyna Salamon describes an almost identical situation: I saw one scene that I will never forget as long as I live. The toddler was now three years old, and this child was taken away immediately. . . . Every mother had the right to take her child out of the barracks on her own and bring it to the watch. Every mother tried to make a little cap, a tiny sweater, anything at all to give to her child. . . . But at the watch, every child was taken by a civilian nurse with an escort. . . . Some mothers refused to hand over their children, screaming, and these children were torn from them.

Figures 7.6 and 7.7. Drawings from a camp album intended for the children of prisoners, 1956. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

488

So the child would be crying and the mother would be throwing herself on the ground, beating it with her fists and her feet. She. . . . It was terrible. . . . And most of the time these mothers never found their children again.81

All these recollections of prison mothers make clear that neither the Gulag administration nor those managing the state orphanages had any obligation to keep the imprisoned mother informed about the fate of her child. Once the mother was released, she generally found it very hard to track the child down. Therefore, the women tried to use various informal channels and connections, relying on the sympathy of the staff at the children’s facilities. Blavats´ka recalls how she would send letters to the orphanage through a relative of hers: “All the women did this whose children were in orphanages. Fortunately, wherever Vira was, there were some decent nurses, nannies, or teachers who would respond to our letters from time to time and even send us photographs of our children.” 82 Kostenko lost her own son in this way and was only able to find him and return him after many years. The stress she lived through was so traumatic that some of the events surrounding her child were simply erased from her memory: They began to take him out of my arms but he clung to my neck: “Mama, mama!” I kept holding him and would not let go. . . . Of course, they brought handcuffs, chained me, and pulled me away by force. Ihor meanwhile was trying to get out of the arms of the overseer, screaming. I can’t remember how they shipped me off in the convoy because I think I was completely unconscious at that point.83

Mothers who were separated from their children when they were arrested not only suffered the agony of separation but also frequently never found out what happened to their children. Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk writes:

Figure 7.8. “From a distant land, as though on wings, I fly to you, Myrosia! To your embrace, my only treasure, my little bird, my Eden! To my beloved daughter from her darling Mother!” Inscription on the back of a photograph that was sent by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923) to her daughter Myroslava from a camp in Taishet, 17 March 1955. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

490

Among us was our friend from Ternopil Oblast. . . . We never saw a smile on her face. Her husband had been killed, but she managed to give her son away to someone to raise, rather than to an orphanage. But would they take that child away from there, would he grow up to be a janissary who cursed his mother and father and went to serve the empire? 84

In 1947, while imprisoned, Potykevych-­Zabolotna wrote a poem conveying the thoughts and feelings of mothers behind bars: My little child, on this special day I have something I’d like to say: In a faraway world that you’ll never know, Your mother’s alive, behind bars. How she longs for you, how she cries to the stars, and prays for her little girl. Grow healthy and strong, my little one! Bring joy to all our family. Locked up for years inside barbed wire, your ma sees no end to her pain, her youthful years and best days devoured by this cursed jail. Should you ever hear bad about mother, Don’t believe the mean tongues of others. Wait for her, darling, she’ll come home soon and hold you and never let go. She’ll tell you her secret, she’ll tell you the truth, what we shed our blood for, and what we all suffered for. That day will come, my daughter,

And will bring us goodness and love! 85

These sufferings added a bitterness, but the feeling of motherly duty kept a woman like Potykevych-­Zabolotna from giving up and helped her endure intolerable difficulties. Anna Marunchak

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

491

describes her own moment of despair: “I thought to myself: will I survive this challenge? I wanted to kill myself because I felt like I just could not go on. One time I almost threw myself under a gravel truck, but my son’s voice stopped me. For his sake, I had to live.” 86 Andrusiak’s child was taken from her after her arrest, and she made a decision to survive imprisonment in order to get her son back: “I ate whatever they gave me because I wanted to live. I never forgot about my child for even a moment, even at the lowest points in my life.” 87 The incarcerated sisters who shared these women’s difficult fate and supported one another in the darkest moments helped the imprisoned mothers overcome the despair that dominated their lives and that brought frequent thoughts of suicide. Kostenko remembers her state after being separated from her son: “I couldn’t even work, and at night I couldn’t sleep, I just cried and cried. . . . My friends told me: ‘You stop crying. Stop torturing your child . . . while you keep fighting, he can’t calm down over there, either.’” 88 Martyniuk gratefully recalls her barracks friends who offered sincere sympathy and reassurances to help her deal psychologically with her separation from her child: I was so miserable without my child in the prison. . . . Oh, Lord, it’s so hard to describe. If not for my friends, maybe I would have gone completely crazy. Katrusia Zaryts´ka saw my grief and told me her story, about having to leave her little son at home in Lviv. . . . She wanted to throw herself under the train, but then her little Bohdan appeared before her eyes.89

By supporting one another in the worst depths of despair, the women together overcame their wretched situation and endured psychologically. Dreams of future meetings with their children, the anticipation of one day finding a son or daughter and restoring their family, gave the women hope in the future, shored up their strength in the face of all the challenges, and pushed them to keep living. Nataliia Shukhevych writes:

Figure 7.9. “Oh Mary, Mother of God, full of grace, take my family under your powerful protection.” Fragment of the embroidered icon of the Mother of God, made by Hanna Protskiv-Liven´ (b. 1923) at the Chortkiv Prison, 1948. Mariana Baidak’s family archive.

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

493

My children were taken away from me, because kids couldn’t be in a prison. They were sent to an orphanage. From that time until my release, I never saw them. . . . I wrote requests to be allowed to write to my children. But it came to nothing. . . . I lived from day to day. The entire time I kept thinking about my children and praying that I might see them just one more time.90

Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak tells about her cellmate: Kalyna talked endlessly about a boy, always with tears in her eyes and unspeakable longing—Oles´, her little son. He was left behind, in freedom, with some people. Who they were and where he was, she did not know. He was her flesh and blood, her baby, and now he was like a mirage. She only wanted one thing, prayed to Our Lord for just one thing: to hold her son to her heart and never be separated from him again.91

Some women were able to set up correspondence with their growing children and in this way maintained relatively regular contact. This allowed them to keep abreast of what their children were doing, to give them advice or guidance, to support them, and to live on their behalf. Kateryna Zaryts´ka rebuilt her relationship with her son over twenty-­five long years of incarceration: her letters went to him filled with maternal love and care, and she encouraged and urged him to good deeds while at the same time chiding him for his mistakes.92 Very painful indeed was the problem with the break and later renewal of relations between imprisoned mothers and children who had effectively been orphaned for many years. Raised in Soviet orphanages or under the guardianship of relatives, these children did not always receive the necessary motherly love and care, and it was hard for them to understand why their mother was not with them. The women themselves very rarely mention this aspect of incarceration.

Figures 7.10 and 7.11. Drawings from a camp album intended for the children of prisoners, 1956. Exhibit of the Ternopil Memorial Museum for Political Prisoners.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

496

We can assume that the most acceptable option for imprisoned mothers was for their children to be raised in the families of close relatives. These children stayed connected to their own culture, they were under the care of loved ones, and they could more easily be restored to their mothers after the women’s release. This is what happened, for instance, with Pavlina Mel´nychuk’s son. Mel´nychuk was arrested while pregnant, gave birth to her son in prison, and was sent with the infant in her arms to the Kharkiv colony. When the boy was eighteen months old, she was allowed to give him over to her sister for raising. After being released, Mel´nychuk was fortunate enough to restore her little family.93 Far more difficult was the process of finding a child that had been shipped to an orphanage or given up for adoption. Over the years, such children often lost the ability to recognize their mothers or even to speak Ukrainian.94 Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka) recalls how she witnessed the reunion between a mother and her daughter in a transit prison at the Potma station: The woman was informed that the child was already at the camp, and we all went out of the barracks. On one side of the checkpoint stood the mother, and on the other side a girl of about seven came out, shaved bald and wearing a threadbare little gray dress. Through tear-­filled eyes, the mother cried, “Are they really giving me back my child?” It seemed to take an eternity for these two creatures, whose fate had been stolen from them, to get closer. Finally, we could hear the loud weeping of the mother and the sobbing of the frightened child, the two embraced and went into the barracks.95

Unfortunately, mistakes were made, as well, and sometimes the mothers were brought children who were not theirs.96 Stefaniia Vuitsyk (Susol) describes such a difficult mix-­up: Before her release, one woman began to demand that the management return her child to her. Otherwise, she said, she would

7. Motherhood behind Bars: A Cursed Blessing

497

not leave the camp. The daughter had been taken away at eleven months, and five years had passed since then. After a while, they brought a little girl, but the woman did not recognize her daughter. She was convinced that a mistake had been made. . . . She had to go through the courts to find the real daughter, who was being raised by a military family in Odesa. When she finally met with her child, the girl asked her in Russian: “Why don’t you put on red lipstick like my mom?” . . . But the woman was able to eventually win over her offspring.97

Needless to say, after many years of separation, many meetings with children were anything but joyful. While Nataliia Po­ povych’s adult son met her at the train station with a bouquet of flowers,98 Mariia Kurochka’s ten-­year-­old son, who was raised by his grandfather and grandmother, refused to recognize her as his mother when she arrived after release. This refusal led to a nervous breakdown for her.99 From the meager recollections of relations with children after the memoirists were released, it becomes clear that the children were not always prepared to forgive their mothers for having orphaned them. In a 2002 letter, Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko wrote with some bitterness: “My sons have been very unhappy to accept my biography and the difficult childhoods they had as a result.” 100 Kateryna Maksymovych, who gave birth to a daughter while incarcerated and handed the child to her sister to raise, also experienced such an estrangement: “For six years, I hadn’t seen my daughter. When I came home again, I was a stranger to her. Nadiia refused to acknowledge me for a long time.” 101 Studying the recollections of female politicals regarding the experience of motherhood in captivity makes it possible to understand all the contradictions and tragedy of what they went through. When a woman’s desire to carry out her maternal role came up against the inhuman conditions in the prisons and camps, the desire to maintain a relationship and eventually to meet with her lost child encouraged her to live, while death or permanent separation from a child left unhealed wounds in a woman’s soul.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

498

Having thoroughly analyzed the link between motherhood and political imprisonment in the writings of four renowned memoirists, Elaine MacKinnon says that, although separation from the child created additional stress for the mother, motherhood often gave the woman additional incentive, strength, and purpose to survive, and it helped her preserve her gender identity.102 This concurs with Maksimova’s conclusions: “Motherhood gave those women a ‘second breath,’ a meaning to their lives, revived their faded hopes for a normal life. . . . The natural sense of concern about their offspring helped them survive and feel their social role as women.” 103 Despite all the emotional and physical pain involved, the role of mother, as it was experienced in reality or at a distance, allowed the women to remain women and to shore up their threatened gender identity in the camps and prisons.

Figure 7.12. Handmade camp mementos made and embroidered by Iryna Senyk for Kateryna Zaryts´ka’s grandchildren, n.d. Collection of the Museum of Liberation Struggle at the Lviv Historical Museum, TK 5272.

CONCLUSIONS

In a situation where they were deprived of all rights, where their resources and options for affecting their situation were almost nil, the only available means for women political prisoners to resist the dehumanizing impact of the Gulag regime was to simply survive. To survive and remain a person meant victory over an oppressive system whose main aim was to destroy the prisoner as a person. For many prisoners, consciously or not, the challenge was to not allow the camp regimen to destroy them physically and morally, to preserve, as much as possible, their physical and mental health, all while remaining an individual with a set of social identities, value system, moral principles, and world view. Effectively, the main goal of long-­term sentences for political prisoners who opposed the Soviet regime was to punish and “reeducate” them. Achieving this goal required the disintegration of a prisoner’s self, the destruction of their basic social identities, and the erosion of their established values and beliefs. The Gulag system used a variety of techniques: hunger, harsh climates, exhausting labor, lack of proper conditions to rest and recover, and the absence of proper medical care. All this was intended to reduce the prisoners’ interests to basic physical survival, bodily needs, and safety, while eliminating all higher needs, such as social recognition, self-­esteem, and self-­actualization. Meanwhile, isolation from the rest of society, an information vacuum, loss of the normal social environment, barracks camp daily routine, and a strictly regimented, confined way of life were all meant to disorient the prisoners in time, rupture their established social connections, inculcate a sense of complete external

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

504

control over their lives, and reinforce their absolute dependence on the regime. Uniforms, the ban on personal belongings, and the use of numbers instead of names to identify prisoners all served to depersonalize the women, to eliminate what was unique about them, to dilute their identities, and to turn them into part of a faceless, obedient mass. While the prisoners’ work and food were under the total control of the regime and the women had no way to substantively influence these standards and regulations, living spaces were more within the control of the prisoners themselves. The women transformed their barracks into surrogate homes, turning them into a space of “collective privacy” as a kind of passive protest against the regime and the camp management. The guards and the camp overseers could not possibly constantly control all aspects of the everyday lives of the prisoners in the barracks, with the exception of routine searches to confiscate “forbidden items.” Despite the countless prohibitions and restrictions—not to mention the serious punishments meted out for violations—the prisoners led a hidden life in their barracks. This life included much that was forbidden: praying, singing, versifying, embroidering, relating personal stories and literary works, teaching, and so on. In this way, the barracks became that living space where a prisoner counterculture was born, took shape, and evolved, one that allowed the women to nurture and maintain their threatened social identities. An ability to use normative femininity to create small pockets of “normal life” served the women as a lifeline in the tempest of their camp existence. It also helped them preserve basic elements of humanity and dignity. Paradoxically, because it was not under the complete control of the camp management, the grated and closed barracks gave the women a certain free space, however illusory, where they could establish a parallel reality that functioned according to the rules of regular life. This space effectively undermined the aim of total control.

Conclusions

505

Meanwhile, the recollections of Ukrainian women also confirm the conclusions of many scholars who have analyzed sexuality, sexual relations, and sexualized violence in the Gulag camps. On the one hand, the prisoners were vulnerable and suffered from various forms of sexual abuse on the part of male personnel in the camps and male prisoners. On the other hand, some women took advantage of their sexuality as an additional resource, exchanging it for better living conditions, lighter work, more food, or clothing. Moreover, intimate and romantic relations were a source of rare joy for many of those suffering the inhuman conditions of the Gulag—and even a way to protest a camp regimen that formally prohibited contact between female and male prisoners. In reality, it was impossible to keep prisoners of different sexes completely apart. For Ukrainian women, one of the most effective ways to survive was to form small communities based on national sisterhood. Joined not only by a common ethnic culture—language, religion, and so on—but most often by their opposition to the regime due to anti-­Soviet, national-political views, the women established small, family-like groups and broader, quasi-­diasporan networks that offered mutual emotional, psychological, and material support. Despite their segregation from similar groups, interethnic prejudices, and tensions, the women were generally able to establish peaceful, often friendly relations with other ethnic groups—and even with the criminal element in the Gulag system. Sometimes, the shared desire to resist an oppressive system led to a sense of common ground among the women, one that allowed them to overcome ethnic differences. The most dramatic manifestation of this solidarity was the broad participation of women in the 1953–54 camp uprisings. Consciously or spontaneously, the women developed and applied relatively effective approaches and methods to counter the destructive impact of the camp regimen on their individuality. This undoubtedly also increased their chances of survival.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

506

The challenges that the women managed to cope with in this extremely uneven confrontation included: 1.

Overcoming isolation and the information vacuum in order to not lose themselves among strangers. They established channels of communication among Ukrainian women prisoners and with the outside world and their homes, and they regularly corresponded within the camps and zones and with their homeland. This correspondence brought support, restored social ties, and provided information.

2. Domesticating their living space in order to not forget who they were while in an alien environment. They created a semblance of “normal life” in the Gulag and turned their cells and barracks into something like a home comprised of the basic elements of the interior. They reorganized the alien environment of the camp or prison and made it into “their” living world. They also practiced traditional women’s daily routines, which helped them preserve their feminine identity despite conditions designed to destroy it. 3. Overcoming monotony and indeterminacy in order to not lose themselves in the flow of time. They structured time deliberately and re-­created the traditional rhythms of life by holding weekly liturgies and celebrating Christmas and Easter, and by adhering as closely as possible to the rituals and attributes of these holy days. 4. Overcoming emotional decline and despair in order to not lose hope. They joined in solidarity with other women, providing emotional support and mobilizing creativity; established female friendship and small mutual-­support groups; and engaged in creative efforts such as singing, versifying, drawing, and staging plays. These efforts helped the women comfort one another at critical times, overcome depression

Conclusions

507

and suicidal moods, or simply distract them to some degree from time to time. 5. Preserving their system of values in order to not lose their moral compasses. They engaged in regular religious practice such as holding private or group prayer in secret and celebrating the liturgy every Sunday and feast days. By taking on the role of the clergy, some women gained completely new experience as well. 6. Maintaining female gender identity in order to feel that they remained women. The women deliberately paid attention to their external appearance, keeping their hair and clothing in as good order as possible and undertaking regular hygienic practices and physical exercises. They also upheld various markers and attributes of womanhood such as embroidery, lacework, and perfumes, celebrated motherhood and cared about their sister prisoners, and “fixed up” their living space and environment. All these activities allowed the women to practice and manifest (heteronormative) gender identity. 7. Maintaining their Ukrainianness in order to not lose their ethnic identity. They set up informal national networks of fellow Ukrainians and re-­created both an imaginary nation in the broadest sense and a genuine diaspora of Ukrainians in the Gulag with the help of correspondence within and outside the camps and prisons, and they continued traditional forms of female creativity, such as embroidery and singing, which served as markers of national identity among the Ukrainian ­women. As in the Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag system was the antithesis of a conventional community: the regimen was designed to remove the individual completely from the environment that is regular human society. On some level, this apparatus aimed

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

508

at atomizing the prisoners and breaking up the foundations of their humanity, and it in fact proved to be a training camp that tested the real meaning of human society. The gender-­divided Gulag camps, like their German death camp counterparts, became an environment that allowed female solidarity to emerge and manifest itself, thanks to which the prisoners survived conditions that had no equivalent in the ordinary world. Relations in these female communities resembled familial sister-­sister and mother-­daughter relationships and were built by cultivating the traditional culture of a “womanly” ethic of care. This shaped possibly the most effective strategy to counter the destructive influence of the Gulag system and became the key to survival for the women. Mutual-­support groups among the women not only offered their members psychological, emotional, informational, and material support—providing a social network as well as food, clothing, and medications—but also allowed the women, by manifesting concern for one another, to carry out their traditional role as caregivers. This, in turn, helped them preserve their gender identity. Female solidarity manifested its effectiveness the most strongly in the most difficult circumstances, when the women were injured or sick, and in crises, such as conflicts with the administration, protests, and camp uprisings. At those moments, the collective response of the women, their readiness to jointly defend the interests of the individual and the group—despite their lack of any other resources or leverage—saved the lives of many prisoners. In applying a feminist approach to the study of women’s stories, we discover an entire layer of the past that was hitherto unknown, a past in which thousands of women lived through history on a daily basis—in every event, every day, and every minute, whether tragic, heroic, or completely ordinary. They experienced history in their own way, as women. They reacted to changes and applied various life strategies based on culturally defined notions of normative femininity: by using their personal

Conclusions

509

gender-­based knowledge, skills, and abilities, and by following, in their actions, the established social norms, moral values, and concepts of femininity in their culture. They made decisions, chose approaches, and looked for resources, but always acted, using whatever opportunities and resources were available, no matter how miserly, and overcame structural limitations. A feminist history of the Gulag offers the opportunity to hear the stories of women political prisoners about what they endured so that we can try to grasp their experience, reconstructing out of the scattered fragments of their recollections a more-­or-­less comprehensive and very complex portrait of the lives of an entire group of women under specific historical circumstances. These lives, filled as they were with pain, tears, shame, and despair, also contained joy, pride, hope, love, and humanity. Though the popular perception of the women who were political prisoners in the Gulag has traditionally made them solely victims who endured enormous abuse, humiliation, suffering, and loss, the women’s stories of what they experienced in the camps and prisons are hardly a portrait of victimization. In their personal memoirs, Ukrainian women who were once political prisoners consistently express their motivation: a desire to survive and triumph over the regime. Their stories are primarily the stories of unbelievable challenges and the ways in which those challenges were overcome, stories about strength of spirit and the power of community. This is why, in studying women’s experience of the Gulag, we must not just focus on the mountain of evidence of martyrdom but also seek out the less conspicuous—but, in fact, extremely powerful—forms of agency by the women in their gender-­based day-­to-­day practices of adaptation, resistance, and survival in captivity.

APPENDICES

ABBREVIATIONS BUR

barak usilennogo rezhima. Enforced regimen barrack, a punishment block or a penalty cell used to totally isolate and punish prisoners for transgressing camp rules.

ChSIR

chleny semei izmennikov rodiny. Family members of traitors of the homeland, a special category of political prisoners.

GULAG

Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel´no-­trudovykh lagerei i kolonii (Main Administration of Labor Camps and Colonies). Subordinated to the MVD after World War II.

ITK

ispravitel´no-­trudovaia koloniia. Corrective labor colony of relatively light regimen for prisoners sentenced for less than three years.

ITL

ispravitel´no-­trudovoi lager´. Corrective labor camp of general regimen for prisoners sentenced for more than three years.

KGB

Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security). The main Soviet agency responsible for internal and external security after 1954.

KVCh

kul´turno-­vospitatel´naia chast´ (cultural educational department). Special department in charge of communist indoctrination and reeducation of prisoners through cultural and educational activities. Each camp had a KVCh.

MGB

Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Ministry for State Security). A precursor to the KGB, responsible for internal and external security between 1946 and 1953.

MVD

Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs). Successor to the NKVD.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

NKVD

512

Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Agency charged with overseeing police work and the GULAG. The NKVD was formed in 1934 and dissolved in 1946.

OGPU

Ob˝edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie (Unified State Political Administration). Soviet secret police in 1923–34. It was later incorporated into the NKVD.

OLP

otdel´nyi lagernyi punkt. A separate camp subsection.

OUN

Orhanizatsiia ukraїns´kykh natsionalistiv (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). A political organization established in 1929 in Vienna.

RF

Russian Federation. The successor state of the Russian

SFSR

Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. The Russian SFSR

SFSR after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. was the largest of the Soviet socialist republics. SIZO

sledstvennyi izoliator. Penitentiary institution to keep the arrestees awaiting trials.

SSR

Soviet Socialist Republic. Soviet Ukraine was the Ukrainian SSR.

TsLT

tsentral´naia lechebnaia tochka. A central hospital unit serving a cluster of camps.

UPA

Ukraїns´ka povstans´ka armiia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Ukrainian armed nationalist underground, a paramilitary and partisan formation during World War II that engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Soviet Union, Communist Poland, and Nazi Germany.

ZhIR

zheny izmennikov rodiny. Wives of traitors of the homeland, a special category of political prisoners.

WOMEN PRISONERS OF THE GULAG WHOSE MEMOIRS WERE USED IN THIS BOOK Olga Adamova-­Sliozberg, b. 1902 Ievheniia Andrusiak, b. 1919 Halyna Andrusiv, b. 1932 Kateryna Andrusyshyn, n. d. Teklia Bekar, b. 1929 Polina Benoni, b. 1923 Oleksandra Blavats´ka, b. 1925 Ol´ha Brodiuk-­Dushenko, n. d. Mariia Bryndzhei-­Lekhyts´ka, n. d. Ievdokiia Budnik-­Kekish, b. 1924 Iuliia Budzanovych, n. d. Teofiliia Bzova-­Fedoriv-­Stakhiv, b. 1910 Stefaniia Chaban-­Haval´, b. 1926 Anastasiia Chekhovets´, b. 1930 Anna Cieślikowska, n. d. Tetiana Deineha, b. 1933 Nadiia Didukh, n. d. Teklia Dovhoshyia, b. 1925 Vira Drozd, b. 1929 Stefaniia Dzendrovs´ka-­Berkut, b. 1925 Sofiia Dziuban-­Holovata, b. 1928 Mariia Fliunt, b. 1925 Vira-­Mariia Franko, b. 1923

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

Nina Gagen-­Torn, b. 1901 Eugenia Ginzburg [Evgeniia Ginzburg], b. 1904 Elena Glinka, b. 1926 Nadezhda Grankina, b. 1904 Mariia Halii, b. 1926 Mariia Havryliv, b. 1929 Iryna Hladka-­Kanii, b. 1927 Ol´ha Hodiak, b. 1925 Halyna Holoiad (Savyts´ka) (Marta Hai), b. 1922 Stefaniia Holyns´ka (Oleshchuk), b. 1925 Uliana Honchar-­Bakai, b. 1925 Vanda Horchyns´ka (Demchuk), b. 1924 Anna Hoshko-­Kit, b. 1926 Mariia Hrendysh, b. 1926 Ol´ha Hrosberh-­Nakonechna, b. 1923 Melaniia Hrytsiv-­Kozak, b. 1928 Mariia Hrytsynina-­Kysil´, b. 1924 Dariia Husiak, b. 1924 Ievheniia Hymon (Khom’iak), b. 1927 Tetiana Hyshpil´-Demchuk, b. 1922 Mariia Iakovyshyn, n. d. Hanna Iurchyk-­Ivasenko, n. d. Olena Iurchyts´ka, b. 1921 Hanna Iurkiv-­Stets´kiv, b. 1923 Ievdokiia Ivakhiv, b. 1921 Hanna [Anna] Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn), b. 1925 Oksana Kamins´ka-­Iurchuk, b. 1922 Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak [Karvans´ka-­Bailiak], b. 1924 Nusia Katamai, n. d. Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya [Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia], b. 1907 Ievheniia Khomii-­Kamins´ka, b. 1926 Oksana Khrashchevs´ka, b. 1925 Volodymyra Kobryn-­Senyk, b. 1928 Halyna Kokhans´ka, b. 1925 Dariia Korchak, b. 1933

514

Appendices

Vira Korpan, b. 1924 Dariia Koshak-­Svystel´nyts´ka, b. 1926 Nataliia Kostenko, b. 1922 Stefaniia Kostets´ka-­Levko, b. 1926 Stefaniia Kostiuk (Protsak), b. 1925 Ievdokiia Kotelko (Kapko), b. 1919 Anna [Hanna] Kotsur, b. 1923 Stefaniia Koval´-Nadorozhniak, b. 1928 Nadiia Krutiak (Rudnyk), b. 1926 Tamara Kryshtal´s´ka (Iemchyk), b. 1926 Iaroslava Kryzhanivs´ka-­Hasiuk, b. 1925 Stefaniia Kvas, b. 1924 Hanna Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka, b. 1927 Mariia Lavriv-­Skrentovych, b. 1925 Vira Lemekha, b. 1923 Ol´ha Liads´ka, b. 1926 Elinor Lipper, b. 1912 Mariia Makohon-­Duzha, b. 1925 Kateryna Maksymovych, b. 1924 Nina Mal´tseva, b. 1911 Kateryna Mandryk-­Kuibida, b. 1927 Zoia Marchenko, b. 1907 Marta N., n. d. Anna Martyniuk, b. 1925 Anna Marunchak, n. d. Ivanna Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka), b. 1925 Iryna (Orysia) Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, b. 1929 Ol´ha Matseliukh-­Horyn´, b. 1930 Hanna Mazepa-­Kuchma, n. d. Kateryna Melish (Mel´nyk), b. 1923 Ol´ha Mereshchak-­Zaiats´, b. 1919 Oksana Meshko, b. 1905 Orysia Mochul´s´ka, n. d. Ol´ha Moda-­Pokaliuk, b. 1923 Mariia Muzychka, b. 1901

515

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

Mariia Nych-­Strakhaniuk, n. d. Beata Obertyńska (Marta Rudzka), b. 1898 Ekaterina Olitskaia, b. 1899 Tamara Petkevich, b. 1920 Hanna Plechii, b. 1929 Dariia Poliuha (Masiuk), b. 1926 Nataliia Popovych, b. 1906 Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna, b. 1924 Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk), b. 1925 Paraska Protsak, b. 1926 Zonia Pyliavs´ka, b. 1922 Mariia Pyrih, b. 1927 Raїsa Rudenko, b. 1939 Tamara Ruzhentseva, b. 1917 Vasylyna Salamon, b. 1919 Kateryna Savchuk, b. 1923 Walli Schliess, n. d. Iryna Senyk, b. 1926 Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko, b. 1920 Halyna Shubs´ka, b. 1918 Nataliia Shukhevych, b. 1910 Stefaniia Shuplat (Bodnar), b. 1927 Mariia Shustakevych, b. 1927 Barbara Skarga, b. 1927 Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, b. 1922 Melaniia Sluka, b. 1927 Ol´ha Spodaryk, b. 1928 Valentyna Starik-­Palamarchuk, b. 1923 Militsa Stefanskaia, b. 1916 Sofiia Stefanyshyn, b. 1927 Ol´ha Stets-­Ivanchuk, b. 1928 Nadiia Surovtsova [Nadezhda Surovtseva], b. 1896 Ruf´ Tamarina, b. 1921 Mariia Tanasiichuk, n. d. Mariia Teslia-­Pavlyk, b. 1927

516

Appendices

Teklia Tykhan, b. 1926 Lidiia-­Oleksandra Tykhovliz (Dzhulyns´ka), b. 1928 Stefaniia Tymchyshyn, b. 1921 Nadezhda Ulanovskaia, b. 1903 Mariia Vahula, b. 1926 Valentyna N., n. d. Oleksandra Veres-­Shtundak, b. 1927 Oksana Vintoniv, b. 1926 Nina Virchenko, b. 1930 Mariia Vislapuu (Hryb), b. 1928 Kateryna Vitko-­Stakh, n.  d. Ada Voitolovskaia, b. 1902 Omeliana Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, b. 1925 Irena Volodymyrs´ka, b. 1924 Hava Volovich, b. 1916 Oksana Vorobii, n. d. Stefaniia Vuitsyk (Susol), b. 1926 Ivanna Vykovych, b. 1933 Larysa Zadorozhan, b. 1920 Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, b. 1919 Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka, b. 1923 Nataliia Zaporozhets´, b. 1923 Kateryna Zaryts´ka, b. 1914 Ol´ha Zaverbna, n. d. Hanna Zelena (Abramchuk), b. 1927 Iosyfa Zholdak, b. 1927

517

GLOSSARY aktirovka

early release of a severely ill prisoner based on an akt, a conclusion of the medical-­ labor commission confirming an incurable health condition or terminal illness.

balanda

a watery prison soup, tasteless and poor, with some potatoes, vegetables, or cereals added.

Banderite

a follower of Stepan Bandera, one of the major leaders of the OUN. This term was pejoratively and broadly used to designate Ukrainian nationalists.

blatnye

common criminals, convicts belonging to and following the rules of a criminal subculture.

burzhuika

a small metal barrel-­shaped stove with a flue sticking out through the roof or a window.

bushlat (pl. bushlaty)

a military-­style pea coat made of wool felt; also, a sleeved jacket with cotton filling widely used by prisoners and by civilian workers.

bytovik (pl. bytoviki)

a petty criminal, convicted for black market activities, petty theft, or other minor economic offenses.

cauldron (kotel)

ration formula, which differentiated ration schedules depending on prisoners’ work output, type of job, health status, and more.

chuni

prison jargon for gross boots made of improvised materials, usually having a sole made of tire rubber and attached bootlegs made of thick quilted cotton.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

520

cellular prison

place of detention for the most dangerous and incorrigible convicts, who were isolated from other prisoners to prevent malefic influence.

dekulakization

the process of destroying of kulaks (wealthy peasants) as a class in the USSR. This campaign was launched in 1929.

goner

From the Russian dokhodiaga. Camp jargon for a last-­legger, a prisoner at the final stage of physical exhaustion and on the verge of death.

Hoshiv Madonna

the wonder-­working icon of the Mother of God held in the Hoshiv Monastery, Ivano-­ Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine, a copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa held in the Jasna Góra Monastery in Poland.

kasha

a porridgelike food made of pearl barley, millet, or wheat groats.

katorga

a harsh regimen section of a corrective labor camp, intended for especially dangerous convicts (mainly political prisoners) in 1943–48.

keptar

sleeveless fur coat made of sheepskin, usually artfully decorated, part of the traditional folk costume of Ukrainian highlanders in the Carpathians.

kirza

colloquial name for heavy military boots made of a type of artificial leather based on a multilayered textile, used in the USSR as a cheap and effective replacement for natural leather.

koliada (pl. koliady)

traditional Ukrainian Christmas carols.

Kolyma tram

prison jargon for a practice of extremely violent group rape of female convicts by male criminals during the transfer (transport) of prisoners to their destination camps.

komandirovka (pl. komandirovki)

a remote assignment; a temporary subdivision of a camp established for seasonal work (e. g., harvesting, mowing) in remote areas.

Appendices

521

komisovka

medical examination of prisoners by the medical-­ labor commission to determine their work capacity.

kordy

thick rubber galoshes worn over chuni.

krashanky

dyed, cooked multicolored eggs to be blessed during special Easter service and then jointly consumed by family members, an essential element of the traditional Ukrainian Easter celebration.

kutia

a ritual grain meal related to Ukrainian funeral customs; an essential component of the traditional Christmas Eve dinner.

lagpunkt (pl. lagpunkty)

a separate camp subsection, also referred to as OLP.

makhorka

gross, cheap tobacco smoked mainly by the lower classes, including prisoners.

mastyrky

jargon for self-­mutilation or deceptions practiced by prisoners to imitate an illness in order to receive a work exemption, be hospitalized, or obtain early release.

mogar

annual plant, also known as foxtail millet (S. italica subsp. mocharicum).

Ostarbeiter

a forced laborer from Central and Eastern Europe in Nazi Germany during World War II.

parasha (pl. parashi)

usually a bucket or a barrel used for excrement inside a cell or barrack with no access to a regular bathroom.

paska

a special ritual bread, an essential component of the traditional Ukrainian Easter meal.

Polish Home Army

Armia Krajowa. Polish underground military resistance during World War II.

pridurki

prisoners who occupy privileged positions in a camp hierarchy doing lighter or managerial jobs.

prozharka

from the Russian verb zharit´ (to roast). A heat treatment of prisoners’ clothes for disinfection purposes.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

522

pysanky

artfully painted fresh eggs endowed with strong symbolical meaning, an essential element of the traditional Ukrainian Easter celebration.

remand prison

a local NKVD jail where arrestees were kept and interrogated during the investigation, before trial and conviction.

salo

lard, usually salted, seasoned, or smoked; traditional Slavic food.

sanobrabotka

a sanitary procedure aimed to eliminate parasites and malignant bacteria from a prisoner’s body and clothes.

shchedrivky

Ukrainian traditional carols for the New Year’s Eve, also known as shchedryi vechir (lit. a generous night).

shchi

a Russian-­style cabbage soup.

shmon

prison jargon for a search for prohibited objects performed by prison or camp guards in cells and barracks.

shock worker

a worker who shows maximum production output, exceeding a production quota.

sotnyk

a mid-­level military rank in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the UPA.

special camps

also known as special regimen camps, these camps were created in 1948 for political prisoners considered especially dangerous. The camps were notorious for their harsher regimen and additional restrictions (use of numbers on the convicts’ clothes, locked barracks, bars on barrack windows, limited/ forbidden correspondence, longer work hours, harsher punishment for rule transgressions, etc.).

traitor of the homeland

general name for political prisoners convicted after Article 58 for “charges of treason of the homeland.” This designation included a wide range of crimes (espionage, defection, etc.).

transit prison (camp)

a special prison or smaller camp where prisoners transferred from one place of confinement to

Appendices

523

another were kept for a relatively short period (usually from a few weeks up to a few months). Ukrainian Sich Riflemen

Ukraїns´ki sichovi stril´tsi. A Ukrainian unit within the Austro-­Hungarian Army during World War I.

urka (pl. urki)

jargon for a hardened, strict, violent, or inveterate criminal convict.

uzvar

traditional Ukrainian beverage made of cooked dry fruit, usually apples, pears, and plums.

valianki

traditional Russian winter footwear; boots made of wool felt.

vertep

a Christmas performance based on the biblical story of Christ’s birth.

zona

guarded, isolated territory enclosed by barbed wire and denoting a camp; general colloquial designation for all places of detention.

GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONS AND PRISONS MENTIONED IN THE TEXT Abez, a camp named after a township near the city of Inta, Komi Republic, Russian Federation (RF) Altai, a region in southern Siberia, RF Balkhash, a lake, Kazakhstan Bibrka, a town in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine Boryslav, a town in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine Bryhidky, NKVD remand prison in Lviv, Ukraine Bukovyna, a region, Ukraine Camp no. 75, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine Cheliabinsk Oblast, a region in west-­central RF Chortkiv, NKVD remand prison in town of same name, Ternopil Oblast Ciscarpathia, a region, Ukraine Construction Site no. 15, a site charged with laying an oil pipeline from Okha township on Sakhalin Island to the city of Komsomolsk-­on-­Amur, Khabarovsk Krai, RF (June 1941–October 1943) Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), a city, Ukraine Drohobych, NKVD remand prison in city of same name, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine Eastern Siberia, a region between the Yenisey River and the Pacific Ocean, RF Fordon, an all-­women prison in the city of Bydgoszcz, Poland Far East, the easternmost territory of the RF Galicia, a region, Ukraine Gulf of Finland, the easternmost arm of the Baltic Sea Iaroslavl, a city north of Moscow, RF Iasinia, a township in Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

526

Inta, a city in Komi Republic, RF Intlag, an ITL near Inta city, Komi Republic, RF Irkutsk, a city in Eastern Siberia, RF Karabas transit camp, near the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan Karaganda, a city, Kazakhstan Karlag, an ITL near the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan Kazachinsk, a township in Irkutsk Oblast, RF Kazan, a city in the Republic of Tatarstan, RF Kengir, a township in Karaganda Oblast, Kazakhstan Kengir, an OLP camp near Kengir township, part of the Steplag ITL Kharkiv Oblast, a region, Ukraine Kolomyia Prison, NKVD remand prison in the town of the same name, Ukraine Kolyma, a river and a region, Magadan Oblast, RF Konotop, a town in Sumy Oblast, Ukraine Krasnoiarsk, a city on the Yenisey River, RF Krem’ianets Prison, NKVD remand prison in the town of the same name, Ukraine Kyiv, city in Kyiv Oblast and the capital of Ukraine Lontskyi, NKVD remand prison in city of Lviv, Ukraine Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine Luk’ianivska, NKVD remand prison in Kyiv, Ukraine Lutsk Prison, NKVD remand prison in city of same name, Ukraine Minlag, special camp no. 1, near Inta township, Komi Republic, RF Mordovia Republic, RF Mykolaiv Oblast, a region, Ukraine Okhotsk, sea of the western Pacific Ocean Ozerlag, special camp no. 7, near Taishet city, Irkutsk Oblast, RF Pechorlag, ITL near Pechora township, Komi Republic, RF Podillia, a region, Ukraine Potma, a transit camp near the township and railway station of the same name, Republic of Mordovia, RF Predshakhtnaia, a camp near the railway station of the same name, city of Vorkuta, Komi Republic, RF Rechlag, special camp no. 6, near city of Vorkuta, Komi Republic, RF Rivne Prison, NKVD remand prison, in city of same name, Ukraine

Appendices

527

Rzeszów Prison, a cellular prison in the city of the same name, Poland Shyriaev, a cellular prison in the city of Norilsk, RF, named after a prison chief notorious for his sadistic cruelty Sillamäe, a town, Estonia Steplag, special camp no. 4, near Kengir township, Karaganda Oblast, Kazakhstan Sniatyn, a town, Ivano-­Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine Susuman, a township, Magadan Oblast, RF Suzdal Prison, cellular prison located in city of the same name, Vladimir Oblast, RF Sverdlovsk, a city east of the Urals, RF (now known as Ekaterinburg) Taishet, a town in Irkutsk Oblast, RF Taimyr Peninsula, the northernmost part of the mainland of Eurasia, Krasnoiarsk Krai, RF Ternopil Oblast, a region, Ukraine Transcarpathia, a region, Ukraine Tula, a city to the south of Moscow, RF Ural, the region around the Ural Mountains, RF Ukhta, a town, Komi Republic, RF Vakkhanka camp, an OLP within the Butugychag ITL in the Kolyma region, RF Vanina Bay, Sea of Japan, Khabarovsk Krai, RF Verkhneuralsk Prison, cellular prison in city of the same name, Cheliabinsk Oblast, RF Viatlag, ITL near Viatka River, Kirov Oblast, RF Vladimir Central Prison, a cellular prison in the city of Vladimir, RF Vorkutlag, ITL near the city of Vorkuta, Komi Republic, RF Vorkuta, a city in Komi Republic, RF Western Siberia, a region between the Urals and the Yenisey River, RF Yenisey, a river in Siberia, RF Zamarstyniv, NRVD remand prison in Lviv, Ukraine Zolochiv Prison, NRVD remand prison in a city of the same name, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 The GULAG was established as part of the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) of the Soviet Union in 1930. In 1934, after the establishment of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the GULAG was subordinated to it, and in 1946, it came under the administration of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). 2 For an interactive map of the correctional labor camps of the Gulag, including information about each of the sites, see “Sistema ispravitel´no-­ trudovykh lagerei v SSSR,” Memorial: The International Historical, Educational, Charitable, and Human Rights Society, 1998, http://old. memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/maps/ussri.htm. 3 Iurii Pyliavets´ and Rostyslav Pyliavets´, “Katorha v SRSR (1943–1954 rr.): Tabory, kontynhent, umovy utrymannia ta pratsi politv’iazniv,” Ukraïns´kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 2 (2011): 91–105. 4 For more details on the different types of prisons, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 18–27. 5 Anatolii Vishnevskii, “Obshchee chislo repressirovanykh,” Demoskop, no. 313–14 (December 2007), http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema05. php; Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 15.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

530

6 Stephen Blyth, “The Dead of the Gulag: An Experiment in Statistical Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. C, 44, no. 3 (1995): 319. Moreover, contemporary Western researchers believe that at least six million persons died in the Gulag system (Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 15–16), whereas Russian historians insist on the much smaller figure of 1.75 million victims between 1930 and 1953. See Mikhail Nakonechnyi, “Smertnost´ zakliuchennykh v otechestvennoi penitentsiarnoi sisteme v 1885–1915 i 1930–1953 godakh: Sravnenie v istoricheskom kontekste” (paper, Shkola-­konferentsiia molodykh uchenykh IRI RAN, Moscow, November 9, 2017), http://mkonf.iriran.ru/papers. php?id=130. 7 Turganbek Allaniiazov, “Ukraintsy v osobykh lageriakh GULAG MVD SSSR,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB 2, no. 48 (2017): 222–23. 8 Lesia Bondaruk, “Nam sontse vsmikhalos´ kriz´ rzhaviï graty. . .,” in Karlag: Kenhirske povstannia. Do istorii povstannia uv’iaznenykh 3 viddilennia Stepovoho taboru MVS SRSR (16 travnia‑26 chervnia 1954 roku), ed. Turganbek Allaniiazov (Karaganda: n. p., 2017), 22. 9 There is ongoing debate in contemporary Gulag studies about whether the Gulag was primarily a repressive institution to isolate and punish “enemies” of the Soviet regime, an instrument of Soviet social engineering aimed at reeducating insufficiently “conscious” citizens, or a means of pursuing economic goals—that is, mainly the absorption of new territories and natural resources using the forced labor of prisoners. For more details, see Alan Barenberg et al., “New Directions in Gulag Studies: A Roundtable Discussion,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 59, no. 3–4 (2017): 376–95. 10 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 5. 11 Viktor Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-­sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” Sotsiolo­ gicheskie issledovaniia, no. 7 (1991): 4. 12 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 157–59. 13 Galina Ivanova, “GULAG: Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve,” in Apogei i krakh stalinizma, ed. Iurii Afanas´ev, vol. 2 of Sovetskoe obshchestvo: Voznik­ novenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final (Moscow: RGGU, 1997), 216–17. 14 It will likely never be possible to calculate exactly how many Ukrainian women were political prisoners in the camps and prisons at this time. In

Notes

531

the end, numbers matter little when we are talking about the wrecked destinies, crippled bodies, and lost lives of thousands whose only fault lay in refusing to submit to the totalitarian Stalinist regime. 15 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 95–96; Pavel Polian, “Inostrantsy v GULAGe: Sovetskie repressii protiv inostrannopoddanykh,” in Rossiia i ee regiony: Territoriia—rasselenie—migratsii, ed. Pavel Polian and Ol´ga Glezer (Moscow: OGI, 2005), 617–30. 16 Zemskov, “GULAG,” no. 6, 10–11. 17 Zemskov, no. 7, 3. 18 Zemskov, no. 7, 8. 19 Pyliavets´ and Pyliavets´, “Katorha v SRSR,” 105. 20 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 53. 21 Aleksandr Bezborodov and Vladimir Khrustalev, eds., Naselenie Gulaga: Chislennost´ i usloviia soderzhaniia, vol. 4 of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh—pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 266. 22 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 264. 23 Vadim Gritsenko and Viacheslav Kalinin, “Zhenskoe l­ itso GULAGa: Kak na mertvoi doroge roslo naselenie SSSR,” Novaia gazeta, April 8, 2009, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2009/04/08/43275-zhenskoe-­litso-­gulaga. 24 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 281. 25 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 291. 26 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 301. 27 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 99; Wilson T. Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power in the Late Stalinist Gulag,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 2 (2015): 208–10. 28 Veronica Shapovalov, trans. and ed., Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 1. 29 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 295. 30 David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947); Boris Yakovlev, Concentration Camps of the USSR (Munich: Institute for Soviet History and Culture Studies, 1955); Albert Konrad Herling, The Soviet Slave Empire (New York: W. Funk, 1951); Volodymyr Kosyk, Concentration Camps in the USSR (London: Ukrainian, 1962); Avraham Shifrin, The First Guidebook

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

532

to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union (Uhldingen, Switzerland: Stephanus Edition, 1980). 31 Martha Chyz, Woman and Child in the Modern System of Slavery— U.S.S.R. (New York: Dobrus, 1962); Stephania Halychyn, 500 Ukrainian Martyred Women (New York: United Ukrainian Women’s Organizations of America, 1956). 32 Helen Celmina, Women in Soviet Prisons (New York: Paragon House, 1985). 33 Taras B. Horalewskyj and Bohdan Arey, eds., Invincible Spirit: Art and Poetry of Ukrainian Women Political Prisoners in the U.S.S.R., trans. Bohdan Yasen (Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1977); Nina Strokata, Ukrainian Women in the Soviet Union: Documented Persecution [1975– 1980] (Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1980); Bohdan Yasen, ed., Women’s Voices from Soviet Labor Camps, trans. Lesia Jones (Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1975); Nina Strokata and Natalia Pazuniak, Oksana Meshko (Philadelphia, PA: Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, 1985). 34 Galina Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System (New York: Routledge, 2000); Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (London: Oxford University Press, 2007); Barnes, Death and Redemption. 35 For a list of the main works on Gulag history, see Wilson T. Bell and Marc Elie, “Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag,” Gulag Studies 1 (2008): 143–60; Bell and Elie, “A Supplement to Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag,” Gulag Studies 4 (2011): 121–26. 36 For a full review of key publications in Gulag history, see Wilson T. Bell, “Gulag Historiography: An Introduction,” Gulag Studies 2–3 (2009–10): 1–20. 37 Barnes, Death and Redemption; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity; Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002).

Notes

533

38 Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters, ed. and trans. Emily D. Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Ol´ga Milova, Izgnanniki v svoei strane: Pis´ma iz sovetskoi ssylki 1921–1930-kh godov (Moscow: Nauka, 2008); Liia Dolzhanskaia and Irina Osipova, “Dorogaia Ekaterina Pavlovna. . .”: Pis´ma zhenshchin i detei. Pis´ma v ikh zashchitu. 1920– 1936 (Saint Petersburg: Zhurnal Zvezda, 2005); Vladimir M. Grinev and A. Danil´, eds., Uznitsy “ALZhIRa”: Spisok zhenshchin-­zakliuchennykh Akmolinskogo i drugikh otdelenii Karlaga (Moscow: Zven´ia, 2003); Orlando Figes, Just Send Me Word. A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (New York: Penguin Books, 2012). 39 An example of this kind of shift can be found in the themed issues of academic periodicals. See, for instance, Olga Ulturgasheva, ed., “Gulag Legacy: Spaces of Continuity in Contemporary Everyday Practices,” special issue, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 7, no. 1 (2015), http://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium/issue/view/18. For a similar analysis of women’s narratives about exile and imprisonment, see Tiina Ann Kirss, ed., “Baltic Life Stories,” special issue, Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005). 40 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 41 Anne Applebaum, “Holovne mistse v moїi knyzi pro HULAH posidaiut´ ne emotsiї ta polityka, a te, shcho perezhyly zhertvy,” Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 8 April 2006, https://dt.ua/SOCIETY/enn_epplbom_golovne_mistse_v_ moyiy_knizi_pro_gulag_posidayut_ne_emotsiyi_ta_politika,_a_te,_scho_ per.html. 42 Nadezhda Surovtseva, “Vladivostok Transit,” in Till My Tale Is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, ed. Semyon Vilensky, trans. John Crowfoot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 181–210; Oksana Meshko, Between Death and Life, trans. George Moshinsky (New York: Women’s Association for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine, 1981). 43 Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness; Vilensky, Till My Tale Is Told; Olga Adamova-­Sliozberg, My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag, trans. Katharine Gratwick Baker (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011); Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

534

Ian Boland, introduced by Heinrich Böll (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). 44 For Jolluck’s study, see Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). For the bibliographies, see Bell and Elie, “Selected Bibliography”; Bell and Elie, “A Supplement to Selected Bibliography.” 45 Bell, “Gulag Historiography,” 18. 46 Barenberg et al., “New Directions in Gulag Studies.” 47 Emma Mason, “Women in the Gulag in the 1930s,” in Women in the Stalin Era, ed. Melanie Ilič (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 131–50; Shalva Gagulashvili, “Grappling with Evil: Women of the Gulag Speak” (MA thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2003); Caroline Vasicek, “Voices from the Darkness: Women in the Nazi Camps and Soviet Gulag” (BA thesis, Boston College, Boston, 2003); Katryna Coak, “‘A Day in the Life of. . .’: Women of the Soviet Gulag,” The View East: Central and Eastern Europe, Past and Present (blog), 19 June 2012, http://thevieweast.wordpress. com/2012/06/19/a-­day-­in-­the-­life-­of-­women-­of-­the-­Soviet-­gulag/. 48 Ol´ga Chesnokova, “Zhenskii opyt GULAGa v sovetskoi istorii 1930–1950kh godov,” in Zhenshchiny v istorii: Vozmozhnost´ byt´ uvidennymi, ed. Irina Chikalova (Minsk: BGPU Maksima Tanka, 2001), 189–93; Vladimir Kuzin, “Zhenshchiny GULAGa,” Grani epokhi: Etiko-­filosofskii zhurnal 32 (2007), http://www.facets.ru/articles7/3210.htm; Veronika Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni: Zhenskie lager´nye memuary,” in Sotsialnaia istoriia: Ezhegodnik, 2003. Zhenskaia i gendernaia istoriia, ed. Nataliia Pushkareva (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), 465–87. 49 In researching manifestations of sexuality and sexualized violence against women in prison, historians often resort less to the personal testimony of the women (which tend to be limited in both quantity and candor), than to the more outspoken memoirs of male political prisoners. This approach of seeing the situation through men’s eyes makes it difficult to properly assess this aspect of camp life for the women themselves, but at least it provides a general idea of the situation, where sexuality could be both a risk factor and an additional resource for incarcerated women. Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power”; Adi Kuntsman, “‘With

Notes

535

a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 308–28; Gratian Cormos, “Women Humiliated in the Romanian Communist Prison,” Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 47–52. 50 In addition to the works mentioned earlier, see also Elaine MacKinnon, “Motherhood and Survival in the Stalinist Gulag,” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 13 (2019): 65–94; Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power”; Liubov´ Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” in Gendernaia teoriia i istoricheskoe znanie, ed. Andrei Pavlov (Syktyvkar, Russia: SGU, 2003), 271–77; Ol´ga Omel´chenko, “Usloviia otbyvaniia nakazaniia beremennymi zhenshchinami i zhenshchinami, imeiushchimi maloletnikh detei, vo vremena GULAGa,” Pravo i politika, no. 5 (2014): 708–18; Arsenii Roginskii and Aleksandr Daniel´, “Arestu podlezhat zheny. . .” in Grinev and Danil´, Uznitsy “ALZhIRa,” 6–30; Veronika Shapovalova, “Sestrenki, mamki, damki: Tema nasiliia v zhenskikh lager´nykh memuarakh,” in Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI–XXI vv.), ed. Marianna Murav´eva and Nataliia Pushkareva (Saint Petersburg: EU SPb, 2012), 142–63. 51 Mara Lazda, “Women, Nation, and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941–1957,” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 1–12; Violeta Davoliute, “Deportee Memoirs and Lithuanian History: The Double Testimony of Dalia Grinkeviciute,” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 51–68; Tiina Kirss, “Survivorship and the Eastern Exile: Estonian Women’s Life Narratives of the 1941 and 1949 Siberian Deportations,” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 13–38; Tiina Kirss, ed. and trans., Estonian Life Stories (New York: CEU Press, 2009); Tiina Kirss, Ene Koresaar, and Marju Lauristin, eds., She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-­Soviet Life Stories (Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2004). 52 Meinhard Stark, Frauen im Gulag: Alltag und Überleben, 1936–1956 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003). 53 Tamara Vrons´ka, “Stalins´ka henderna polityka u dobu ‘velykoho teroru’ (1937–1938 rr.),” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB 32 (2009): 137–75;

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

536

Vrons´ka, Upokorennia strakhom: Simeine zaruchnytstvo v karal´nii praktytsi radians´koї vlady (1917–1953 rr.) (Kyiv: Tempora, 2013), 142–92. 54 Volodymyr Nikol´s´kyi, “Statystyka sotsial´noho skladu represovanykh radians´kymy orhanamy derzhavnoї bezpeky u 1943–1957 rr. (za dokumentamy Derzhavnoho arkhivu SB Ukraїny),” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­ NKVD-­KGB 20 (2003): 124–25. 55 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from Holocaust (London: Rider, 2004). 56 Dariia Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno! (Lviv: n. p., 2014), 57–58. 57 Ivanna Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho (Kyiv: Klio, 2019), 138. 58 Beata Obertyńska (Marta Rudzka), W domu niewoli (Rome: Nakł. Oddziału kultury i prasy 2. korpusu A. P., 1946); Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (Chicago: Regnery, 1951); Nina Gagen-­Torn, Memoria (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1994); Tamara Petkevich, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, trans. Yasha Kolts and Ross Ufberg (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Adamova-­Sliozberg, My Journey; Ada Voitolovskaia, Po sledam sud´by moego pokoleniia (Syktyvkar, Russia: Komi knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1991); Hava Volovich, “My Past,” in Till My Tale Is Told, 241–76. 59 Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 84. In the Russian original published as Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut. Khronika vremen kul´ta lichnosti (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1990), 333–4. 60 Barbara Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia . . . 1944–1956, trans. Dmytro Antoniuk (Chernivtsi: Knyhy-­ХХІ, 2018), 216; published in the Polish original as Barbara Skarga, Po wyzwoleniu . . . 1944–1956 (Warsaw: Fundacja Aletheia, 2000). 61 Walli Schliess, “Den´ u Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 7 (July 1956): 5–6; Schliess, “Molytva u Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 9 (September 1956): 7; Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 8 (August 1956): 6–9; Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 10 (October 1956): 7; Schliess, “Rizdvo u Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 1 (January 1957): 4; “Rozvaha v Vorkuti,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 11 (November 1956): 7. 62 Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, Naskal´naia zhivopis´: “. . . bezzakoniia nashi svidetel´stvuiut protiv nas,” ed. Vladimir Vigilianskii (Moscow: Kvadrat,

Notes

537

1991); Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek: Povest´ o perezhitom, 6 vols., 12 books (Moscow: Fond Kersnovskoi, 2000–2001), http://www.gulag.su/ project/. 63 Hilda Smith, “Feminism and the Methodology of Women’s History,” in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 372; Susan Geiger, “What’s So Feminist about Women’s Oral History?,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (1990): 170; Marjorie L. Devault, “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis,” Social Problems 37, no. 1 (1990): 96–116. 64 Ronit Lentin, “Introduction: Engendering Genocides,” in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1998), 5. 65 For more details, see Graham Gardner, “Unreliable Memories and Other Contingencies: Problems with Biographical Knowledge,” Qualitative Research 1, no. 2 (2000): 185–204. 66 The Virtual Gulag Museum portal represents 127 museums—state- and NGO-­funded museums, museums of certain institutions and schools, and museums of local history—located in the territory of the former Soviet Union that in one way or another focus on political repression and the experience of political prisoners. The list, however, is far from exhaustive: it does not include a slew of similar museums in Ukraine in the cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Buchach, and others. See Virtual´nyi muzei GULAGa, http://www.gulagmuseum.org/. 67 Tiurma na Lonts´koho, “U ‘Tiurmi na Lonts´koho’ demonstruvatymut´ rukodillia uv’iaznenykh zhinok-­politv’iazniv,” accessed 24 June 2020, http://www.lonckoho.lviv.ua/podiji/anonsy/u-­tyurmi-­na-­lontskoho-­ demonstruvatymut-­rukodillya-­uvyaznenyh-­zhinok-­politvyazniv.html; Tiurma na Lonts´koho, “Kolir molytvy: vyshyti ikony u radianskykh tiurmakh i taborakh,” accessed 24 June 2020, http://www.lonckoho.lviv.ua/ podiji/kolir-­molytvy-­vyshyti-­ikony-­u-radyanskyh-­tyurmah-­i-taborah. html. See also Tomasz Kizny, Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps (Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2004). 68 Gulag Museum at Perm, GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom (online exhibit), GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/; Roy Rosenzweig Center for

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

538

History and New Media, Days and Lives (online visual exhibit), GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/days-­and-­lives/; Open Society Archives, Gulag Exhibit, https://catalog.osaarchivum.org/ catalog/nOodAgV2; Aleksandr Gromov and Tengiz Semenov, dir., GULAG-­ foto. Zhenskii al´bom (documentary film, 2003), YouTube video, 26:17, posted 14 September 2014, https://www.youtube.com/­watch?­v=­b4OqCJa-­ eh0; Marianna Yarovskaya, dir., Women of the Gulag (documentary film, 2018), https://womenofthegulag.com/; Sakharov Center, Vospominaniia o GULAGe: Avtory i teksty vospominanii o GULAGe (The Memoirs of the Gulag and Their Authors Database), https://www.sakharov-­center.ru/ asfcd/auth/. 69 Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini, vol. 1 of International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 112. 70 Vladislav Pocheptsov, “‘Kolymskoe zemliachestvo’: Problema formirovaniia identichnosti politicheskikh zakliuchennykh (na materiale memuarov Zoi Dmitrievny Marchenko),” Laboratorium 7, no. 1 (2015): 137; Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness, 2; Anne Applebaum, introduction to Gulag Voices: An Anthology, ed. Anne Applebaum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), xiii–xiv. 71 Researchers who have studied the experience of women in the Holocaust have run into similar ethical issues: Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, “Introduction: The Role of Gender in the Holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 18; Janet L. Jakobs, “Women, Genocide, and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research,” Gender and Society 18, no. 2 (2004): 223–38. 72 Jakobs, “Women, Genocide, and Memory,” 235. 73 This observation is based on an apt comparison by Leona Toker in her Return from the Archipelago, 82–94. 74 Oksana Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit: Khudozhnio-­dokumental´na proza (Lviv: Spolom, 2012), 51, 57–58. 75 Oleksandra Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu! Za її voliu! (Kolomyia: Vik, 2010), 5–6. 76 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 110.

Notes

539

77 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 103. 78 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 112. 79 Oleksandra Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia (Lviv: Mizhnarodna ekonomichna fundatsiia, 2010), 120.

CHAPTER 1 1 A complete archive of this publication is available on the site of the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, http://resource.history.org.ua/. 2 Vrons´ka, “Stalins´ka henderna polityka”; Vrons´ka, Upokorennia strakhom. 3 Pyliavets´ and Pyliavets´, “Katorha v SRSR”; Oleksandr Rubliov, “Halyts´kymy marshrutamy HULAHu: Zakhidnoukraїs´ka intelihentsiia v taborakh SRSR. 1930-tі rr.,” Istoriia Ukraїny, no. 37 (2002): 11–12. 4 For a list of publications by Larysa Bondaruk see her “Ukraїns´kyi rukh oporu v radians´kykh kontstaborakh u 40-kh–pershii polovyni 50-kh rokiv XX st.” (PhD diss., Volyns´kyi national´nyi universytet im. Lesi Ukraїnky, Lutsk, 2011). 5 The most significant publications include: Mikhail Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel´no-­trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998); Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga (7 vols.); Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, eds., GULAG 1917–1960: Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (Moscow: MFD, 2000); Galina Ivanova, Istoriia GULAGa 1918–1958: Sotsial´no-­ekonomicheskii i politiko-­pravovoi aspekty (Moscow: Nauka, 2006); Lev Borodkin, Paul Gregori, and Oleg Khlev­ niuk, eds., Gulag: Ekonomika prinuditel´nogo truda (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008); Oleg Khlevniuk and Sergei Mironenko, eds., Zakliuchennye na stroikakh kommunizma. GULAG i ob˝ekty energetiki v SSSR: Sobranie dokumentov i fotografii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008). 6 Some of the most recent issues are available in open access on the association’s site, Vseukraїns´ke tovatystvo politychnykh v’iazniv i represovanykh (All-­Ukrainian Association for Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression), http://repressed.org.ua/, under the tab titled “Chasopys.”

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

540

7 Larysa Buriak, Zhinka v ukraїns´komu istorychnomu naratyvi: Avtory, ideї, obrazy (druha polovyna ХІХ–persha tretyna ХХ st.) (Kyiv: National´na akademiia upravlinnia, 2010). 8 For more details on the trends and peculiarities of women’s history studies in Ukraine since independence, see Oksana Kis, “(Re)Constructing the Ukrainian Women’s History: Actors, Agents, Narratives,” in Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine, ed. Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 152–79. 9 For more about the activities of this organization, see its official website: Ukraїns´ka asotsiatsiia doslidnykiv zhinochoї istoriї (Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History), http://www.womenhistory.org.ua/. 10 Irina Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa: Opyt issledovaniia memuaristiki i ustnykh svidetel´stv byvshykh uznikov,” in Ustnaia istoriia: Teoriia i praktika, ed. Tatiana Shcheglova (Barnaul, Russia: BGPU, 2007), 152. 11 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 184–85. 12 Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova, “After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union,” in Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 95–96. 13 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 73. 14 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 464. 15 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 113. 16 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 75–76. 17 Toker, 82. 18 For the most complete list of memoirs of former political prisoners published outside the USSR, see Toker, 295–305. 19 Meshko, Between Death and Life. 20 See, for example, Halyna Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi: Spohady, ed. Mykola Posivnich, Litopys UPA, ed. Petro I. Potichnyi, vol. 9 (Lviv: Litopys UPA, 2008); Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia. 21 Nadiia Surovtsova, Spohady (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo im. Oleny Telihy, 1996); Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit. 22 See, for example, Iaroslav Lal´ka, ed., Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny: Dokumenty, materialy, spohady, vol. 1 (Lviv: Prosvita, 1993) and vol. 2 (Lviv: Halyts´ka vydavnycha spilka, 1997); Bohdan Hordasevych and

Notes

541

Sofiia Voloshchak, eds., Nepokhytni: Zbirnyk spohadiv (Lviv: Ridna shkola, 2005). 23 Bohdan Hordasevych, Halyna Hordasevych, and Nina Strokata, eds., Neskorena Berehynia: Zhertvy moskovs´ko-­komunistychnoho teroru ХХ stolittia (Lviv: Piramida, 2002). 24 Ivan Kryvuts´kyi, ed., V namysti z koliuchoho drotu. Spohady zhinok v’iazniv HULAHu, uchasnyts´ noryl´s´koho povstannia 1953 roku (Lviv: Manuskrypt, 2009). 25 Helinada Hrinchenko, Irina Rebrova, and Irina Romanova, “Usna istoriia v postradians´kykh doslidnyts´kykh praktykakh (na prykladi suchasnykh Bilorusi, Rosiї ta Ukraїny),” Ukraїns´kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 4 (2012): 172–87. 26 Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa,” 150–51. 27 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, vol. 1. 28 Ievhen Lunio, ed., Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi: Rozpovidi uchasnykiv i ochevydtsiv, 2 vols. (Lviv: Rastr‑7, 2005–15). 29 Memorial´nyi muzei totalitarnykh rezhymiv “Terytoriia teroru” u L´vovi (Territory of Terror Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes in Lviv), http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/; Proiekt ““Lokal´na istoriia” (Local History Project), http://localhistory.org.ua/lyudy-­vijny/; Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, http://www.ucrdc.org/. 30 Sakharov Center, Neopublikovannye materialy: Vospominaniia, interv´iu, vstrechi (Unpublished materials: Reminiscences, interviews, meetings), http://www.sakharov-­center.ru/museum/library/unpublished. html; Sakharov Center, Vospominaniia o GULAGe; Evropeiskaia ­Pamiat´ o Gulage (European Memories of the Gulag Project), http://museum.­ gulagmemories.eu/ru/thematique. 31 Halyna Datsiuk, ed., Usna zhinocha istoriia. Povernennia (Kyiv: Spadshchyna, 2003); Datsiuk, ed., Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї: Sproba samore­presentatsiї (Kyiv: Spadshchyna, 2007); Mariia Pan´kiv, ed., Vira, Nadiia, Liubov: Spohady zhinok, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Ukraїns´kyi Arkhiv, 2001–5); Iroїda Vynnyts´ka, ed., Nezvychaini doli zhychainykh zhinok: Usna istoriia ХХ stolittia (Lviv: Vydavnytstvo L´vivs´koї Politekhniky, 2013); Marta Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu: Zhinochi istoriї viiny (Kharkiv: Klub simeinoho dozvillia, 2018); Bohdan Savka, “A smert´ їkh

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

542

bezsmertiam zustrila”: Narysy, spohady, dokumenty pro uchast´ zhinotstva triokh raioniv Ternopillia (Husiatyns´koho, Zalishchyts´koho, Pidvolochys´koho) v natsional´no-­vyzvol´nii borot´bi OUN-­UPA (Ternopil: Dzhura, 2003). 32 Nadiia Surovtsova, “Zhyttia Nadiї Surovtsovoї, opysane neiu samoiu v selyshchi Nyzhnii Seimchan Mahadans´koï oblasti,” 3 parts, Ukraїna: nauka i kul´tura 24 (1990): 414–560; 25 (1991): 218–301; 26/27 (1993): 285–321. 33 Surovtsova, Spohady; Nadiia Surovtsova, Lysty (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo im. Oleny Telihy, 2001). 34 Nadezhda Surotseva, “Kolymskie vospominaniia,” in Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, ed. Semen Vilenskii, vol. 1 of Dodnies´ tiagoteet (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1989), 252–324; Surovtseva, “Vladivostok Tranzit.” 35 Liudmyla Iakymenko and Ihor Kryvosheia, Nadiia Surovtsova (1896– 1985): U poshukakh vtrachenoho chasu (Uman: Vydavets´ Sochins´kyi, 2016); Liudmyla Iakymenko, “Osoblyvosti naratsiї v tabirnii prozi N. Su­ rovtsovoї,” Visnyk LNU im. T. Shevchenka. Filolohichni nauky, no. 12 (2012): 88–94. 36 Paul L. Gregory, Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness; Vilensky, Till My Tale Is Told; Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, eds., Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Applebaum, Gulag Voices. 37 Hanna Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19: Avtobiohrafichna rozpovid´ (Kyiv: Vydavnychyi dim Kyievo-­Mohylians´ka Akademiia, 2001); Hanna Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї (spohady politv’iaznia) (Lviv: PP Soroka, 2009); Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi; Oksana Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia! Do 100-richchia Oksany Iakivny Meshko, ed. Vasyl´ Ovsiienko and Оles´ Serhiienko (Kharkiv: Prava liudyny, 2005); Anastasiia Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї: Dokumental´na povist´, publitsystyka (Lutsk: PP Ivaniuk VP, 2014); Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!; Ievheniia Andrusiak, Spohady (Lviv: LNU im. I. Franka, 2001); Mariia Vahula, Moia doroha z domu cherez v’iaznytsi, laherni zony, zaslannia dodomu (Lviv: Ukraїns´ki tekhnolohiї, 2006); Dariia Korchak, Pobachene

Notes

543

i perezhyte: Spohady politv’iaznia (Stryi, Ukraine: Ukrpol, 2016); Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty (Ternopil: Lileia, 1996). 38 Pan´kiv, Vira, Nadiia, Liubov. 39 Anna Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie (Merezhane zhyttiam), ed. Roman Halan (Warsaw: Ukraїns´kyi Arkhiv, 1999). 40 Applebaum, introduction, x; Adler, The Gulag Survivor. 41 Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa,” 141. 42 Sherbakova, 133–34. 43 Khubova, Ivankiev, and Sharova, “After Glasnost,” 89. 44 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 106. 45 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 77. 46 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 467–73. 47 Surovtsova, Spohady. 48 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia! 49 Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 40. 50 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 473. 51 Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness, 2. 52 Pocheptsov, “Kolymskoe zemliachestvo,” 137. 53 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 113. 54 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 65–66. 55 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 112–14. 56 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 5. 57 Polina Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda: Spohady i rozdumy politv’iaznia (Chortkiv: n. p., 2003), 27. 58 Vahula, Moia doroha, 3. 59 Vahula, 81. 60 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 3, 9. 61 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 6. 62 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, 9. 63 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 5–6. 64 Andrusiak, Spohady, 9, 84. 65 Anna Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´ (Lviv: Ukraїs´ki tekhnolohiї, 2009), 81–113. 66 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 9.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

544

67 Oksana Khrashchevs´ka: “Zlamanyi tsvit” (website), accessed 20 July 2020, https://nezlamana.in.ua. 68 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 3. 69 Surovtsova, Spohady, 5–6. 70 Oksana Meshko, “Memoirs,” Ukrainian Review 27, no. 2 (1979): 35–54; no. 3 (1979): 36–50; no. 4 (1979): 22–50; Meshko, Between Death and Life. 71 Oksana Meshko, Mizh zhyttiam i smertiu (Kyiv: NVP Iava, 1991). 72 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 87–88. 73 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 8. 74 Nadiia Didukh, Dva koliory moї (knyha-­spomyn) (Lviv: n. p., 2002), 7. 75 Didukh, 7. 76 Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa,” 143. 77 Applebaum, Gulag Voices, 8–9. 78 This position is also maintained by Sherbakova in her “Pamiat´ GULAGa,” 143–44. 79 The following is a list and brief description of key themes in camp memoirs as discussed in Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 82–94. 80 Toker, 89. 81 Oksana Kis´, “Henderni aspekty praktyky usnoistorychnykh doslidzhen´: Osoblyvosti zhinochoho dosvidu, pam’iati i naratsiї,” in Suspil´ni zlamy i povorotni momenty: Makropodiї kriz´ pryzmu avtobiohrafichnoї rozpovidi, ed. Oksana Kis´, Helinada Hrinchenko, and Tetiana Pastushenko (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukraїny, 2014), 11–41; Elena Rozhdestvenskaia, “Gendernye osobennosti vospominanii,” in Zhenshchiny i muzhchiny v kontekste istoricheskikh peremen, vol. 1, ed. Nataliia Pushkareva (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2012), 48–51. 82 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 464–65. 83 Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa,” 142. 84 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 114. 85 Since camp uprisings were extraordinary events in the daily lives of Gulag prisoners, an analysis of the participation of women in them is beyond the scope of my study. 86 Iryna Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my: Spohady (Lviv: Spolom, 2011).

Notes

545

87 Surovtsova, Spohady, 267. 88 Surovtsova, 269. 89 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 185–209; see also Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 72–75. 90 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 80. 91 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 114. 92 Veronica Shapovalov also emphasizes this point in her Remembering the Darkness, 279. 93 Shapovalova, “Sestrenki, mamki, damki,” 149. 94 Adi Kuntsman, “‘With a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 308–28; Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 313; Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas Whitney and Harry Willetts (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 236–37. 95 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 465. 96 Shapovalova, 464–73. 97 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 114. 98 Mikhail Kromm, “Povsednevnost´ kak predmet istoricheskogo issledovaniia (vmesto predisloviia),” in Istochnik. Istorik. Istoriia. Istoriia povsednevnosti: Sbornik nauchnykh rabot, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2003), 10–11; Nina Vambol´dt and Mariia Shubina, “Povsednevnost´ v istorii,” in Gumanitarnye issledovaniia: Ezhegodnik, vol. 11 (Omsk: Izdatel´stvo OmGPU, 2006), 97. 99 Nataliia Pushkareva, “Istoriia povsednevnosti: Predmet i metody,” Sotsial´naia istoriia: Ezhegodnik (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 9. 100 Nataliia Pushkareva, “Istoriia povsednevnosti i mikroistoriia,” in Teoriia i metodologiia istorii: Uchebnik dlia vuzov, ed. V. V. Alekseev et al. (Volgograd: Uchitel´, 2014), 322, 325; Kromm, “Povsednevnost´ kak predmet,” 11. 101 Pushkareva, “Istoriia povsednevnosti i mikroistoriia,” 324; Irina Rebrova, “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ v ekstremal´noi situatsii: Po materialam ustnykh i pis´mennykh vospominanii zhenshchin o Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine,” in Rossiiskaia povsednevnost´ v zerkale gendernykh otnoshenii, ed. Nataliia Pushkareva (Moscow: NLO, 2013), 605–30.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

546

102 Kromm, “Povsednevnost´ kak predmet,” 8; Pushkareva, “Istoriia povsednevnosti: Predmet i metody,” 35–36. 103 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2. 104 Nataliia Pushkareva, “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ v epokhu sotsial´nykh kataklizmov: Mezhdu traditsiiami i novatsiiami,” in Povsednevnyi mir sovetskogo cheloveka 1920–1940-kh gg., ed. Evgenii Krinko, Irina Tazhi­ dinova, and Tatiana Khlynina (Rostov-­on-­Don: Izdatel´stvo UNT RAN, 2009), 215; Mary Holmes, Gender and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2009), 1. 105 Anna Belova, “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ kak predmet istorii povsednevnosti: Istoriograficheskii i metodologicheskii aspekty,” in Pushkareva, Rossiiskaia povsednevnost´, 52. 106 Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17, 20. 107 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2012), 219–51; Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962–1023. 108 Lata Mani, “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole McCann and Seung-­kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2013), 443. 109 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 5–16. 110 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 793. 111 Lynn M. Thomas, “Historicising Agency,” Gender and History 28, no. 2 (2016): 330. 112 Thomas, 327–29; Jill Vickers, “Gendering the Hyphen: Gender Scripts and Women’s Agency in the Making and Re-­Making of Nation-­States” (paper, Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, University of Manitoba, 3–5 June 2004), https://www.cpsa-­acsp.ca/papers‑2004/ Vickers.pdf; Amia Lieblich, Tammar B. Zilber, and Rivka Tuval-­Mashiach, “Narrating Human Actions: The Subjective Experience of Agency,

Notes

547

Structure, Communion, and Serendipity,” Qualitative Inquiry 14, no. 4 (2008): 613–31. 113 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 17, 20; similarly, Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 793. 114 Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency?,” 962. 115 Martin Hewson, “Agency,” in Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, ed. Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, Elden Wiebe (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 13–16. 116 Barker, Cultural Studies, 240–41. 117 Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency?,” 971. 118 Emirbayer and Mische, 971. 119 Joan W. Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Next Wave Provocations) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 38; Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75. 120 Thomas, “Historicising Agency,” 330, 332. 121 Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History, 19, 111. 122 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 759, 777, 779. 123 Thomas, “Historicising Agency.” 124 Thomas, 327–29. 125 Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust; Esther Fuchs, ed., Women in the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999); Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 126 Judith T. Baumel, “Women’s Agency and Survival Strategies during the Holocaust,” Women’s Studies International Forum 22, no. 3 (1999): 329–47. 127 Baumel, 338, 341–42. 128 Baumel, 330, 345 (italics in the original). 129 Lentin, introduction, 5. 130 Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell, and Carol Wolkowitz, eds., A Glossary of Feminist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92–93; Maggie Humm, Słownik teorii feminizmu (Warsaw: Semper, 1993),

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

548

104–5; Sarah Gamble, ed., The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2001), 230–31; Richard Dunphy, Sexual Politics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 83–84. 131 Shea Munyi, “Toward а Constructionist Perspective of Examining Femininity Experience,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2014): 275–91. 132 Nikol´s´kyi, “Statystyka sotsial´noho skladu represovanykh.” 133 Martha Bohachevsky-­Chomiak, Feminists despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939 (Toronto: University of Alberta Press, 1988). 134 Oksana Kis´, “Zhinoche pytannia v ideolohiї і propahandi OUN,” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 1 (2018): 91–102. 135 For a detailed analysis of Ukrainian traditional notions of femininity and corresponding roles, see Oksana Kis´, Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrains´kii kul´turi druhoï polovyny XIX–pochatku XX stolittia (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukraïny, 2008).

CHAPTER 2 1 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 186. 2 Khlevniuk and Mironenko, Zakliuchennye na stroikakh kommunizma, 289–393. 3 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 197–98. 4 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 220–21, 228–29, 234–36, 241–42, 246, 253–58, 260–62, 274. 5 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 228–29. 6 Boris Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii sanitarnoi sluzhby GULAGa (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 152. 7 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 258–59. 8 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 270–71. 9 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 133; similarly, Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 10 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 38–39, 209; Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138; Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila,

Notes

549

72–73; Natal´ia Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko (zapis´ L. Bogoraz),” in Pamiat´: Istoricheskii sbornik, vol. 4 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 409; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 139; Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 33; Kateryna Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas do boiu (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2017), 275. 11 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 43; similarly Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 274–75. 12 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 39, 41. 13 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 217–18. 14 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 60; similarly Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:441, 1:443. 15 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 134; Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 72; Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 60; Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 39; Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138; Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 125–26; Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 72; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 122. 16 Militsa Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe (Moscow: Suzdalev, 1994), 23–24. 17 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 65. 18 Lesia Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´ kriz´ rzhaviї graty: Kateryna Zaryts´ka v ukraїns´komu natsional´no-­vyzvol´nomu rusi (Toronto: Litopys UPA, 2007), 208. 19 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 81–82. 20 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 10–11; similarly Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 114; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 57. 21 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 128. 22 Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek: Povest´ o perezhitom (Moscow: Fond Kersnovskoi, 2000–2001), album 5 (Arkhiv illiuzii), drawing 27, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 23 Vahula, Moia doroha, 12; similarly, Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 92; Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 123. 24 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 235–36. 25 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 39–40. 26 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 238–39. 27 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 97.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

550

28 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 407. 29 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 266. 30 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 209–10. 31 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 15. 32 Lipper, Eleven Years, 15. 33 Surovtsova, Spohady, 266. 34 Anna Marunchak writes separately in her memoirs about the husbandry of the women and girls from western Ukraine, who managed to more or less organize acceptable daily life within the strict conditions of the camp in the Komi Republic. See Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101. 35 Surovtsova, Spohady, 294. 36 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 267–68. 37 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 169. 38 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 309. 39 Schliess, “Den´ u Vorkuti,” 6; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 309. 40 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 161. 41 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 143–44; similarly, Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 216. 42 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 41. 43 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 263. 44 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 259. 45 Lesia Bondaruk, “Kenhirs´ke povstannia iak vyiav kryzy systemy HULAH,” Ukraїns´kyi instytut natsional´noї pam’iati, accessed 22 May 2020, http://www.memory.gov.ua/news/do‑60-ti-­littya-­kengirskogo-­ povstannya-­kengirske-­povstannya-­yak-­viyav-­krizi-­sistemi-­gulag. 46 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 202. 47 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 133; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 258. 48 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 258; similarly, Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 64. 49 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 245. 50 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 168. 51 Surovtsova, Spohady, 270.

Notes

551

52 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 259. 53 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 61. 54 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 86–87; Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 199. 55 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:609. 56 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 202–3. 57 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 232, 259. 58 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 32–33. 59 Surovtsova, Spohady, 280, 282. 60 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 139; Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 130; Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 267; Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z ko­liuchoho drotu, 209; Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 134; Anna Inanyts´ka, interview by Taras Cholii, 31 July‑1 August 2009, transcript, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, fond 1, opys 1; Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 125, 190; Lipper, Eleven Years, 88. 61 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 264. 62 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 137. 63 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 60–61. 64 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 78. 65 Quoted in Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 24–25. 66 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 199–200. 67 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 263. 68 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 44, 96; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 270–72; Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 47–48. 69 Andrusiak, Spohady, 65. 70 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 2:500. 71 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 25. 72 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 243–44. 73 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 194. 74 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 39, 41; similarly, Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 128; Ievhen Lunio, ed., Iz povstans´kykh i tabirnykh chasiv. Rozpovidi Melaniї Sluky ta Stefaniї Susol (Lviv: Rastr‑7, 2019), 98. 75 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 193.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

552

76 Applebaum, 219–20. 77 Chyz, Woman and Child, 97–100; Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 52; Paraska Protsak, Na perekhrestiakh zhyttia (spohady) (Ivano-Frankivs´k: Misto-­ NV, 2003), 27; Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 67, 165; Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 71ff.; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 139; Tetiana ­Karpeniuk, Viktoriia Serheieva, and Iryna Boiko, eds., Na zlami stolit´. U pam’iat´ pryideshnim pokolinniam (Lutsk: Teren, 2014), 117; Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:451–54, 1:466–67; Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 43, 49; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 65. 78 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 20. 79 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 9–10. 80 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 110. 81 Iryna Senyk, Metelyky spohadiv. Spohady i vzory dlia vyshyvannia, trans. Vira Malanchii (Lviv: Vydavnytstvo MS, 2003), 48; Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 83. 82 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 59–60. 83 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 70. 84 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 73. 85 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 86 Bondaruk, “Kenhirs´ke povstannia.” 87 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 245–47. 88 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 126. 89 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 115. 90 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 137. 91 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 94. 92 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 54. 93 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 81. 94 Kersnovskaia, Naskal´naia zhivopis´, 337. 95 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 44; Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 65. 96 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 151. 97 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 252–53; Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 226. 98 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 17–18. 99 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 33–34.

Notes

553

100 Ivanova, “GULAG: Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve,” 251. 101 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 410. 102 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 134–35. 103 Ivanova, “GULAG: Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve,” 251. 104 Ivanova, 240–43. 105 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 73. 106 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 47. 107 Borodkin, “Trud v GULAGe:. . . mezhdu prinuzhdeniem i stimulirovaniem,” in Borodkin, Gregori, and Khlevniuk, Gulag, 131–33. 108 Borodkin, 141–43; Ivanova, “GULAG: Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve,” 245. 109 Borodkin, “Trud v GULAGe,” 146–49; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 31. 110 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 139. 111 Andrusiak, Spohady, 65. 112 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 25; Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 148. 113 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 309–10. 114 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 47. 115 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 283. 116 Halyna Svarnyk and Andrii Feloniuk, eds., Olena Stepaniv—Roman Dashkevych. Spohady i narysy (Lviv: Piramida, 2009), 245. 117 Quoted in Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 26. 118 Nakhapetov, 26. 119 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 22. 120 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 27. 121 Specific food norms for different categories of prisoners are presented in Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 120–30; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 21–23. 122 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 207–8. 123 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 246. Skarga provides a similarly detailed description of rations in her memoirs: Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 162–63. 124 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 44.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

554

125 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 127–28. It was common practice in the USSR to mark high-­voltage electrical equipment with special “caution” signs featuring a skull. 126 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 41. 127 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:443, 1:459. 128 Lal´ka, 1:468; similarly, Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 37–38. 129 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 39. 130 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 23–24. 131 James Heinzen, “Corruption in the Gulag: Dilemmas of Officials and Prisoners,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 456–75; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 36–39; Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 213–14. 132 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 302. 133 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 209. 134 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 135 Kryvuts´kyi, 39, 209; Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101, 124, 134; Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 246. 136 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:558. 137 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 43. 138 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 406. 139 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 154. 140 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 17. 141 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 36; similarly, Andrusiak, Spohady, 60; Teklia Tykhan, interview by Taras Cholii, 15 July 2009, video, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/persons/?ci_personid=90; Irena Volodymyrs´ka, interview by Iurii Maniukh, September 1994, audio, Oral History Archives, Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, CD record no. 161. 142 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138. 143 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 207. 144 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 41–42. 145 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 154.

Notes

555

146 Chyz, Woman and Child, 104. 147 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 42. 148 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 75. 149 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 33. 150 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 139. 151 Svarnyk and Feloniuk, Olena Stepaniv, 44. 152 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 36; similarly, Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 42. 153 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 409. 154 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 45. 155 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 305. 156 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 135. 157 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, 101. 158 Quoted in Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 30. 159 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga,, 217–18. 160 For more about the physical fitness categories for Gulag prisoners, see Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 62–72. 161 Zemskov, “GULAG,” 6:22. 162 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 76. 163 Alexopoulos, 93. 164 Chyz, Woman and Child, 114. 165 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 41. 166 Ol´ha Hodiak, interview by Mar’iana Pyrih, 27 August 2009, transcript, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, fond 1, opys 1. 167 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 67. 168 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 46. 169 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 99. 170 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 42–43; similarly, Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:607. 171 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:462. 172 Lal´ka, 1:453. 173 Lal´ka, 1:459. 174 Surovtsova, Spohady, 283. 175 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 93–95.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

556

176 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 76, 92. 177 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 48–51. 178 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 71. 179 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 189–90. 180 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 17. 181 Mariia Shtepa, Pam’iat´ klyche (Chortkiv: Terno-­Hraf, 2008), 36. 182 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 134, 144. 183 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 150–51; similarly, Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 110. 184 Surovtsova, Spohady, 279. 185 For more detail on this practice, see Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 110–16. 186 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 43. 187 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 94. 188 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 106–7; similarly, Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:602–3. 189 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 106. 190 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 260. Golfo Alexopoulos shows, using concrete facts, that discharging prisoners with terminal illnesses was one of the ways that the real death rate was concealed in the Gulag system. Those discharged died in great numbers within a short time following their discharge, but these deaths were not reflected in the statistics of the Gulag camps. See Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 133–59. 191 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 104–5. 192 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 18. 193 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 237ff. 194 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snohoviї, 40. 195 Obertyńska (Rudzka), W domu niewoli, 194. 196 Andrusiak, Spohady, 58, 63. 197 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 228. 198 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 245–47. 199 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 98. 200 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 44. 201 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 84.

Notes

557

202 Sofiia Stefanyshyn, interview by Andrii Shymanskyi, 27 July 2011, video, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, http://www. territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/persons/?ci_personid=67. 203 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:605–6. 204 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 94. 205 Halyna Lytvyn, ed., Oderzhyma svobodoiu. Shliakh Heroini svitu Iryny Senyk (Brusturiv, Ukraine: Dyskursus, 2017), 99. 206 Tykhan, interview. 207 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:538. 208 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 46. 209 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 210 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 74. 211 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 210. 212 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 131. 213 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 86, 105–7. 214 Raїsa Rudenko, “Zhaduiuchy perezhyte,” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 2 (February 1988): 4. 215 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 251. 216 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 95. 217 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 39. 218 Senyk, Metelyky spohadiv, 51. 219 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 99–102. 220 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 102–4; Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 50–51. 221 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 49. 222 Vahula, Moia doroha, 25. 223 The Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (Ukraïnski sichovi stril´tsi) was a Ukrainian unit within the Austro-­Hungarian Army during World War I. 224 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:609. 225 Lal´ka, 1:452. 226 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 39; similarly, Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 140. 227 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:451. 228 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 86. 229 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snohoviї, 37.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

558

230 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 50; similarly, Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:467. 231 Surovtsova, Spohady, 272. 232 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 242. 233 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 41. 234 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 175. 235 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 87–89. 236 Volodymyrs´ka, interview. 237 Chyz, Woman and Child, 114; Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 23; Vahula, Moia doroha, 25. 238 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 133; Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 94. 239 Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 51–52.

CHAPTER 3 1 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 82–83, 85. 2 Ivanova, Istoriia GULAGa, 322. 3 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 380. 4 Jolluck, Exile and Identity, xxiv. 5 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 47. 6 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 300; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 262. 7 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 74. 8 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 9 Schliess, “Rizdvo u Vorkuti,” 4. 10 Quoted in Jolluck, Exile and Identity, 208. 11 Ruf´ Tamarina, Takaia planida, ili Zarubki na “Shchepke” (Tomsk: Vodolei, 2002), 150. 12 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 76. 13 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 186. 14 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 96. 15 Terebovlians´kyi istoryko-­kraieznavchyi muzei (Terebovlia Local History Museum), http://trebovlyamuseum.at.ua/. 16 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 150–51.

Notes

559

17 Schliess, “Rizdvo u Vorkuti.” 18 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 15–19. 19 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 72–73. 20 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 334–35. 21 For more detail, see Oksana Kis´, “Tvorchist´ ukraїns´kykh zhinok-­ politv’iazniv HULAHu,” Narodna tvorchist´ ta etnolohiia, no. 3 (2016): 51–59. 22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6. 23 Anderson, 7. 24 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 118. 25 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 155. 26 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 301. 27 Parasha was prison jargon for a latrine, and the word was also used for rumors because camp and prison toilets were typically the main points where information was exchanged among prisoners, as is described here. 28 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 38. 29 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 70. 30 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 23; similarly, Hodiak, interview, 10. 31 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:616. 32 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 73. 33 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 140. 34 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 70. 35 Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” 7. 36 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 486–87. 37 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 44. 38 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 39 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 87; similarly, Andrusiak, Spohady, 51; Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 106; Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 160; Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 127; Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 21. 40 Dariia Husiak, interview by Taras Cholii, 1 June 2009, transcript, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, fond 1, opys 1, p. 29. 41 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 60.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

560

42 Surovtsova, Spohady, 239. 43 Surovtsova, 273. 44 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 65; Ome­liana Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, “Nas bulo desiat´ tysiach u Kenhiri,” Nashe zhyttia / Our Life, no. 2 (February 1992): 8. 45 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 54. 46 Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, “Nas bulo desiat´ tysiach,” no. 2, 7–9; similarly, Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 87. 47 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 119. 48 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 413–14. 49 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:452. 50 Pocheptsov, “Kolymskoe zemliachestvo,” 141. 51 Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” 7. 52 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 294. 53 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 96. 54 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 262–65. 55 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 271. 56 Datsiuk, Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї, 69. 57 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 154. 58 Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” 7. 59 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 228. 60 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 32. 61 Pyliavets´ and Pyliavets´, “Katorha v SRSR,” 95. 62 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 256. 63 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 64 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 100. 65 Hodiak, interview, 20. 66 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 256–57, 295; similarly, Ivanna Fedushchak and Viktor Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak—doroha u vichnist´ (Lviv: NVF Ukraїns´ki tekhnolohiї, 2006), 216. 67 Chyz, Woman and Child, 132. 68 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 167. 69 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 85. 70 Vahula, Moia doroha, 39.

Notes

561

71 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138–40; similarly, Vahula, Moia doroha, 27. 72 Quoted in Pocheptsov, “Kolymskoe zemliachestvo,” 141. 73 Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, “Nas bulo desiat´ tysiach,” 7. 74 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:538. 75 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 183. 76 Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” 7. 77 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 105. 78 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 287. 79 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 312–13. 80 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138–40. 81 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 46. 82 Andrei Zavadskii, “Pis´ma iz lageria kak sposob sokhranit´ sebia: Sluchai khudozhnika Grigoriia Filippovskogo,” Laboratorium 7, no. 1 (2015): 147–57. 83 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 44; Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 221. 84 Quoted in Nakhapetov, Ocherki istorii, 30–31. 85 Chyz, Woman and Child, 132–33. 86 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 69. 87 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 266–67. 88 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 83–86. 89 Khrashchevs´ka, 82–83. 90 Schliess, “Poshta u Vorkuti,” 7. 91 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 40. 92 Surovtsova, Spohady, 324. 93 Vahula, Moia doroha, 40. 94 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 101. 95 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 260. 96 Kokhans´ka, 266. 97 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 271–72, 282; similarly, Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 119; Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 147. 98 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 36. 99 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 49.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

562

100 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), 95. 101 Hodiak, interview, 16; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 261, 271. For more on religious practices and the role of faith among Ukrainian women who were political prisoners, see Oksana Kis´, “Reli­ hiini praktyky ukraїnok-­politv’iazniv u HULAHu,” Karpaty: Liudyna, etnos, tsyvilizatsiia 6 (2016): 41–49. 102 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 262. 103 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 124; similarly, Surovtsova, Spohady, 309; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 161. 104 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 45. 105 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 310–11. 106 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:605. 107 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 50. 108 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:469. 109 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 50. 110 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 161. 111 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 75, 142. 112 Anna Ivanyts´ka, interview by Taras Cholii, 31 July‑1 August 2009, transcript, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, fond 1, opys 1. 113 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 102. 114 Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 218. 115 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 253. 116 Jolluck, Exile and Identity, 189–278. 117 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 53. 118 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 39. 119 Jolluck, Exile and Identity, 201–2, 218. 120 An entire chapter in Jolluck’s book is dedicated to this phenomenon; see Jolluck, 183–219. 121 Quoted in Jolluck, 215. 122 Vahula, Moia doroha, 10; similarly, Lunio, Iz povstans´kykh i tabirnykh chasiv, 103–4. 123 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 42–43. 124 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 94.

Notes

563

125 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 156. 126 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 222; Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 50–51; Lunio, Iz povstans´kykh i tabirnykh chasiv, 42. 127 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 213. 128 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 292; similarly, Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 94. 129 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 34–35, 40–41. 130 Mariia Pan´kiv, Teofiliia: Pro Teofiliiu Bzovu-­Fedoriv-­Stakhiv: Spohady (Lviv: Tsentr doslidzhen´ vyzvol´noho rukhu, 2009), 135–36. 131 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 306–7. 132 Kokhans´ka, 239–40. 133 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:613, and see 2:438. 134 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 130. 135 Vahula, Moia doroha, 55, 69. 136 Virtual´nyi muzei GULAGa. 137 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 21; similarly, Vahula, Moia doroha, 35. 138 Gagen-­Torn, Memoria, 144. 139 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 225. 140 Lazda, “Women, Nation, and Survival,” 7–8. 141 Lazda, 7–8. 142 Tamarina, Takaia planida, 150. 143 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 190–91. 144 Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, “Nas bulo desiat´ tysiach,” 7. 145 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 166. 146 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 147 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 216. 148 Polian, “Inostrantsy v GULAGe,” 627. 149 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 310. 150 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 154. 151 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, 116. 152 Jolluck, Exile and Identity, 212–15. 153 Davoliute, “Deportee Memoirs,” 55–56. 154 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 24.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

564

155 Scholars note that in men’s memoirs of their time of imprisonment, prayer and other religious practices have a special place, which helped preserve their humanity. See Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 383, 424–25. 156 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 253, 267; see also Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 184; Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 86–87, 135. 157 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101. 158 Ivanyts´ka, interview, 46; similarly, Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 135; Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 18–19. 159 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 57. 160 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 161 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 81. 162 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 58. 163 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 176. 164 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 48. 165 The prayers of political prisoners, collected by Anna Kotsur, Taishet OLP 29, 1952, are preserved in the Lviv Historical Museum. 166 Vahula, Moia doroha, 17. 167 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 19. 168 Ivanyts´ka, interview, 59–60. 169 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 45. 170 Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 267–68. 171 Vahula, Moia doroha, 18. 172 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 67. 173 Vahula, Moia doroha, 13; similarly, Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 107. 174 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 57; similarly, Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 33; Lunio, Iz povstans´kykh i tabirnykh chasiv, 40–41; Schliess, “Molytva u Vorkuti,” 7. 175 Schliess, “Molytva u Vorkuti,” 7. 176 Exhibits at the Department of Liberation Struggle of the History Museum in Lviv, the Terebovlia Museum of Local History, and the Ternopil Historical and Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners preserve a significant number of such handmade icons, which were secretly embroidered in prison cells, in transit camps, and in barracks, and were preserved and brought back to their homeland by onetime prisoners.

Notes

565

177 Svitlana Kocherhina, “Doli halyts´kykh politv’iazniv ta alehorychna symvolika v їkh tabirnykh vyrobakh (na materialakh vystavky ‘Voiennoistorychni pam’iatky’),” Naukovi zapysky L´vivskoho istorychnoho muzeiu 7 (1998): 290. 178 Schliess, “Molytva u Vorkuti,” 7. 179 Obertyńska (Rudzka), W domu niewoli, 66. 180 Schliess, “Molytva u Vorkuti,” 7. 181 Christopher L. Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2001), 202. 182 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 158. 183 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 184 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 48. 185 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:461. 186 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 300. 187 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:605. 188 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 77. 189 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 15–19. 190 Kryvuts´kyi, 17. 191 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 268, 305. 192 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 76. 193 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 149. 194 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 96. 195 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 73–74.

CHAPTER 4 1 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 131. 2 Aimar Ventsel, Baurzhan Zhangutin, and Dinara Khamidullina, “Social Meaning of Culture in a Stalinist Prison Camp,” Folklore 25 (2014): 15. 3 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 41. 4 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 91–92, 100. 5 Lytvyn, 91. 6 Lytvyn, 194–95. 7 Iryna Senyk, Suvii polotna: Poeziї, 2nd ed., ed. Natalia Danylenko and Nadiia Svitlychna (New York: Spilka, 1990); Senyk, Zagratovana iunist´:

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

566

Poeziї (Drohobych, Ukraine: Vidrodzhennia, 1996); Senyk, Metelyky spohadiv. 8 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 76. 9 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 200. 10 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 160. 11 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 75. 12 Hodiak, interview, 22. 13 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 133. 14 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 13. 15 Didukh, Dva koliory moї, 48. 16 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 154. 17 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 300–301. 18 Vira Drozd, interview by Taras Cholii, 15 July 2009, video, Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, ­http://www.­territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/ persons/?ci_personid=38. 19 This line is from a well-­known song called “Boldly, Friends. . .” that is also known as the “anthem of the narodovol´tsy,” in reference to members of the Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) populist party of the late nineteenth century. It is attributed to Russian writer Mikhail Mikhailov (1829–65). See, for example, Raisa D. (Naiwen), “Istoriia odnoi pesni: ‘Narodovol´cheskii gimn’ (‘Smelo, druz´ia, ne teriaite. . .’),” Nora Chernogo Khobbita (blog), 19 September 2015, http://naiwen.livejournal. com/1292585.html. 20 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:281; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 67–68. 21 Quoted in Ihor Derev’ianyi, “Ukraїns´ki povstantsi v HULAHu: Borot´ba tryvaie,” Tyzhden´, 21 October 2012, http://tyzhden.ua/History/62782. 22 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 22–23. 23 Drozd, interview. 24 Mariia Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Neskorena pisnia (Pisni medsestry UPA i politv’iaznia) (Ternopil: Lileia, 1997), 30. 25 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 16–17. 26 Quoted in Halyna Kravtsova, “Poetychnyi vymir povstans´kykh tiuremnykh pisen´,” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 4 (2014): 755.

Notes

567

27 Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 269. 28 Kravtsova, “Poetychnyi vymir,” 756–57. 29 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 167. 30 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 304. 31 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 48. 32 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 195. 33 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 30. 34 Machteld Venken, “Iak spiv mozhe nadaty sensu voiennomu dosvidu. Ostarbaiterky v Bel´hiї povoiennoho periodu.” Ukraїna Moderna, 9 April 2015, http://uamoderna.com/md/venken-­ostarbeiters-­singing. 35 Sherbakova, “Pamiat´ GULAGa”; Toker, Return from the Archipelago; Claudia Pieralli, “The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners (1921–1939): An Historical-­Typological Framework,” in Contributi italiani al 15. Congresso Internazionale degli Slavisti: Minsk, 20–27 settembre 2013, ed. Marcello Garzaniti et al. (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2013), 387–411; Andrea Gullotta, “Gulag Poetry. An Almost Unexplored Field of Research,” in (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag: Fiction and Reality, ed. Felicital Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016), 175–92. 36 Nadiia Koloshchuk, Tabirna proza v paradyhmi postmodernu (Lutsk: Vezha, 2006), 183–204. 37 Pieralli, “The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners,” 390, 398; Gullotta, “Gulag Poetry,” 182–83. 38 Vahula, Moia doroha, 82–90; Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 56–71. 39 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 202. 40 Kryvuts´kyi, 81. 41 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty; Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Neskorena pisnia. 42 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 75–76. 43 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 56. 44 Pieralli, “The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners,” 404–6. 45 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 82. 46 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 48. 47 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 103.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

568

48 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 98, 100, 102, 105–6, 111, 114–15. 49 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 100. 50 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 41–43. 51 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 52. 52 For poems written by female political prisoners from the camps, see the edited collections: Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu; Horalewskyj and Arey, Invincible Spirit. 53 Datsiuk, Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї, 69–70. 54 Gullotta, “Gulag Poetry,” 179. 55 Gullotta, 182–84. 56 Pieralli, “The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners,” 396, 407. 57 Pieralli, 398. 58 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 23. 59 Quoted in Kocherhina, “Doli halyts´kykh politv’iazniv,” 288. 60 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 142–45, 167. 61 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 24. 62 Surovtsova, Spohady, 278. 63 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 236. 64 Zoia Marchenko, interview by Liudmila Vasilovskaia, December 1998, transcript, Neopubublikovannye materialy, Sakharov Center, http:// www.sakharov-­center.ru/museum/library/unpublished/278.html. 65 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 4:218–19. 66 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 4:218–19. 67 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 4:262–65. 68 Pyliavets´ and Pyliavets´, “Katorha v SRSR,” 95. 69 For more detail, see Oksana Kis´, “Natsiia iak uiavlena i real´na spil´nota kriz´ pryzmu zhinochoho dosvidu ukraїnok-­politv’iazniv HULAHu,” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 6 (2016): 1274–85. 70 Ventsel, Zhangutin, and Khamidullina, “Social Meaning of Culture,” 13. 71 A more in-­depth analysis of the activities of KVCh units is provided in a number of dissertations: Il´ia Kolomeiskii, “Kul´turno-­vospitatel´naia rabota v lageriakh i koloniiakh GULAGa NKVD-­MVD SSSR na territorii Cheliabinskoi oblasti” (PhD diss., Cheliabinskii Universitet, Cheliabinsk, 2009); Viktoriia Mironova, “Kul´turno-­vospitatel´naia rabota v lageriakh

Notes

569

GULAGa NKVD-­MVD SSSR v 1930–1950-е gody: Na materialakh Irkutskoi oblasti (PhD diss., Irkutskii Universitet, Irkutsk, 2004). 72 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 293–95. 73 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 294. 74 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:605. 75 Studies of the theater arts in the camps include Natalia Kuziakina, Theater in the Solovki Prison Camp, trans. Boris M. Meerovich (London: Routledge, 1995); Marlen Korallov, ed., Teatr GULAGa: Vospominaniia, dokumenty, ocherki (Moscow: Memorial, 1995). 76 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 148–49. 77 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:281; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 65. 78 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 131–32. Halyna Shandarak-­Brovchenko also mentions the organization of a choir in one of the camps; see Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 87. Orysia Mochul´s´ka mentions the eased regimen and the possibility for prisoners to gather in their barracks freely to sing and celebrate feast days; see Kryvuts´kyi, 153. 79 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 125. 80 Surovtsova, Spohady, 292–93. 81 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 181–82. 82 Schliess, “Rozvaha v Vorkuti,” 7. 83 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 23. 84 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 68; similarly, Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 70. 85 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 161–62. 86 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 172–73. Similar emotions are described by another member of the camp “culture unit,” Iaroslava Kryzhanivs´ka-­Hasiuk; see Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 132. 87 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 237. 88 Svarnyk and Feloniuk, Olena Stepaniv, 250–51. 89 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 146. 90 Schliess, “Rozvaha v Vorkuti,” 7. 91 Schliess, 7.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

570

92 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 15. 93 Kryvuts´kyi, 151. 94 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 335. 95 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 200–201. 96 Onyshko, 201. 97 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 17. 98 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 160; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 277–78; Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 286–87; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 75–76; Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 23; Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 17–18; Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 142. 99 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 75, 139. 100 Drozd, interview. 101 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 128–30. 102 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 76. 103 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 77. 104 Schliess, “Rizdvo u Vorkuti,” 4; similarly, Vahula, Moia doroha, 29. 105 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 288. 106 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 51. 107 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 304. 108 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 160; similarly, Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 277–78; Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 142. 109 Schliess, “Rizdvo u Vorkuti,” 4. 110 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 237. 111 Valentyna N., “Velykden´ u v’iaznytsi (z perezhytoho),” Nashe zhyttia / Our Life, no. 4 (April 1990): 2–3. 112 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 45. 113 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 331; similarly, Vahula, Moia doroha, 29. 114 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 335–36. 115 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 78–81. 116 Gagen-­Torn, Memoria, 242. 117 Several publications, generally exhibition albums, present various types of prisoner art, including that of quite a number of Ukrainian women. See Arsenii Roginskii and Valentina Tikhanova, eds., Tvorchestvo

Notes

571

i byt GULAGa: Katalog muzeinogo sobraniia Obshchestva “Memorial” (Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998); Boris Sveshnikov, Lagernye risunki: Al´bom (Moscow: Zven´ia, 2000); Nurlan Dulatbekov and Nurshat Zhumadilova, eds., Karlag: Tvorchestvo v nevole: Khudozhniki, muzei, dokumenty, pamiatniki (Karaganda: n. p., 2009). 118 Ventsel, Zhangutin, and Khamidullina, “Social Meaning of Culture.” 119 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 120 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 255. 121 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 119. 122 Valentyna N., “Velykden´ u v’iaznytsi,” 2. 123 Kocherhina, “Doli halyts´kykh politv’iazniv,” 284. 124 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 67. 125 An exhibit of embroidery by political prisoners was held in Lviv in May 2013; see Tiurma na Lonts´koho, “U tiurmi na Lonts´koho.” In spring 2018, another collection of embroidered icons was exhibited in the same museum; see Tiurma na Lonts´koho, “Kolir molytvy.” 126 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 181. 127 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 44–45. 128 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:194. 129 Surovtsova, Spohady, 295, 304; similarly, Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 46. 130 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 409–10. 131 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 273. 132 Surovtsova, Spohady, 274–75. 133 Some examples of camp embroidery, handmade postcards, drawings, “plastic” details made out of bread, and so on have been preserved in museum and private collections. Wonderful samples of embroidery and poetry by political prisoners from later periods are also presented in Horalewskyj and Arey, Invincible Spirit, an album of art by women who were political prisoners. 134 Kocherhina, “Doli halyts´kykh politv’iazniv,” 290. 135 Kateryna Peleshchyshyn, “Malodoslidzheni aspekty tvorchosti v’iazniv stalins´kykh tiurem і taboriv (na materialakh vystavky ‘Voienno-­ istorychni pam’iatky’),” Naukovi zapysky L´vivskoho istorychnoho muzeiu 6, no. 2 (1997): 57–70.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

572

136 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 88, 115. 137 Peleshchyshyn, “Malodoslidzheni aspekty tvorchosti,” 63. 138 Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 214. 139 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 183. 140 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, 148. 141 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 142. 142 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 186. 143 Dulatbekov and Zhumadilova, Karlag. 144 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 113. 145 Kersnovskaia, Naskal´naia zhivopis´. 146 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 233, 239. 147 Kokhans´ka, 271. 148 Vahula, Moia doroha, 11. 149 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 174; similarly, Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 30. 150 Senyk, Metelyky spohadiv, 52; similarly, Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 101. 151 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 53–54. 152 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 119–20. 153 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 38. 154 Surovtsova, Spohady, 265–66, 351. 155 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 388–89; Zoia Marchenko, interview by Liudmila Vasilovskaia, December 1998, transcript, Neopubublikovannye materialy, Sakharov Center. http://www.sakharov-­center.ru/museum/­ library/unpublished/278.html. 156 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 2:500. 157 Vahula, Moia doroha, 36–37. 158 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 87. 159 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 201–2. 160 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 157. 161 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 48. 162 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 304. 163 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 2:437. 164 Didukh, Dva koliory moї, 52. 165 Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 211. 166 Surovtsova, Spohady, 228.

Notes

573

167 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 8. 168 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 200. 169 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 38. 170 Surovtsova, Spohady, 240–41. 171 Surovtsova, 240–41. 172 Surovtsova, 245. 173 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 225. 174 Skarga, 225–26. 175 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 254. 176 Kokhans´ka, 256. 177 Kokhans´ka, 267–68. 178 Surovtsova, Spohady, 281. 179 Surovtsova, 294. 180 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 50. 181 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 384. 182 Bjornar Olsen, In Defense of Things. Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (London: Altamira, 2010). 183 Olsen, 115. 184 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 185 Other scholars of creative activity in the Gulag camps have drawn similar conclusions, see Ventsel, Zhangutin, and Khamidullina, “Social Meaning of Culture,” 22.

CHAPTER 5 1 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 25–26; similarly, Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:615. 2 Husiak, interview, 30, 32; similarly, Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 87, 89. 3 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:564–74. However, her other memoirs, published later, are entirely dedicated to the years in the camps (Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my). 4 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 82; similarly, Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 104; Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 264, 266, 270.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

574

5 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 111, 113. 6 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 82. 7 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 73. 8 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 31, 37, 42. 9 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 161. 10 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 63. 11 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 96. 12 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 249. 13 Surovtsova, Spohady, 266. 14 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 33, 35. 15 Surovtsova, Spohady, 324. 16 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 135. 17 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 144. 18 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 34. 19 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 126. 20 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 72. 21 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 64. 22 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 20. 23 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snohoviї, 43; similarly, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 45. 24 Rudenko, “Zhaduiuchy perezhyte,” 5. 25 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 129. 26 Surovtsova, Spohady, 229–31. 27 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 74. 28 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 41. 29 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 286. 30 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 81–82. 31 Kryvuts´kyi, 107. 32 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 125. 33 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 18, 26, 34, 48–49. 34 Hanna Plechii, Makivkoiu poklykani: Spohady i rozdumy kolyshnioї zv’iazkovoї UPA (Lviv: Kameniar, 2007), 23, 25. 35 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 29. 36 Husiak, interview, 39. 37 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 72–73.

Notes

575

38 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, 175–76. 39 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 235, 243, 268. 40 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:281. 41 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 92. 42 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 292, 300. 43 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 76–77, 138. 44 Surovtsova, Spohady, 218. 45 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 120. 46 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 38. 47 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 183. 48 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 180–81. 49 Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, 24–25; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 48. 50 Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 50–51. 51 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 120–21. 52 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 133; similarly, Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 171. 53 Oksana Vintoniv, interview by Iurii Maniukh, October 1994, audio, Oral History Archives, Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, CD record no. 191. 54 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 93. 55 What made the situation especially significant was that this event took place in a separate barrack designated for women prisoners with venereal diseases. Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 131. 56 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 165. 57 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 138. 58 Havryshko, 145. 59 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 117. 60 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 33, 119–20. 61 Mariia Pyrih, interview by Roksolana Popeliuk, 17 January 2017, video, oral history project “Liudy viiny,” NGO Lokal´na istoriia video archive. 62 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 64. 63 Poliuha, 78–80. 64 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 135. 65 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 119.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

576

66 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 119. 67 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 67. 68 Khrashchevs´ka, 77, 105–6. 69 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 174. 70 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 106. 71 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 147. 72 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 111. 73 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 82; similarly, Surovtsova, Spohady, 270; Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 153; Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 123. 74 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 2:499; similarly, Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 121. 75 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 154. 76 Pan´kiv, Vira, Nadiia, Liubov, 1:72–73; similarly, Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 151. 77 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 83. 78 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 140. 79 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 100. 80 Surovtsova, Spohady, 256. 81 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 38–39; Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 124; Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 278. 82 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 67. 83 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 110. 84 As an example, Ol´ha Hodiak provides a list of forty-­three names and surnames of her sister prisoners who participated in the camp uprising in Taishet. See Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 98. 85 Surovtsova, Spohady, 263. 86 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 41. 87 Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 22. 88 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 144. 89 Hodiak, interview, 12. 90 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 110.

Notes

577

91 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 73–74. Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna remembers the same story, too; see Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 85. 92 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 151. 93 Kryvuts´kyi, 94. 94 Surovtsova, Spohady, 295. 95 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 229. 96 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 62. 97 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 41–42. 98 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 87. 99 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 42; similarly, Hodiak, interview; Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 107. 100 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 74. 101 Surovtsova, Spohady, 305. 102 Baumel, “Women’s Agency and Survival,” 338, 341–42. 103 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 45. 104 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 35. 105 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 158–59. 106 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 93–94; similarly, Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 94; Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 26; Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 219. 107 Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 266. 108 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 164. 109 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101. 110 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 138. 111 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 34. 112 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 195, 199. 113 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:467. 114 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 25. 115 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 39. 116 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 301. 117 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 9. 118 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 119 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 158.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

578

120 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 210, 267; similarly, Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 57. 121 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 60. 122 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 87. 123 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, 136. 124 Svarnyk and Feloniuk, Olena Stepaniv, 247. 125 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 237. 126 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 77, 178. 127 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 59. 128 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 120–21, 134. 129 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:437. 130 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 41. 131 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 271. 132 Vahula, Moia doroha, 29–30. 133 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 6, 10–11, 20, 55. 134 Svarnyk and Feloniuk, Olena Stepaniv, 243. 135 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 136. 136 Baumel, “Women’s Agency and Survival,” 342. 137 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 301. 138 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 150–51. 139 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 53. 140 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 485. 141 David W. Minar and Greer Scott, The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), ix. 142 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 319. 143 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 175, 178. 144 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 51–52. 145 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 101–3; similarly, Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 52; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 82. 146 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 70–75, and see 154–55. 147 Nanci Adler, “Return of the Repressed,” in On Living through Soviet Russia, ed. Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch (London: Routledge, 2004), 212–13. 148 Gheith and Jolluck, Gulag Voices, 6. 149 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 266–67.

Notes

579

150 Kokhans´ka, 267. 151 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 183. 152 Pocheptsov, “Kolymskoe zemliachestvo.” 153 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 120. 154 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 28. 155 Surovtsova, Spohady, 216. 156 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 13–14. 157 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:612. 158 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 198. 159 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 120. 160 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 253–54. 161 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 126. 162 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 41. 163 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 54. 164 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 141. 165 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 96. 166 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 133–34; similarly, Vahula, Moia doroha, 41. 167 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 43. 168 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 96. 169 Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 273. 170 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 96. 171 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 172 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:615. 173 Drozd, interview. 174 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 58; similarly, Vynnyts´ka, Nezvychaini doli, 174. 175 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 126. 176 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 242. 177 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 178 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 125; similarly, Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 138–39. 179 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 18. 180 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 29, 35.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

580

181 Khlevniuk and Mironenko, Zakliuchennye na stroikakh kommunizma, 313, 327, 355. 182 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 396–98; Ivanova, Istoriia GULAGa, 353–54. 183 Ivanova, “GULAG,” 239. 184 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 124; similarly, Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 70; Ol´ha Mereshchak-­Zaiats´, Khto z Bohom, to Boh z nym: Spohady (Ternopil: Aston, 2015), 19. 185 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 41. 186 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 54. 187 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 97. 188 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 181. 189 Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 32. 190 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 178. 191 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 108–9. 192 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 126. 193 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 119. 194 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:194. 195 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 37. 196 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, Naselenie Gulaga, 263. 197 Bezborodov and Khrustalev, 259. The former political prisoners assert that this norm was never implemented for them. 198 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 40. 199 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 267. 200 Surovtsova, Spohady, 277. 201 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 83. 202 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 45. 203 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 40. 204 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 167. 205 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 96. 206 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 161. 207 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:482. 208 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:277–78; similarly, Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 67.

Notes

581

209 Svarnyk and Feloniuk, Olena Stepaniv, 247. 210 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 169. 211 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 255. 212 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 135. 213 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 309; similarly, Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 148. 214 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 95. 215 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 143–44. 216 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 138. 217 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 72. 218 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 124. 219 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 220 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 137. 221 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 67. 222 Adamova-­Sliozberg, My Journey, 16. 223 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 128. 224 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 266, 271–72. 225 Surovtsova, Spohady, 244–45. 226 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 71, 94. 227 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101. 228 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 210, 303. 229 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 137. 230 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 106. 231 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 170. 232 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 486. 233 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 67. 234 Surovtsova, Spohady, 309. 235 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 113. 236 Surovtsova, Spohady, 239. 237 Surovtsova, 350. 238 Quoted in Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 193–94. 239 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:278. 240 Rudenko, “Zhaduiuchy perezhyte,” 6. 241 Surovtsova, Spohady, 348. 242 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 208.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

582

243 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 181. 244 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 146. 245 Vahula, Moia doroha, 33. 246 Surovtsova, Spohady, 348. 247 Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 115. 248 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my. 249 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 82. 250 Ruth R. Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 95–102.

CHAPTER 6 1 Veronica Shapovalov also emphasizes this point; see Remembering the Darkness, 279. 2 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 73. 3 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 209. 4 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 40. 5 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 101–2. 6 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 236. 7 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 104. 8 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 474. 9 Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 211. 10 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 37. 11 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 16. 12 Vynnyts´ka, Nezvychaini doli, 176. 13 Surovtsova, Spohady, 229–31. 14 Surovtsova, 231, 344. 15 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 286. 16 Surovtsova, Spohady, 271. 17 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 73. 18 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 229. 19 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 146. 20 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 12; similarly, Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 32. 21 Surovtsova, Spohady, 309.

Notes

583

22 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 228. 23 Oksana Kis, “Defying Death: Women’s Experience of the Holodomor, 1932–33,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southern European Women’s and Gender History 7 (2013): 42–67; Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity, 42; Rebecca Manley, “Nutritional Dystrophy: The Science and Semantics of Starvation in World War II,” in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, ed. Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 225–27. 24 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 73, 104. 25 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 62. 26 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 110–11. 27 Andrusiak, Spohady, 57, 59. 28 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 20. 29 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:452. 30 Surovtsova, Spohady, 279. 31 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:460. 32 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 33, 44. 33 Lipper, Eleven Years, 117–35. 34 Voitolovskaia, Po sledam sud´by, 280–81. 35 Gratian Cormos, “Gender Policies in the Romanian Gulag,” Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies 3, no. 5 (2011): 72–73. 36 Felicja Karay, Death Сomes in Yellow: Skarzysko-­Kamienna Slave Labor Camp (New York: Routledge, 1997), 239. 37 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 198–99. 38 Andrusiak, Spohady, 61. 39 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 70. 40 Chyz, Woman and Child, 64, 69. 41 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 83. 42 Cormos, “Women Humiliated,” 49. 43 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 225. 44 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 15. 45 Surovtsova, Spohady, 251. 46 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 128. 47 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 55.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

584

48 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 133. 49 Nadezhda Grankina, “Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy,” in Vilenskii, Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, 166; similarly, Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 69. 50 Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 5 (Arkhiv illiuziy), drawing 13, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 51 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 17; Ekaterina Olitskaia, Moi vospominaniia, book 2 (Frankfurt: Posev, 1971), 235; Adamova-­Sliozberg, My Journey, 71; Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 178–79. 52 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 238, 244; similarly, Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 75. 53 Lytvyn, Oderzhyma svobodoiu, 93. 54 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 118; similarly, Andrusiak, Spohady, 56; Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 126; Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 7 (Oazis v adu), drawing 10, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 55 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 43. 56 Gheith and Jolluck, Gulag Voices, 202. 57 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:556. 58 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 122. 59 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 61. 60 Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 5 (Arkhiv illiuziy), drawing 46, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 61 Surovtsova, Spohady, 268. 62 Hordasevych and Voloshchak, Nepokhytni, 110. 63 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 247. 64 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 181. 65 Cormos, “Women Humiliated,” 50. 66 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power”; Anne Applebaum, “‘Sex Was Survival Strategy in Gulag,’ Says US Journalist Anne Applebaum,” interview by Monika Horáková, Expats.cz, 9 December 2010, https://news.expats. cz/weekly-­czech-­news/sex-­was-­survival-­strategy-­in-­gulag-­says-­us-­ journalist/; Chyz, Woman and Child, 128. 67 Nikita Petrov, Istoriia imperii “Gulag,” chapter 6, Psevdologiia, accessed 24 June 2020, http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/.

Notes

585

68 Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 9 (Chernaia roba ili belyi khalat), drawing 46, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 69 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 134. 70 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 138. 71 Tamara Ruzhentseva, “Vospominaniia,” in Vsia nasha zhizn´: Vospominaniia Galiny Ivanovny Levinson i rasskazy, zapisannye eiu, ed. Оlga Blinkina and Ekaterina Velikanova (Moscow: Memorial, 1996), 72–75. 72 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 72. 73 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 211–12. 74 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 237. 75 Havryshko, 175. 76 Martha Chyz, one of the earliest scholars to study women’s experience of the Gulag, is of a similar opinion; see Chyz, Woman and Child, 128; Lipper, Eleven Years, 119. 77 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 35. 78 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 311. 79 Surovtsova, Spohady, 301. 80 Surovtsova, 316. 81 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 100. 82 Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 9 (Chernaia roba ili belyi khalat), drawing 7, accessed 21 May 2020, http://www.gulag.su/albom/. 83 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 106–7. 84 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 269. 85 Kokhans´ka, 263–64. 86 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 213–14. 87 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 313; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 249–50. 88 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 169. 89 Kuntsman, “With a Shade of Disgust,” 309. 90 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power,” 200, 203. 91 Nadezhda Ulanovskaia and Maia Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem´i (Saint Petersburg: Inapress, 2003), 249. 92 Fedushchak and Fedushchak, Abez´ i Adak, 213. 93 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 77. 94 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 215–17.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

586

95 Skarga, 215. 96 Skarga, 217. 97 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 83. 98 Surovtsova, Spohady, 317. 99 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power,” 199. 100 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 314–15. 101 Gustaw Herling-­Grudziński, Inny Świat (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008). 102 Kuzin, “Zhenshchiny GULAGa”; see Sozerko Malsagoff, An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North, trans. F. H. Lyon (London: A. M. Philpot, 1926); Boris Shiriaev, Neugasimaia lampada (Moscow: Тovarishchestvo russkikh khudozhnikov, 1991). 103 Elena Glinka, “The Kolyma Tram,” in Applebaum, Gulag Voices, 39–48. 104 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 171. 105 Ukrainian scholar Martha Chyz, whose study of women’s experience in the Gulag was based almost exclusively on the memoirs of the prisoners themselves, mentions the practice of rape very briefly, claiming that it was a standard part of camp life: Chyz, Woman and Child, 130. 106 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 83; similarly, Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 72. 107 Shapovalova, “Sestrenki, mamki, damki,” 149–50. 108 Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Za Ukraїnu!, 84–85; Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 84; Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:461; Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 122. 109 Shtepa, Pam’iat´ klyche, 42–43. 110 Chyz, Woman and Child, 64, 69. 111 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 58. 112 Surovtsova, Spohady, 268, 242. 113 Petkevich, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, 174. 114 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 44. 115 Havryshko, 153. 116 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:441. 117 Bondaruk, “Kenhirs´ke povstannia”; Ivanova, Istoriia GULAGa, 328. 118 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 33. 119 Surovtsova, Spohady, 314.

Notes

587

120 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 240. 121 Surovtsova, Spohady, 356. 122 Volovich, “My Past,” 260. 123 Surovtsova, Spohady, 318. 124 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 192–95. 125 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 239–40. In Ukrainian, the phrase mii cholovik means both “my husband” and “my man.” 126 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 201. 127 Schliess, “Nedilia u Vorkuti,” 6. 128 For more detail on this, see Kis´, “Natsiia iak uiavlena.” 129 Husiak, interview, 37. 130 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 71. 131 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 121–25. 132 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 148–49. 133 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 212–13. 134 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 275. 135 Kokhans´ka, 290. 136 Bondaruk, “Kenhirs´ke povstannia.” 137 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 65; similarly, Bondaruk, “Nam sontse vsmikhalos´,” 18–19. 138 Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 70. 139 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 44–45. 140 Lunio, Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi, 2:150–51. 141 Lunio, 2:277. 142 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 69, 80. 143 Khrashchevs´ka, Zlamanyi tsvit, 111. 144 Oksana Kis´, “National´no-­vyzvol´ni zmahannia iak vyprobuvannia mezh tradytsiinoї zhinochosti: Zhinochyi dosvid u natsionalistychnomu pidpilli 1940–50-kh rokiv,” Etnichna istoriia narodiv Ievropy 48 (2016): 72. 145 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 204. 146 This can be seen in the biographical notes about the female political prisoners whose recollections were published in the collection from Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia; similarly, Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 28; Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 321.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

588

147 Datsiuk, Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї, 74; Poliuha, Vse zh ne daremno!, 82. 148 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 70; similarly, Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 55–56. 149 Kokhans´ka, Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi, 320. 150 Kokhans´ka, 321. 151 Datsiuk, Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї, 61. 152 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 54. 153 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 110–11. 154 Protsak, Na perekhrestiakh zhyttia, 14, 31. 155 Mandryk-­Kuibida, Volia klyche nas, 284–85. 156 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 1:483; similarly, Potykevych-­ Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 55–56. 157 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 228. 158 Lal´ka, Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny, 2:439. 159 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 337. 160 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 103–4. 161 Surovtsova, Spohady, 327. 162 Vahula, Moia doroha, 53. 163 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 176. 164 Pocheptsov, “Kolymskoe zemliachestvo.”

CHAPTER 7 1 Andrusiak, Spohady, 83–84. 2 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 173. 3 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power,” 208–9. 4 Gritsenko and Kalinin, “Zhenskoe litso GULAGa.” 5 Petrov, Istoriia imperii “Gulag,” chapter 17. 6 Zemskov, “GULAG,” 7:8. 7 Zemskov, 7:8. 8 Petrov, Istoriia imperii “Gulag,” chapter 17. 9 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power,” 220. 10 Semen Vilenskii and Aleksandr Iakovlev, eds., Deti GULAGa: 1918–1956 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2002), 343–45. 11 Vilenskii and Iakovlev, 345.

Notes

589

12 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 267–69. 13 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 84. 14 For example, Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 175, 179. 15 Zakydal´s´ka, Intyns´ki snihoviї, 30–31. 16 Vilenskii and Iakovlev, Deti GULAGa, 428. 17 Nataliia Zaporozhets´, “Iz vospominanii,” in Vilenskii, Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, 537–38. 18 Andrusiak, Spohady, 49. 19 Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, A my lyshylysia liud´my, 35. 20 Datsiuk, Usna zhinocha istoriia, 269. 21 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 31. 22 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 405. 23 Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 271–72. 24 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 116–18. 25 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 24–89. 26 Voitolovskaia, Po sledam sud´by, 381–95; Volovich, “My Past,” 262–64. 27 Surovtsova, Spohady, 317–18, 357. 28 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 94. 29 Havryshko, 153. 30 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 78. 31 Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 275. 32 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 318. 33 Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power,” 216–17. 34 Gritsenko and Kalinin, “Zhenskoe litso GULAGa.” 35 Volovich, “My Past,” 260. 36 Petkevich, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, 251–80. 37 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 478. 38 Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 206–7. 39 Surovtsova, Spohady, 316–17. 40 Surovtsova, 356. 41 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 319; Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 273. 42 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 322. 43 Meshko, Ne vidstupliusia!, 55.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

590

44 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 77. 45 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 480. 46 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 407. 47 Surovtsova, Spohady, 319. 48 Volovich, “My Past,” 262. 49 Volovich, 262. 50 Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 3. 51 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 99. 52 Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 3–4. 53 For more on children in the Gulag, see Semyon Vilensky and Cathy A. Frierson, Children of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 54 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 99–100. 55 Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 275. 56 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 322–23. 57 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 406. 58 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 175–76. 59 Pan´kiv, Vira, Nadiia, Liubov, 1:63–65. 60 Pan´kiv, 2:244–45. 61 Pan´kiv, 1:47–48. 62 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 77. 63 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 405. 64 Kostenko, 406. 65 Shapovalova, “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni,” 480. 66 Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 275–77. 67 Zemskov, “GULAG,” 7:8. 68 Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 323. 69 “‘Mamochkino kladbishche’—Kladbishche detgorodka pos. Dolinka,” Virtual´nyi muzei GULAGa, accessed 24 June 2020, http://www.­ gulagmuseum.org/showObject.do?object=19885512&language=1; Makhabbat Ensebaeva, “‘Mamochkino kladbishche’: Kak khoronili detei repressirovanykh zhenshchin,” InformBiuro, 18 May 2017, https:// informburo.kz/stati/mamochkino-­kladbishche-­kak-­horonili-­detey-­ repressirovannyh-­zhenshchin.html. 70 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 100–101.

Notes

591

71 Surovtsova, Spohady, 320–21. 72 Surovtsova, 320–21. 73 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 77. 74 Surovtsova, Spohady, 320. 75 Pan´kiv, Vira, Nadiia, Liubov, 1:156–57, 2:248, 2:289–90. 76 Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Meni bulo 19, 77. 77 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 102. 78 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 176; similarly, Skarga, Pislia vyzvolennia, 207; Bondaruk, “Nam sontse vsmikhalos´,” 19. 79 Kersnovskaia, Skol´ko stoit chelovek, album 9 (Chernaia roba ili belyi khalat), drawing 2, accessed 28 August 2020, http://www.gulag.su/ albom/. 80 Hoshko-­Kit, Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´, 104. 81 Vynnyts´ka, Nezvychaini doli, 180–81; similarly, Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 154. 82 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 167. The author preserved these photographs and published them in her memoir. 83 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 405. 84 Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Zaruchnytsia imperiї, 109. 85 Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Nam duzhe treba zhyty, 66. 86 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 101. 87 Andrusiak, Spohady, 49. 88 Kostenko, “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko,” 408. 89 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 174–77; similarly, Korchak, Pobachene i perezhyte, 26; Mereshchak-­Zaiats´, Khto z Bohom, 26. 90 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 80–81. 91 Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Vo im’ia Tvoie, 299. 92 Onyshko, Nam sontse vsmikhalos´, 206. 93 Benoni, Taka nasha hirka pravda, 29–30. 94 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 171–76. 95 Mashchak, Dorohamy mynuloho, 163. 96 Blavats´ka, Khronika moho zhyttia, 171. 97 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 50.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

98 Hordasevych, Hordasevych, and Strokata, Neskorena Berehynia, 147. 99 Savka, A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila, 100–101. 100 Kryvuts´kyi, V namysti z koliuchoho drotu, 91. 101 Havryshko, Dolaiuchy tyshu, 176. 102 MacKinnon, “Motherhood and Survival.” 103 Maksimova, “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa,” 277.

592

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES Adamova-­Sliozberg, Olga. My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag. Translated by Katharine Gratwick Baker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Andrusiak, Ievheniia. Spohady. Lviv: LNU im. I. Franka, 2001. Benoni, Polina. Taka nasha hirka pravda: Spohady i rozdumy politv’iaznia. Chortkiv: n. p., 2003. Bezborodov, Aleksandr, and Vladimir Khrustalev, eds. Naselenie Gulaga: ­Chislennost´ i usloviia soderzhaniia. Vol. 4 of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004. Blavats´ka, Oleksandra. Khronika moho zhyttia. Lviv: Mizhnarodna ekonomichna fundatsiia, 2010. Datsiuk, Halyna, ed. Istoriia odniieї fotohrafiї: Sproba samoreprezentatsiï. Kyiv: Spadshchyna, 2007. —, ed. Usna zhinocha istoriia. Povernennia. Kyiv: Spadshchyna, 2003. Didukh, Nadiia. Dva koliory moї (knyha-­spomyn). Lviv: n. p., 2002. Dolzhanskaia, Liia, and Irina Osipova, eds. “Dorogaia Ekaterina Pavlovna. . .”: Pis´ma zhenshchin i detei. Pis´ma v ikh zashchitu. 1920–1936. Saint ­Petersburg: Zhurnal Zvezda, 2005. Drozd, Vira. Interview by Taras Cholii. 15 July 2009. Video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

594

http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/ persons/?ci_personid=38. Fedushchak, Ivanna, and Viktor Fedushchak. Abez´ i Adak—doroha u vichnist´. Lviv: NVF Ukraїns´ki tekhnolohiї, 2006. Figes, Orlando. Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Formakov, Arsenii. Gulag Letters. Edited and translated by Emily D. Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Gagen-­Torn, Nina. Memoria. Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1994. Ginzburg, Eugenia [Evgeniia Ginzburg]. Within the Whirlwind. Translated by Ian Boland. Introduced by Heinrich Böll. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Ginzburg, Evgeniia [Eugenia Ginzburg]. Krutoi marshrut. Khronika vremen kul´ta lichnosti. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1990. Glinka, Elena. “‘Kolymskii tramvai’ srednei tiazhesti.” In Kolyma, edited by Semen Vilenskii [Simeon Vilenskii, Semyon Vilenskii], 376–80. Vol. 2 of Dodnies´ tiagoteet. Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2004. —. “The Kolyma Tram.” In Applebaum, Gulag Voices, 39–48. —. “Trium, ili Bol´shoi ‘kolymskii tramvai’: Rasskaz-­svidetel´stvo.” Raduga, no. 2 (1990): 14–30. Grankina, Nadezhda. “Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy.” In Vilenskii, Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, 149–74. Havryshko, Marta. Dolaiuchy tyshu: Zhinochi istoriї viiny. Kharkiv: Klub simeinoho dozvillia, 2018. Herling-­Grudziński, Gustaw. Inny Świat. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008. Hodiak, Ol´ha. Interview by Mar’iana Pyrih. 27 August 2009. Transcript and video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum. Fond 1, opys 1, 31 pages. http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/ archive/video-­archive/persons/?ci_personid=9. Horalewskyj, Taras B., and Bohdan Arey, eds. Invincible Spirit: Art and Poetry of Ukrainian Women Political Prisoners in the U.S.S.R. Translated by Bohdan Yasen. Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1977.

Bibliography

595

Hordasevych, Bohdan, Halyna Hordasevych, and Nina Strokata, eds. Neskorena Berehynia: Zhertvy moskovs´ko-­komunistychnoho teroru ХХ stolittia. Lviv: Piramida, 2002. Hordasevych, Bohdan, and Sofiia Voloshchak, eds. Nepokhytni: Zbirnyk spohadiv. Lviv: Ridna shkola, 2005. Hoshko-­Kit, Anna. Zhertvy za nezalezhnist´. Lviv: Ukraїns´ki tekhnolohiї, 2009. Husiak, Dariia. Interview by Taras Cholii. 1 June 2009. Transcript and video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum. Fond 1, opys 1, 39 pages. http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/ video-­archive/persons/?ci_personid=1. Ivanyts´ka, Anna [Hanna Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn)]. Interview by Taras Cholii. 31 July‑1 August 2009. Transcript and video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum. Fond 1, opys 1, 56 pages. http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/ persons/?ci_personid=8. Karpeniuk, Tetiana, Viktoriia Serheieva, and Iryna Boiko, eds. Na zlami stolit´. U pam’iat´ pryideshnim pokolinniam. Lutsk: Teren, 2014. Karvans´ka-­Bailiak, Anna [Anna Karwańska-­Bajlak]. Vo im’ia Tvoie: (Merezhane zhyttiam). Edited by Roman Halan. Warsaw: Ukraїns´kyi Arkhiv, 1999. Kersnovskaia, Evfrosiniia [Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya]. Naskal´naia zhivopis´: “ . . . bezzakoniia nashi svidetel´stvuiut protiv nas.” Edited by Vladimir Vigilianskii. Moscow: Kvadrat, 1991. —. Skol´ko stoit chelovek: Povest´ o perezhitom. 6 vols., 12 books. Moscow: Fond Kersnovskoi, 2000–2001. http://www.gulag.su/project/. Khlevniuk, Oleg, and Sergei Mironenko, eds. Zakliuchennye na stroikakh kommunizma. GULAG i ob˝ekty energetiki v SSSR: Sobranie dokumentov i fotografii. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008. Khrashchevs´ka, Oksana. Zlamanyi tsvit: Khudozhnio-­dokumental´na proza. Lviv: Spolom, 2012. Accompanying website: “Oksana Khrashchevs´ka: ‘Zlamanyi tsvit,’” accessed 20 July 2020, https://nezlamana.in.ua. Kirss, Tiina, ed. and trans. Estonian Life Stories. New York: CEU Press, 2009. Kokhans´ka, Halyna. Z Ukraїnoiu v sertsi: Spohady. Edited by Mykola Posivnich. Litopys UPA, edited by Petro I. Potichnyi, vol. 9. Lviv: Litopys UPA, 2008.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

596

Kokurin, Aleksandr, and Nikita Petrov, eds. Gulag 1917–1960: Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei. Moscow: MFD, 2000. Korchak, Dariia. Pobachene i perezhyte: Spohady politv’iaznia. Stryi, Ukraine: Ukrpol, 2016. Kostenko, Natal´ia. “Sud´ba Natal´i Kostenko (zapis´ L. Bogoraz).” In Pamiat´: Istoricheskii sbornik, vol. 4, 402–12. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981. Kryvuts´kyi, Ivan, ed. V namysti z koliuchoho drotu. Spohady zhinok v’iazniv HULAHu, uchasnyts´ noryl´s´koho povstannia 1953 roku. Lviv: Manuskrypt, 2009. Lal´ka, Iaroslav, ed. Litopys neskorenoї Ukraїny: Dokumenty, materialy, spohady. 2 vols. Lviv: Prosvita and Halyts´ka vydavnycha spilka, 1993–97. Lipper, Elinor. Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. Chicago: Regnery, 1951. Lunio, Ievhen, ed. Iavorivshchyna u povstans´kii borot´bi: Rozpovidi uchasnykiv i ochevydtsiv. 2 vols. Lviv: Rastr‑7, 2005–15. —, ed. Iz povstans´kykh i tabirnykh chasiv. Rozpovidi Melaniї Sluky ta Stefaniї Susol. Lviv: Rastr‑7, 2019. Lytvyn, Halyna, ed. Oderzhyma svobodoiu. Shliakh heroїni svitu Iryny Senyk. Brusturiv, Ukraine: Dyskursus, 2017. Malsagoff, Sozerko [Malsagov, Sozerko]. An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North. Translated by F. H. Lyon. London: A. M. Philpot, 1926. Malsagov, Sozerko [Malsagoff, Sozerko]. Adskie ostrova: Sovietskaia tiur´ma na Dal´nem Severe. Translated by Shakhbulat Iandiev. Nalchik: Elfa, 1995. Mal´tseva, Nina. “Za pologom stalinskoi pechati: Zapiski i vospominaniia.” In Entsyklopediia Sibirskogo Gulaga, edited by Leonid Mukhin. Irkutsk: Vos´moe nebo, 2005. https://www.sakharov-­center.ru/asfcd/ auth/?t=book&num=5660. Mandryk-­Kuibida, Kateryna. Volia klyche nas do boiu. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2017. Marchenko, Zoia. Interview by Liudmila Vasilovskaia. December 1998. Transcript. Neopubublikovannye materialy, Sakharov Center. http:// www.sakharov-­center.ru/museum/library/unpublished/278.html. —. Semnadtsat´ let na ostrovakh GULAGa. Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1999. Mashchak, Ivanna. Dorohamy mynuloho. Kyiv: Klio, 2019. Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, Iryna. A my lyshylysia liud´my: Spohady. Lviv: Spolom, 2011.

Bibliography

597

Mereshchak-­Zaiats´, Ol´ha. Khto z Bohom, to Boh z nym: Spohady. Ternopil: Aston, 2015. Meshko, Oksana. Between Death and Life. Translated by George Moshinsky. New York: Women’s Association for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine, 1981. —. “Memoirs.” Ukrainian Review 27, no. 2 (1979): 35–54; no. 3 (1979): 36–50; no. 4 (1979): 22–50. —. Mizh zhyttiam i smertiu. Kyiv: NVP Iava, 1991. —. Ne vidstupliusia! Do 100-richchia Oksany Iakivny Meshko. Edited by Vasyl´ Ovsiienko and Оles´ Serhiienko. Kharkiv: Prava liudyny, 2005. Milova, Ol´ga, ed. Izgnanniki v svoei strane: Pis´ma iz sovetskoi ssylki 1921– 1930-kh godov. Moscow: Nauka, 2008. N., Valentyna. “Velykden´ u v’iaznytsi (z perezhytoho).” Nashe zhyttia / Our Life, no. 4 (April 1990): 2–3. Obertyńska, Beata (Marta Rudzka). W domu niewoli. Rome: Nakł. Oddziału kultury i prasy 2. korpusu A. P., 1946. Olitskaia, Ekaterina. Moi vospominaniia. Book 2. Frankfurt: Posev, 1971. Pan´kiv, Mariia. Teofiliia: Pro Teofiliiu Bzovu-­Fedoriv-­Stakhiv: Spohady. Lviv: Tsentr doslidzhen´ vyzvol´noho rukhu, 2009. —, ed. Vira, Nadiia, Liubov: Spohady zhinok. 2 vols. Warsaw: Ukraїns´kyi Arkhiv, 2001–5. Petkevich, Tamara. Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Kolts and Ross Ufberg. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. Plechii, Hanna. Makivkoiu poklykani: Spohady i rozdumy kolyshnioї zv’iazkovoї UPA. Lviv: Kameniar, 2007. Poliuha, Dariia. Vse zh ne daremno! Lviv: n. p., 2014. Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Mariia. Nam duzhe treba zhyty. Ternopil: Lileia, 1996. —. Neskorena pisnia (Pisni medsestry UPA i politv’iaznia). Ternopil: Lileia, 1997. Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Hanna. Meni bulo 19: Avtobiohrafichna rozpovid´. Kyiv: Vydavnychyi dim Kyievo-­Mohylians´ka Akademiia, 2001. Protsak, Paraska. Na perekhrestiakh zhyttia (spohady). Ivano-­Frankivsk: Misto-­NV, 2003. Pyrih, Mariia. Interview by Roksolana Popeliuk. 17 January 2017. Video. Oral history project “Liudy viiny,” NGO Lokal´na istoriia video archive.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

598

Rudenko, Raїsa. “Zhaduiuchy perezhyte.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 2 (February 1988): 3–6. Ruzhentseva, Tamara. “Vospominaniia.” In Vsia nasha zhizn´: Vospominaniia Galiny Ivanovny Levinson i rasskazy, zapisannye eiu, edited by Оlga Blinkina and Ekaterina Velikanova, 64–81. Moscow: Memorial, 1996. Savka, Bohdan. “A smert´ їkh bezsmertiam zustrila”: Narysy, spohady, dokumenty pro uchast´ zhinotstva triokh raioniv Ternopillia . . . v natsional´no-­vyzvol´nii borot´bi OUN-­UPA. Ternopil: Dzhura, 2003. Schliess, Walli. “Den´ u Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 7 (July 1956): 5–6. —. “Molytva u Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 9 (September 1956): 7. —. “Nedilia u Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 8 (August 1956): 6–9. —. “Poshta u Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 10 (October 1956): 7. —. “Rizdvo u Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 1 (January 1957): 4. —. “Rozvaha v Vorkuti.” Nashe Zhyttia / Our Life, no. 11 (November 1956): 7. Senyk, Iryna. Metelyky spohadiv. Spohady i vzory dlia vyshyvannia. Translated by Vira Malanchii. Lviv: Vydavnytstvo MS, 2003. —. Suvii polotna: Poeziї. 2nd ed. Edited by Natalia Danylenko and Nadiia Svitlychna. New York: Spilka, 1990. —. Zagratovana iunist´: Poeziї. Drohobych, Ukraine: Vidrodzhennia, 1996. Shiriaev, Boris. Neugasimaia lampada. Moscow: Тovarishchestvo russkikh khudozhnikov, 1991. Shtepa, Mariia. Pam’iat´ klyche. Chortkiv: Terno-­Hraf, 2008. Skarga, Barbara. Pislia vyzvolennia . . .1944–1956. Translated by Dmytro Antoniuk. Chernivtsi: Knyhy-­ХХІ, 2018. —. Po wyzwoleniu . . .1944–1956. Warsaw: Fundacja Aletheia, 2000. Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Oleksandra. Za Ukraїnu! Za її voliu! Kolomyia: Vik, 2010. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Translated by Thomas Whitney and Harry Willetts. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. Stefanskaia, Militsa. Chernoe i beloe. Moscow: Suzdalev, 1994. Stefanyshyn, Sofiia. Interview by Andrii Shymanskyi. 27 July 2011. Video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum. http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/ persons/?ci_personid=67.

Bibliography

599

Surovtseva, Nadezhda [Nadiia Surovtsova]. “Kolymskie vospominaniia.” In Vilenskii, Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, 252–324. —. “Vladivostok Transit.” In Vilensky, Till My Tale Is Told, 181–210. Surovtsova, Nadiia [Nadezhda Surovtseva]. Lysty. Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo im. Oleny Telihy, 2001. —. Spohady. Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo im. Oleny Telihy, 1996. —. “Zhyttia Nadiї Surovtsovoї, opysane neiu samoiu v selyshchi Nyzhnii Seimchan Magadanskoї oblasti.” 3 parts. Ukraїna: Nauka i kul´tura 24 (1990): 414–560; 25 (1991): 218–301; 26/27 (1993): 285–321. Svarnyk, Halyna, and Andrii Feloniuk, eds. Olena Stepaniv—Roman Dashkevych. Spohady i narysy. Lviv: Piramida, 2009. Tamarina, Ruf´. Takaia planida, ili Zarubki na “Shchepke.” Tomsk: Vodolei, 2002. Tykhan, Teklia. Interview by Taras Cholii. 15 July 2009. Video excerpts. Oral History Archive, Territory of Terror Memorial Museum. http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/uk/archive/video-­archive/persons/?ci_personid=90. Ulanovskaia, Nadezhda, and Maia Ulanovskaia. Istoriia odnoi sem´i. Saint Petersburg: Inapress, 2003. Vahula, Mariia. Moia doroha z domu cherez v’iaznytsi, laherni zony, zaslannia dodomu. Lviv: Ukraїns´ki tekhnolohiї, 2006. Vilenskii, Semen [Semyon Vilensky, Simeon Vilensky]. Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy. Vol. 1 of Dodnies´ tiagoteet. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1989. Vilenskii, Semen [Semyon Vilensky, Simeon Vilensky], and Aleksandr Iakovlev, eds. Deti GULAGa: 1918–1956. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2002. Vintoniv, Oksana. Interview by Iurii Maniukh. October 1994. Audio. Oral History Archives, Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. CD record no. 191. Voitolovskaia, Ada. Po sledam sud´by moego pokoleniia. Syktyvkar, Russia: Komi knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1991. Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, Omeliana. “Nas bulo desiat´ tysiach u Kenhiri.” Nashe zhyttia / Our Life, no. 2 (February 1992): 7–9; no. 3 (March 1992): 5–11.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

600

Volodymyrs´ka, Irena. Interview by Iurii Maniukh. September 1994. Audio. Oral History Archives, Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. CD record no. 161. Volovich, Hava. “My Past.” In Vilensky, Till My Tale Is Told, 241–76. Vynnyts´ka, Iroïda [Iroida Wynnytsky], ed. Nezvychaini doli zhychainykh zhinok: Usna istoriia ХХ stolittia. Lviv: Vydavnytstvo L´vivs´koї Politekhniky, 2013. Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Hanna. Zaruchnytsia imperії (spohady politv’iaznia). Lviv: PP Soroka, 2009. Zakydal´s´ka, Anastasiia. Intyns´ki snihoviї: Dokumental´na povist´, publitsystyka. Lutsk: PP Ivaniuk VP, 2014. Zaporozhets´, Nataliia. “Iz vospominanii.” In Vilenskii, Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, 532–38.

SECONDARY SOURCES Adler, Nanci. The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002. —. “Return of the Repressed.” In On Living through Soviet Russia, edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, 214–34. London: Routledge, 2004. Alexopoulos, Golfo. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Allaniiazov, Turganbek. “Ukraintsy v osobykh lageriakh GULAG MVD SSSR.” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB 2, no. 48 (2017): 218–38. Andermahr, Sonya, Terry Lovell, and Carol Wolkowitz, eds. A Glossary of Feminist Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003. —, ed. Gulag Voices: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. —. “Holovne mistse v moїi knyzi pro HULAH posidaiut´ ne emotsiї ta polityka, a te, shcho perezhyly zhertvy.” Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 8 April 2006, https://dt.ua/SOCIETY/

Bibliography

601

enn_epplbom_golovne_mistse_v_moyiy_knizi_pro_gulag_posidayut_ ne_emotsiyi_ta_politika,_a_te,_scho_per.html. —. Introduction to Applebaum, Gulag Voices, vii–xv. —. “‘Sex Was Survival Strategy in Gulag,’ Says US Journalist Anne Applebaum.” Interview by Monika Horáková.” Expats.cz, 9 December 2010. https://news.expats.cz/weekly-­czech-­news/ sex-­was-­survival-­strategy-­in-­gulag-­says-­us-­journalist/. Barenberg, Alan, Wilson T. Bell, Sean Kinnear, Steven Maddox, and Lynne Viola. “New Directions in Gulag Studies: A Roundtable Discussion.” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 59, no. 3–4 (2017): 376–95. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2012. Barnes, Steven A. Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Baumel, Judith T. “Women’s Agency and Survival Strategies during the Holocaust.” Women’s Studies International Forum 22, no. 3 (1999): 329–47. Bell, Wilson T. “Gulag Historiography: An Introduction.” Gulag Studies 2–3 (2009–10): 1–20. —. “Sex, Pregnancy and Power in the Late Stalinist Gulag.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 2 (2015): 198–224. —. Stalin’s Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Bell, Wilson T., and Marc Elie. “Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag.” Gulag Studies 1 (2008): 143–60. —. “A Supplement to Selected Bibliography of Historical Works on the Gulag.” Gulag Studies 4 (2011): 121–26. Belova, Anna. “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ kak predmet istorii povsednevnosti: Istoriograficheskii i metodologicheskii aspekty.” In Pushkareva, Rossiiskaia povsednevnost´, 25–67. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754–80. Blyth, Stephen. “The Dead of the Gulag: An Experiment in Statistical Investigation.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. C, 44, no. 3 (1995): 307–21.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

602

Bohachevsky-­Chomiak, Martha. Feminists despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939. Toronto: University of Alberta Press, 1988. Bondaruk, Larysa [Lesia Bondaruk]. “Ukraїns´kyi rukh oporu v radians´kykh kontstaborakh u 40-kh–pershii polovyni 50-kh rokiv XX st.” PhD diss., Volyns´kyi national´nyi universytet im. Lesi Ukraїnky, Lutsk, 2011. Bondaruk, Lesia [Larysa Bondaruk]. “Kenhirs´ke povstannia iak vyiav kryzy systemy HULAH.” Ukraїns´kyi instytut natsional´noї pam’iati. Accessed 22 May 2020. http://www.memory.gov.ua/news/do‑60-ti-­littya-­ kengirskogo-­povstannya-­kengirske-­povstannya-­yak-­viyav-­krizi-­sistemi-­ gulag. —. “Nam sontse vsmikhalos´ kriz´ rzhaviї graty. . .” In Karlag: Kenhirske povstannia. Do istorii povstannia uv’iaznenykh 3 viddilennia Stepovoho taboru MVS SRSR (16 travnia‑26 chervnia 1954 roku), edited by Turganbek Allaniiazov, 5–24. Karaganda: n. p., 2017. Borodkin, Lev. “Trud v GULAGe: . . . mezhdu prinuzhdeniem i stimulirovaniem.” In Borodkin, Gregorі, and Khlevniuk, Gulag, 129–56. Borodkin, Lev, Paul Gregorі, and Oleg Khlevniuk, eds. Gulag: Ekonomika prinuditel´nogo truda. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008. Buriak, Larysa. Zhinka v ukraїns´komu istorychnomu naratyvi: Avtory, ideї, obrazy (druha polovyna ХІХ–persha tretyna ХХ st.). Kyiv: National´na akademiia upravlinnia, 2010. Celmina, Helen. Women in Soviet Prisons. New York: Paragon House, 1985. Chesnokova, Ol´ga. “Zhenskii opyt GULAGa v sovetskoi istorii 1930–1950-kh godov.” In Zhenshchiny v istorii: Vozmozhnost´ byt´ uvidennymi, edited by Irina Chikalova, 189–93. Minsk: BGPU Maksima Tanka, 2001. Chyz, Martha. Woman and Child in the Modern System of Slavery—U.S.S.R. New York: Dobrus, 1962. Coak, Katryna. “‘A Day in the Life of. . .’: Women of the Soviet Gulag.” The View East: Central and Eastern Europe, Past and Present (blog), 19 June 2012. http://thevieweast.wordpress. com/2012/06/19/a-­day-­in-­the-­life-­of-­women-­of-­the-­Soviet-­gulag/. Cormos, Gratian. “Gender Policies in the Romanian Gulag.” Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies 3, no. 5 (2011): 72–75.

Bibliography

603

—. “Women Humiliated in the Romanian Communist Prison.” Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 47–52. D., Raisa (Naiwen). “Istoriia odnoi pesni: ‘Narodovol´cheskii gimn’ (‘Smelo, druz´ia, ne teriaite. . .’).” Nora Chernogo Khobbita (blog). 19 September 2015. http://naiwen.livejournal.com/1292585.html. Dallin, David, and Boris Nicolaevsky. Forced Labor in Soviet Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947. Davoliute, Violeta. “Deportee Memoirs and Lithuanian History: The Double Testimony of Dalia Grinkeviciute.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 51–68. Derev’ianyi, Ihor. “Ukraїns´ki povstantsi v HULAHu: Borot´ba tryvaie.” Tyzhden´, 21 October 2012. http://tyzhden.ua/History/62782. Devault, Marjorie L. “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.” Social Problems 37, no. 1 (1990): 96–116. Dulatbekov, Nurlan, and Nurshat Zhumadilova, eds. Karlag: Tvorchestvo v ne­ vole: Khudozhniki, muzei, dokumenty, pamiatniki. Karaganda: n. p., 2009. Dunphy, Richard. Sexual Politics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962–1023. Ensebaeva, Makhabbat. “‘Mamochkino kladbishche’: Kak khoronili detei repressirovanykh zhenshchin.” InformBiuro, 18 May 2017. https:// informburo.kz/stati/mamochkino-­kladbishche-­kak-­horonili-­detey-­ repressirovannyh-­zhenshchin.html. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from Holocaust. London: Rider, 2004. Fuchs, Esther, ed. Women in the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999. Gagulashvili, Shalva. “Grappling with Evil: Women of the Gulag Speak.” MA thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2003. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2001.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

604

Gardner, Graham. “Unreliable Memories and Other Contingencies: Problems with Biographical Knowledge.” Qualitative Research 1, no. 2 (2000): 185–204. Geiger, Susan. “What’s So Feminist about Women’s Oral History?” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (1990): 169–82. Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck, eds. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984. Gregory, Paul L. Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013. Grinev, Vladimir M., and A. Danil´, eds. Uznitsy “ALZhIRa”: Spisok zhenshchin-­ zakliuchennykh Akmolinskogo i drugikh otdelenii Karlaga. Moscow: Zven´ia, 2003. Gritsenko, Vadim, and Viacheslav Kalinin. “Zhenskoe ­litso ­GULAGa: Kak na mertvoi doroge roslo naselenie SSSR.” Novaia gazeta, 8 April 2009. https://novayagazeta.ru/ articles/2009/04/08/43275-zhenskoe-­litso-­gulaga. Gromov, Aleksandr, and Tengiz Semenov, dir. GULAG-­foto. Zhenskii al´bom. Documentary film, 2003. YouTube video, 26:17. Posted 14 September 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4OqCJa-­eh0. Gullotta, Andrea. “Gulag Poetry. An Almost Unexplored Field of Research.” In (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag: Fiction and Reality, edited by Felicital Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann, 175–92. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. Gurewitsch, Brana, ed. Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Halychyn, Stephania. 500 Ukrainian Martyred Women. New York: United Ukrainian Women’s Organizations of America, 1956. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Heinzen, James. “Corruption in the Gulag: Dilemmas of Officials and Prisoners.” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 456–75. Herling, Albert Konrad. The Soviet Slave Empire. New York: W. Funk, 1951.

Bibliography

605

Hewson, Martin. “Agency.” In Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, edited by Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe, 13–16. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010. Holmes, Mary. Gender and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2009. Hrinchenko, Helinada, Irina Rebrova, and Irina Romanova. “Usna istoriia v postradians´kykh doslidnyts´kykh praktykakh (na prykladi suchasnykh Bilorusi, Rosiї ta Ukraїny).” Ukraїns´kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 4 (2012): 172–87. Humm, Maggie. Słownik teorii feminizmu. Warsaw: Semper, 1993. Iakymenko, Liudmyla. “Osoblyvosti naratsiї v tabirnii prozi N. Surovtsovoї.” Visnyk LNU im. T. Shevchenka. Filolohichni nauky, no. 12 (2012): 88–94. Iakymenko, Liudmyla, and Ihor Kryvosheia. Nadiia Surovtsova (1896–1985): U poshukakh vtrachenoho chasu. Uman: Vydavets´ Sochins´kyi, 2016. Ivanova, Galina. “GULAG: Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve.” In Apogei i krakh stalinizma, edited by Iurii Afanas´ev, 209–72. Vol. 2 of Sovetskoe obshche­ stvo: Vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final. Moscow: RGGU, 1997. —. Istoriia GULAGa 1918–1958: Sotsial´no-­ekonomicheskii i politiko-­pravovoi aspekty. Moscow: Nauka, 2006. —. Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System. New York: Routledge, 2000. Jakobs, Janet L. “Women, Genocide, and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research.” Gender and Society 18, no. 2 (2004): 223–38. Jolluck, Katherine R. Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Karay, Felicja. Death Сomes in Yellow: Skarzysko-­Kamienna Slave Labor Camp. New York: Routledge, 1997. Khlevniuk, Oleg. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Khubova, Daria, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova. “After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union.” In Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 89–102. Kirss, Tiina, ed. “Baltic Life Stories.” Special issue, Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005).

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

606

—. “Survivorship and the Eastern Exile: Estonian Women’s Life Narratives of the 1941 and 1949 Siberian Deportations.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 13–38. Kirss, Tiina, Ene Koresaar, and Marju Lauristin, eds. She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-­Soviet Life Stories. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2004. Kis, Oksana [Oksana Kis´]. “Defying Death: Women’s Experience of the Holodomor, 1932–33.” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southern European Women’s and Gender History 7 (2013): 42–67. —. “(Re)Constructing the Ukrainian Women’s History: Actors, Agents, Narratives.” In Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine, edited by Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova, 152–79. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Kis´, Oksana [Oksana Kis]. “Henderni aspekty praktyky usnoistorychnykh doslidzhen´: Osoblyvosti zhinochoho dosvidu, pam’iati i naratsiї.” In Suspil´ni zlamy i povorotni momenty: Makropodiї kriz´ pryzmu avtobiohrafichnoї rozpovidi, edited by Oksana Kis´, Helinada Hrinchenko, and Tetiana Pastushenko, 11–41. Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukraїny, 2014. —. “National´no-­vyzvol´ni zmahannia iak vyprobuvannia mezh tradytsiinoї zhinochosti: Zhinochyi dosvid u natsionalistychnomu pidpilli 1940–50kh rokiv.” Etnichna istoriia narodiv Ievropy 48 (2016): 61–78. —. “Natsiia iak uiavlena i real´na spil´nota kriz´ pryzmu zhinochoho dosvidu ukraїnok-­politv’iazniv HULAHu.” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 6 (2016): 1274–85. —. “Relihiini praktyky ukraїnok-­politv’iazniv HULAHu.” Karpaty: Liudyna, etnos, tsyvilizatsiia 6 (2016): 41–49. —. “Tvorchist´ ukraїns´kykh zhinok-­politv’iazniv HULAHu.” Narodna tvorchist´ ta etnolohiia, no. 3 (2016): 51–59. —. Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrains´kii kul´turi druhoi polovyny XIX–pochatku XX stolittia. Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukraïny, 2008. —. “Zhinoche pytannia v ideolohiї і propahandi OUN.” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 1 (2018): 91–102.

Bibliography

607

—. “Zhinochyi dosvid HULAHu: Stan doslidzhen´ ta dzherel´ni resursy v ukraїns´komu konteksti.” Ukraїns´kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 3 (2016): 125–38. Kizny, Tomasz. Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2004. Kocherhina, Svitlana. “Doli halyts´kykh politv’iazniv ta alehorychna symvolika v їkh tabirnykh vyrobakh (na materialakh vystavky ‘Voienno-­ istorychni pam’iatky’).” Naukovi zapysky L´vivskoho istorychnoho muzeiu 7 (1998): 283–95. Kolomeiskii, Il´ia. “Kul´turno-­vospitatel´naia rabota v lageriakh i koloniiakh GULAGa NKVD-­MVD SSSR na territorii Cheliabinskoi oblasti.” PhD diss., Cheliabinskii Universitet, Cheliabinsk, 2009. Koloshchuk, Nadiia. Tabirna proza v paradyhmi postmodernu. Lutsk: Vezha, 2006. Korallov, Marlen, ed. Teatr GULAGa: Vospominaniia, dokumenty, ocherki. Moscow: Memorial, 1995. Kosyk, Volodymyr. Concentration Camps in the USSR. London: Ukrainian, 1962. Kravtsova, Halyna. “Poetychnyi vymir povstans´kykh tiuremnykh pisen´.” Narodoznavchi zoshyty, no. 4 (2014): 754–59. Kromm, Mikhail. “Povsednevnost´ kak predmet istoricheskogo issledovaniia (vmesto predisloviia).” In Istochnik. Istorik. Istoriia. Istoriia povsednevnosti: Sbornik nauchnykh rabot, vol. 3, 7–24. Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2003. Kuntsman, Adi. “‘With a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag.” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 308–28. Kuziakina, Natalia. Theater in the Solovki Prison Camp. Translated by Boris M. Meerovich. London: Routledge, 1995. Kuzin, Vladimir. “Zhenshchiny GULAGa.” Grani epokhi: Etiko-­filosofskii zhurnal 32 (2007). http://www.facets.ru/articles7/3210.htm. Lazda, Mara. “Women, Nation, and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941– 1957.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 1–12. Lentin, Ronit. “Introduction: Engendering Genocides.” In Gender and Catastrophe, edited by Ronit Lentin, 2–17. London: Zed Books, 1998.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

608

Lieblich, Amia, Tammar B. Zilber, and Rivka Tuval-­Mashiach. “Narrating Human Actions: The Subjective Experience of Agency, Structure, Communion, and Serendipity.” Qualitative Inquiry 14, no. 4 (2008): 613–31. Linden, Ruth R. Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. MacKinnon, Elaine. “Motherhood and Survival in the Stalinist Gulag.” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 13 (2019): 65–94. Maksimova, Liubov´. “Materinstvo v lageriakh GULAGa.” In Gendernaia teoriia i istoricheskoe znanie, edited by Andrei Pavlov, 271–77. Syktyvkar, Russia: SGU, 2003. “‘Mamochkino kladbishche’—Kladbishche detgorodka pos. Dolinka.” Virtual´nyi muzei GULAGa. Accessed 24 June 2020. http://www.gulagmuseum.org/ showObject.do?object=19885512&language=1. Mani, Lata. “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole McCann and Seung-­kyung Kim, 433–46. New York: Routledge, 2013. Manley, Rebecca. “Nutritional Dystrophy: The Science and Semantics of Starvation in World War II.” In Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, edited by Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer, 206–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Mason, Emma. “Women in the Gulag in the 1930s.” In Women in the Stalin Era, edited by Melanie Ilič, 131–50. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Minar, David W., and Greer Scott. The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Mironova, Viktoriia. “Kul´turno-­vospitatel´naia rabota v lageriakh GULAGa NKVD-­MVD SSSR v 1930–1950-е gody: Na materialakh Irkutskoi oblasti.” PhD diss., Irkutskii Universitet, Irkutsk, 2004. Munyi, Shea. “Toward а Constructionist Perspective of Examining Femininity Experience.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2014): 275–91. Nakhapetov, Boris. Ocherki istorii sanitarnoi sluzhby GULAGa. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009. Nakonechnyi, Mikhail. “Smertnost´ zakliuchennykh v otechestvennoi penitentsiarnoi sisteme v 1885–1915 i 1930–1953 godakh: Sravnenie v

Bibliography

609

istoricheskom kontekste.” Paper presented at the Shkola-­konferentsiia molodykh uchenykh IRI RAN, Moscow, 9 November 2017. http://mkonf. iriran.ru/papers.php?id=130. Nikol´s´kyi, Volodymyr. “Statystyka sotsial´noho skladu represovanykh radians´kymy orhanamy derzhavnoї bezpeky u 1943–1957 rr. (za dokumentamy Derzhavnoho arkhivu SB Ukraїny).” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­ KGB 20 (2003): 124–25. Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. Women in the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Olsen, Bjornar. In Defense of Things. Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. London: Altamira, 2010. Omel´chenko, Ol´ga. “Usloviia otbyvaniia nakazaniia beremennymi zhenshchinami i zhenshchinami, imeiushchimi maloletnikh detei, vo vremena GULAGa.” Pravo i politika, no. 5 (2014): 708–18. Onyshko, Lesia. Nam sontse vsmikhalos´ kriz´ rzhaviї graty: Kateryna Zaryts´ka v ukraїns´komu natsional´no-­vyzvol´nomu rusi. Toronto: Litopys UPA, 2007. Passerini, Luisa, ed. Memory and Totalitarianism. Vol. 1 of International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Peleshchyshyn, Kateryna. “Malodoslidzheni aspekty tvorchosti v’iazniv stalins´kykh tiurem і taboriv (na materialakh vystavky ‘Voienno-­istorychni pam’iatky’).” Naukovi zapysky L´vivskoho istorychnoho muzeiu 6, no. 2 (1997): 57–70. Petrov, Nikita. Istoriia imperii “Gulag.” Psevdologiia. Accessed 24 June 2020. http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/. Pieralli, Claudia. “The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners (1921–1939): An Historical-­Typological Framework.” In Contributi italiani al 15. Congresso Internazionale degli Slavisti: Minsk, 20–27 settembre 2013, edited by Marcello Garzaniti, Alberto Alberti, Monica Perotto, and Bianca Sulpasso, 387–411. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2013. Pocheptsov, Vladislav. “‘Kolymskoe zemliachestvo’: Problema formirovaniia identichnosti politicheskikh zakliuchennykh (na materiale memuarov Zoi Dmitrievny Marchenko).” Laboratorium 7, no. 1 (2015): 136–46.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

610

Polian, Pavel. “Inostrantsy v GULAGe: Sovetskie repressii protiv inostrannopoddanykh.” In Rossiia i ee regiony: Territoriia—rasselenie—migratsii, edited by Pavel Polian and Ol´ga Glezer, 617–30. Moscow: OGI, 2005. Pushkareva, Nataliia. “Istoriia povsednevnosti i mikroistoriia.” In Teoriia i metodologiia istorii: Uchebnik dlia vuzov, edited by V. V. Alekseev, N. N. Kradin, A. V. Korotaev, and L. E. Grinin, 312–34. Volgograd: Uchitel´, 2014. —. “Istoriia povsednevnosti: Predmet i metody.” In Sotsial´naia istoriia: Ezhegodnik, 2007, edited by Nataliia Pushkareva, 9–54. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007. —, ed. Rossiiskaia povsednevnost´ v zerkale gendernykh otnoshenii. Moscow: NLO, 2013. —. “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ v epokhu sotsial´nykh kataklizmov: Mezhdu traditsiiami i novatsiiami.” In Povsednevnyi mir sovetskoho cheloveka 1920–1940-kh gg., edited by Evgenii Krinko, Irina Tazhidinova, and Tatiana Khlynina, 212–22. Rostov-­on-­Don: Izdatel´stvo UNT RAN, 2009. Pyliavets´, Iurii, and Rostyslav Pyliavets´. “Katorha v SRSR (1943–1954 rr.): Tabory, kontynhent, umovy utrymannia ta pratsi politv’iazniv.” Ukraїnskyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 2 (2011): 91–105. Rebrova, Irina. “Zhenskaia povsednevnost´ v ekstremal´noi situatsii: Po materialam ustnykh i pismennykh vospominanii zhenshchin o Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine.” In Pushkareva, Rossiiskaia povsednevnost´, 605–30. Roginskii, Arsenii, and Aleksandr Daniel´. “Arestu podlezhat zheny. . .” In Grinev and Danil´, Uznitsy “ALZhIRa”, 6–30. Roginskii, Arsenii, and Valentina Tikhanova, eds. Tvorchestvo i byt GULAGa: Katalog muzeinogo sobraniia Obshchestva “Memorial.” Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998. Rozhdestvenskaia, Elena. “Gendernye osobennosti vospominanii.” In Zhenshchiny i muzhchiny v kontekste istoricheskikh peremen, vol. 1, edited by Nataliia Pushkareva, 48–51. Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2012. Rubliov, Oleksandr. “Halyts´kymy marshrutamy HULAHu: Zakhidnoukraїns´ka intelihentsiia v taborakh SRSR. 1930-tі rr.” Istoriia Ukraїny, no. 37 (2002): 11–12.

Bibliography

611

Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–97. —. The Fantasy of Feminist History (Next Wave Provocations). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. —. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. —. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75. Shapovalov, Veronica [Veronika Shapovalova], trans. and ed. Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Shapovalova, Veronika [Veronica Shapovalov]. “Lager´ kak obraz zhizni: Zhenskie lager´nye memuary.” In Sotsial´naia istoriia: Ezhegodnik, 2003. Zhenskaia i gendernaia istoriia, edited by Nataliia Pushkareva, 464–87. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003. —. “Sestrenki, mamki, damki: Tema nasiliia v zhenskikh lager´nykh memuarakh.” In Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI– XXI vv.), edited by Marianna Murav´eva and Nataliia Pushkareva, 142–63. Saint Petersburg: EU SPb, 2012. Sherbakova, Irina. “The Gulag in Memory.” In Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 103–15. —. “Karta pamiati o GULAGe—problemy i lakuny.” Laboratorium 7, no. 1 (2015): 114–21. —. “Pamiat´ GULAGa: Opyt issledovaniia memuaristiki i ustnykh svidetel´stv byvshykh uznikov.” In Ustnaia istoriia: Teoriia i praktika, edited by Tatiana Shcheglova, 132–53. Barnaul, Russia: BGPU, 2007. Shifrin, Avraham. The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union. Uhldingen, Switzerland: Stephanus Edition, 1980. Smirnov, Mikhail, ed. Sistema ispravitel´no-­trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923– 1960: Spravochnik Moscow: Zven´ia, 1998. Smith, Hilda. “Feminism and the Methodology of Women’s History.” In Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, edited by Berenice A. Carroll, 368–84. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Stark, Meinhard. Frauen im Gulag: Alltag und Überleben, 1936–1956. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

612

Strokata, Nina. Ukrainian Women in the Soviet Union: Documented Persecution [1975–1980]. Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1980. Strokata, Nina, and Natalia Pazuniak. Oksana Meshko. Philadelphia, PA: Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, 1985. Sveshnikov, Boris. Lagernye risunki: Al´bom. Moscow: Zven´ia, 2000. Thomas, Lynn M. “Historicising Agency.” Gender and History 28, no. 2 (2016): 324–39. Tiurma na Lonts´koho. “Kolir molytvy: Vyshyti ikony u radians´kykh tiurmakh i taborakh.” Accessed 24 June 2020. http://www.lonckoho.lviv.ua/podiji/ kolir-­molytvy-­vyshyti-­ikony-­u-radyanskyh-­tyurmah-­i-taborah.html. —. “U ‘Tiurmi na Lonts´koho’ demonstruvatymut´ rukodillia uv’iaznenykh zhinok-­politv’iazniv.” Accessed 24 June 2020. http://www.lonckoho.lviv. ua/podiji/anonsy/u-­tyurmi-­na-­lontskoho-­demonstruvatymut-­rukodillya-­ uvyaznenyh-­zhinok-­politvyazniv.html. Toker, Leona. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Ulturgasheva, Olga, ed. “Gulag Legacy: Spaces of Continuity in Contemporary Everyday Practices.” Special issue, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 7, no. 1 (2015). http://www.soclabo.org/index.php/ laboratorium/issue/view/18. Vambol´dt, Nina, and Mariia Shubina. “Povsednevnost´ v istorii.” In Gumanitarnye issledovaniia: Ezhegodnik, vol. 11, 92–99. Omsk: Izdatel´stvo OmGPU, 2006. Vasicek, Caroline. “Voices from the Darkness: Women in the Nazi Camps and Soviet Gulag.” BA thesis, Boston College, Boston, 2003. Venken, Machteld. “Iak spiv mozhe nadaty sensu voiennomu dosvidu. Ostarbaiterky v Bel´hiї povoiennoho periodu.” Ukraїna Moderna, 9 April 2015. http://uamoderna.com/md/venken-­ostarbeiters-­singing. Ventsel, Aimar, Zhangutin Baurzhan, and Khamidullina Dinara. “Social Meaning of Culture in a Stalinist Prison Camp.” Folklore 25 (2014): 7–24. Vickers, Jill. “Gendering the Hyphen: Gender Scripts and Women’s Agency in the Making and Re-­Making of Nation-­States.” Paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, University of Manitoba, 3–5 June 2004. https://www.cpsa-­acsp.ca/papers‑2004/ Vickers.pdf.

Bibliography

613

Vilensky, Simeon [Semyon Vilenskii, Semen Vilenskii], ed. Till My Tale Is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag. Translated by John Crowfoot. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Vilensky, Semyon [Simeon Vilenskii, Semen Vilenskii], and Cathy A. Frierson. Children of the Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Viola, Lynne. The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. Vishnevskii, Anatolii. “Obshchee chislo repressirovanykh.” Demoskop, no. 313– 14 (December 2007). http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema05. Vrons´ka, Tamara. “Stalins´ka henderna polityka u dobu ‘velykoho teroru’ (1937–1938 rr.).” Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB 32 (2009): 137–75. —. Upokorennia strakhom: Simeine zaruchnytstvo v karal´nii praktytsi radians´koї vlady (1917–1953 rr.). Kyiv: Tempora, 2013. Weitzman, Lenore J., and Dalia Ofer. “Introduction: The Role of Gender in the Holocaust.” In Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 1–18. Yakovlev, Boris. Concentration Camps of the USSR. Munich: Institute for Soviet History and Culture Studies, 1955. Yasen, Bohdan, ed. Women’s Voices from Soviet Labor Camps. Translated by Lesia Jones. Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp, 1975. Zavadskii, Andrei. “Pis´ma iz lageria kak sposob sokhranit´ sebia: Sluchai khudozhnika Grigoriia Filippovskogo.” Laboratorium 7, no. 1 (2015): 147–57. Zemskov, Viktor. “GULAG (istoriko-­sotsiologicheskii aspekt).” Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniia, no. 6 (1991): 10–27; no. 7 (1991): 3–16. Zugger, Christopher L. The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2001.

ONLINE RESOURCES Elektronnyi arkhiv ukraїns´koho vyzvol´noho rukhu (Digital archive of the Ukrainian liberation movement). http://avr.org.ua/. Evropeiskaia Pamiat´ o Gulage (European Memories of the Gulag Project). http://museum.gulagmemories.eu/ru/thematique. Gulag Museum at Perm. GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom (online exhibit). GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives. http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/.

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

614

Memorial´nyi muzei totalitarnykh rezhymiv “Terytoriia teroru” u L´vovi (Territory of Terror Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes in Lviv). http://www.territoryterror.org.ua/. Memorial: The International Historical, Educational, Charitable, and Human Rights Society. https://www.memo.ru/en-­us/. —. Sistema ispravitel´no-­trudovykh lagerei v SSSR. Interactive map of Soviet correctional camps. http://old.memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/maps/ ussri.htm. Muzei vyzvol´noї borot´by Ukraїny u L´vovi (Museum of Ukraine’s Liberation Struggle in Lviv). http://www.lhm.lviv.ua/location/liberation.html. Open Society Archives. Gulag Exhibition. https://catalog.osaarchivum.org/ catalog/nOodAgV2. Proiekt “Lokal´na istoriia” (Local History Project). https://localhistory.org.ua/ ochevydtsi/. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Days and Lives (online visual exhibit). GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives Project. http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/days-­and-­lives/. Sakharov Center. Neopublikovannye materialy. http://www.sakharov-­center. ru/museum/library/unpublished.html. —. Vospominaniia o GULAGe: Avtory i teksty vospominanii o GULAGe (The Memoirs of the Gulag and Their Authors Database). https://www. sakharov-­center.ru/asfcd/auth/. Terebovlians´kyi istoryko-­kraieznavchyi muzei (Terebovlia Local History Museum). http://trebovlyamuseum.at.ua/. Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. http://www.ucrdc. org/. Ukraїns´ka asotsiatsiia doslidnykiv zhinochoї istoriї (Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History). http://www.womenhistory.org.ua/. Virtual´nyi muzei GULAGa (Virtual Museum of the GULAG). http://www.gulagmuseum.org/. Vseukraїns´ke tovatystvo politychnykh v’iazniv i represovanykh (All-­ Ukrainian Association for Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression). http://repressed.org.ua/. Yarovskaya, Marianna, dir. Women of the Gulag. Documentary film. 2018. https://womenofthegulag.com/.

Bibliography

615

Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­NKVD-­KGB (From the Archives of the Cheka-­GPU-­ NKVD-­KGB). Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. http://resource.history.org.ua/.

INDEX

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. A my lyshylysia liud´my (Mateshuk-­ Hrytsyna, Iryna [Orysia]), 401 abortions, 416, 468

Anderson, Benedict, 179–80 Andrusiak, Ievheniia, 52, 67–68, 124, 137, 160, 416, 455–56, 462

Adamova-­Sliozberg, Olga, 393

Andrusiak, Vasyl´, 67, 455

Adler, Nanci, 59, 369

Andrusiv, Halyna, 245

agency

Andrusyshyn, Kateryna,

as central concept, 91–92, 95, 509

128, 369, 443–44

as historical category, 93–94

apathy, 355, 357

during Holocaust, 94–95

Applebaum, Anne, 11, 46, 55,

role of in women’s history studies, 94

144, 175, 320, 427, 431, 432 arrests

temporal dimensions of, 92–93

memoirs on, 31–32

various forms of, 89–90

theme of, 77

aktirovka, 158, 519

See also interrogations

alimentary dystrophy, 152–53

art and artwork, 287f, 301–8, 315f,

All-­Ukrainian Association for

318f, 321, 486–87f, 494–95f.

Political Prisoners and Victims

See also drawings; embroi-

of Repression, 42, 44, 262

dery; expression, through

amateur performances and art, 270–80 amenorrhea, 408

art; individual prisoners Article 54, Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (1934), 5

INDEX

Article 58, Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR, 5 axiology, creativity as, 321

617

on plays, 270, 276 on singing, 259 on temperature, 132 Bereza, Mariia, 69f

bags, 114–15f, 166f Baidak, Mariana, 125f, 166f, 296f, 382f, 390f, 454f, 471f, 489f, 492f balanda, 143, 146, 519 Baltic women, 214, 221, 222–23, 226

Beria, Lavrentii, 104, 147 Berlant, Lauren, 93 Bezdyk-­Poliashets´ka, Mariia, 102f Beztalanna (Karpenko-­ Karyi, Ivan), 276

Bandera, Stepan, 67

Bilevych, Vira, 25, 70–71

Banderite, definition of, 519

Bilins´ka, Iryna, 460f

Barabash-­Bilyns´ka, Liuba,

birth control, forced, 416

60–61f, 233f, 253f, 264f Bardach, Janusz, 432 Barnes, Steven A., 144–45, 185 barracks, 103–5, 106, 112, 395–402.

blankets, 117 blatnoi (common criminal; pl. blatnye), 27, 339–45, 429, 519 Blavats´ka, Oleksandra

See also living conditions;

on acts of kindness, 335

living spaces, arranging

on arrest, 32

Barvins´ka, Nataliia, 393

on clothing and appear-

Basarab, Liubov, 301

ance, 372, 388, 392

bathhouses, 119–20, 400, 419–20

on correspondence, 198

bathrooms/toilets, communi-

on criminals, 340, 341, 343, 345

cation using, 189. See also

cultural activities and, 254–55

parasha (pl. parashi)

daughter of, 456–57, 488

Baumel, Judith T., 95, 355, 363, 365

discovery of memoir of, 25

Bekar, Teklia, 459, 461, 462

on disease, 163

Bell, Wilson T., 12

on ethnic groups in camps, 217

Belova, Anna, 91

on lesbianism, 427–28

Benoni, Polina

on motivation for writing, 70–71

on deterioration of femininity, 409

on plays, 276–77 on shaving of prisoners, 421

on ethnic groups in camps, 221

blind spots, 86

on living conditions, 109

bodies

on motivation for writing, 64

destruction and pres-

on physical condition, 153, 156

ervation of, 407–16

618

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

involuntary prostitution, 422–31

ki), 27, 339–45, 429, 519.

rape, 431–35

See also petty criminal

sexual abuse, 416–22 Bodnar, Iryna, 462

Bzova-­Fedoriv-­Stakhiv, Teofiliia, 218–19

Bohachevsky-­Chomiak, Martha, 97 boils, 158

camp albums, 60–61f, 82–83f, 310f

Bondaruk, Larysa (Lesia

camp mail, 185, 187–92, 211

Bondaruk), 41

camp shops, 136–38

Borys, Parasia, 304

camp strikes, 223

Brodiuk-­Dushenko, Ol´ha, 476

camp uprisings

Bryhidky Remand Prison, 111f, 257, 260, 309, 316, 411 Bryndzhei-­Lekhyts´ka, Mariia, 138, 363

at Kengir, 119, 129, 223, 435, 441 as manifestation of solidarity, 505 at Norilsk, 49–50, 222, 223, 256

Brys, Halyna and Oleksa, 446

as separate from everyday life, 91

Buca, Edward, 431

Ukrainian versus Russian

Buchach Memorial Museum of Political Prisoners collection

women’s involvement in, 81 caroling, 283. See also sing-

camp albums from, 82–83f, 310f

ing; koliada (pl. koliady)

embroidery from, 69f, 72f, 151f,

cauldron (kotel), 139–40, 519

203f, 227f, 238–39f, 244f, 282f

cavity searches, 418. See

inscription from, 108f,

also vaginal searches

200f, 349f, 353f, 370f

cellular prison, 3, 281, 475, 520

photographs from, 178f, 361f,

censorship

364f, 367f, 375f, 387f, 406f, 445f Budnik-­Kekish, Ievdokiia, 328–29, 346 Budzanovych, Iuliia, 444, 446

in camps, 8–9 of self, 48, 407, 433 Chaban-­Haval´, Stefaniia, 179, 240–41, 281, 283

bunk beds, 103, 106

chance, theme of, 79

Burbela-­Oleksiv, Anna, 159f, 295f

Chekh, Zenia, 210

burzhuika, 265, 519

Cheplia, Irynka, 243

bushlat (pl. bushlaty), 377, 379–80,

chicken blindness. See nyctalopia

381, 383, 389, 393, 519 bytovik, bytovichka (petty criminal; pl. bytoviki, bytovich-

children birth of, 459, 461–62 in camps, 469–77

INDEX

619

clothing for, 460f

clubs, 273–74

death of, 477–81

collars, 297, 388, 391, 393

drawings for, 486–87f, 494–95f

communication

embroidery for, 294,

in camps, 187–92, 439–41.

297, 478f, 483f, 499f

See also bathrooms/toilets,

facilities for, 458–59

communication using

medical services for, 477–81

with home, 192–212. See

number of in Gulag system, 458

also correspondence

reunions with, 496–97

“community of memory,” 262

separation from, 482–98

“community of suffering,” 360

See also motherhood

compassion, 335–39

Chortkiv Remand Prison, 109, 125f, 296f, 433, 492f Christmas, 66f, 194f, 206f, 237, 243, 245, 259, 271–72, 280–81, 283, 284–86, 290, 297, 316, 416, 506 chronic illnesses, 148–49, 351–52 ChSIR (chleny semei izmennikov rodiny), 40

caring and, 345–55 confession, 236–37 confrontation, motif of, 81 consolidation, 175. See also solidarity art and, 321 Cormos, Gratian, 416 correctional labor camps (ITLs), 3

chuni, 379, 380, 519

correctional labor colonies (ITKs), 3

Chwat, Aleksander, 176–77, 217

correspondence

Chyz, Martha, 9, 145, 433

from home, 192–204

Cieślikowska, Anna, 420

secret, 187–92, 439–41.

Circular no. 258, 126

See also bathrooms/toilets,

clothing

communication using

for children, 460f for cold weather, 131

community and, 204 creativity and free time

confiscation of, 372, 376

artwork, 301–8

dampness of, 107

Christian feast days, 280–91

numbers on, 332–34, 381

drawing, 301–8

repairing, sewing, and

embroidery, 291–301. See also

decorating, 385–95

main entry embroidery

sharing of, 355; by

folk songs, 255–63

Auntie Pasha, 392

functions of, 321–22

uniforms, 376–85, 378f

nature, 314–22

620

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

overview of, 251–55

Dilai-­Vodoviz, Ivanna, 177

poetry, 263–70

disabled prisoners, camps for, 157

prison songs, 255–63

dishes, dearth of, 113, 116

reading, 308–13

Divine Liturgy, 237–46, 283, 289

retellings of liter-

dog, prisoners’ caring for, 317

ary works, 308–13

Dovhoshyia, Teklia, 129, 140–41

self-­education, 308–13

Dovzhuk, A., 445f

singing, 255–63

drawings

theatrical performances, 270–80 Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR, 5 Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (1934), 5

for children, 486–87f, 494–95f as creative outlet, 301–8 See also creativity and free time; greeting cards/postcards Drohobych Remand Prison, 347

crosses, 236

Drozd, Mykola, 446

cultural inventory, 112

Drozd, Vira, 258, 283, 446

culture crews, 255, 273

Duchymins´ka, Ol´ha, 264f, 378f Dydyk, Halia, 400

Dai sertsiu voliu, zavede v nevoliu (Kropyvnyts´kyi, Marko), 276 daily life focus on, 90 patterns in stories of, 76–77

dysentery, 150, 414 dystrophy, 152, 156, 160 Dzendrovs´ka-­Berkut, Stefaniia, 389, 447 Dziuban-­Holovata, Sofiia, 122

routines in, 409–11, 506 dampness, perpetual, 107 Dauge, Alida, 223 dehumanization of prisoners, 327–35, 504 Deineha, Tetiana, 182

Easter, 179, 197f, 219, 237, 245, 258–59, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286, 288–89, 343, 506 eau de cologne, 393–94 embroidery

dekulakization, 520

on bags, 114–15f, 166f

depersonalization, 332–34

on brush case, 118f

despair and depression,

on camp albums and note-

355–59, 506–7

books, 60–61f, 181f

Diakovs´ka, Ol´ha, 82–83f, 310f, 367f

for children, 478f, 483f

Didukh, Nadiia, 257, 314

on clothing, 460f

dignity, theme of, 77

for greeting card, 87f

INDEX

621

on mementos, 499f

feminism, pragmatic, 97

Mother of God, 69f, 102f, 111f,

fish bones, needles from, 293, 385

125f, 134f, 151f, 159f, 203f,

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 90

230f, 233f, 238f, 471f, 492f

fleas, 121–22

on napkins, 250f, 253f,

flowers and plants, 399–400

296f, 299f, 300f

folk songs, 255–63, 274–75

religious, 72f, 174f, 227f, 239f,

folklorized narratives, 76

242f, 244f, 282f, 292f, 295f, 454f

food

by Senyk, Iryna, 252, 254

exchanging for clothing, 391

social functions of, 291–301

for feast days, 281, 283

end-­of-­term fatigue, theme of, 80

for nursing mothers, 461, 475–76

epidemic typhus, 150

rations of, 139–47, 157. See

erysipelas, 158

also cauldron (kotel)

escape, theme of, 78

on religious holidays, 286, 288

ethic of care, 363, 508

sharing of, 354, 363

ethical issues, 21–30

food poisoning, 150, 152

ethnic communities, 175–80, 507

footwear, 131–32, 377, 379

ethnicity, as determination

Fordon Women’s Prison,

of “enemy” status, 5–6 exercise, 410–12

313, 347, 476 Frankl, Viktor E., 18, 320, 355

exhaustion, 146, 156

Franko, Ivan, 276, 309

exile after release, 366

Franko, Vira-­Mariia, 121, 167

Exile and Identity (Jolluck,

free time. See creativi-

Katherine R.), 14 expression, through art, 321 extraordinary ordinariness, 90

ty and free time friendship breaking up of, 184–85 with men, 439–43

families after release, 443–50

theme of, 84 From Materials Prepared

ersatz, 435–39

for the Report of Gulag

See also children; mar-

Supervisor G. P. Dobrynin at a

riages; motherhood

Meeting with the USSR Minister

family-­like relations,

of Internal Affairs to Verify

362–66, 401, 505

the Conditions under Which

Feast of Jordan, 281

622

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

Prisoners Are Being Held in Special Regimen Camps, 201 frostbite, 131

Gulag: A History (­Applebaum, Anne), 11 Gulag Instruction no. 9/2–2/34285c on Stopping the Transmission

Gagen-­Torn, Nina, 221, 290–91 gang rape, 431, 432, 433, 434 gender

of Illegal Correspondence by Prisoners, 201–2 Gulag system

differences in daily life of, 90–91

contemporary studies

differences in mutu-

and sources on, 8–11

al support and, 355

degradation in, 4

differences in narra-

demographics of, 3

tives and, 80–81

description of, 2–3

effects of starvation

establishment of, 2

and, 412–13, 414–16

gender composition

endurance of prison

of prisoners in, 5

terms and, 412–16

gender factor in, 12–17

erasure of, 408, 507

gender isolation in, 6–7

during Holocaust, 95

reorganization of, 7–8

normative feminini-

share of “politicals” in, 5

ty and, 96, 388–95

violence in, 4

study of Gulag system and, 12–17 gender separation measures, 6–7

women in, 4 Gullotta, Andrea, 269

general labor, 127, 165 Ginzburg, Eugenia, 19–20, 473–74 Glinka, Elena, 432

Hai, Marta (Halyna Holoiad [Savyts´ka]), 237, 347

gnats, 131

hair, 374, 376, 392

Gogol, Nikolai (Mykola Hohol´), 276

Halii, Mariia, 260

goner, 129, 158, 414, 520

Halych, Olia, 241

gonorrhea, 163

Hamivka, Paraskeviia, 347

Grankina, Nadezhda, 418

happiness, changing nature of, 314

greeting cards/postcards, 56f,

Hasiuk, Halyna and Iaroslav, 446

66f, 87f, 154–55f, 186f, 191f,

health, 147–63

206f, 268f, 301, 302f, 303f,

heart diseases, 168

304, 305f, 307f, 356f

heating, 105, 106–7, 116 Heleta, Nadiia (Anastasiia), 111f

INDEX

hepatitis, 152 Herling-­Grudziński, Gustaw, 20, 431 Himka, John-­Paul, 25 Hladka-­Kanii, Iryna, 150, 152, 167, 192 Hodiak, Ol´ha, 149, 211, 351 Hohol´, Mykola (Nikolai Gogol), 276

623

on torture, 329 housing, 103–17. See also barracks; living conditions; living spaces, arranging Hrendysh, Mariia, 150, 433 Hrosberh-­Nakonechna, Ol´ha, 313, 363, 447

Holocaust, 94–95, 257

Hrytsiv-­Kozak, Melaniia, 214

Holoiad (Savyts´ka), Halyna.

Hrytsynina-­Kysil´, Mariia, 358

See Hai, Marta Holyns´ka (Oleshchuk), Stefaniia, 240, 284, 337 homeland, links with correspondence from, 192–204 packages from, 204–12

Hulak-­Artemovs´kyi, Semen, 279f humaneness, 335–39 hunger, 132, 145–46, 158 Husiak, Dariia, 188, 336, 400, 416, 439 hygiene, 117–24, 397–98, 417–18

homosexual relations, 71,

Hymon (Khom’iak), Ievheniia, 276

88, 427–28, 429–30.

hypothermia, 107, 116, 131, 148–49

Honchar, Oles´, 312

hypovitaminosis, 152

Honchar-­Bakai, Uliana, 152, 240, 413–14 Horchyns´ka (Demchuk), Vanda, 245–46, 334, 410, 432

Iakovyshyn, Mariia, 179, 289–90, 447 icons, 236 Iliuk, Vasylyna, 47f, 315f

Hoshiv Madonna, 520

incentives, work, 135–38

Hoshko-­Kit, Anna

infant mortality, 477–81

on caring for child in

infectious diseases, 148, 150

prison, 461, 474–75

informational isolation, 180–87, 506

on children in camps,

injuries, on-­the-­job, 160–63

479–80, 484, 485

Inquiry from the Gulag

on clothing and ap-

Organizational Department

pearance, 384, 393

into Shortfalls in the work

correspondence and, 201

of Gulag Administrations

on disease, 150, 157

and Departments, 142

on ethnic groups in camps, 212

Institute of History of Ukraine, 40

on living conditions, 109

Inta River dam, 135

on patriotism, 68

624

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

interethnic relations, 212–26. See

on ingenuity, 116

also national solidarity, ethnic

on lice and fleas, 122

communities and; solidarity,

on living space, 396

ethnic communities and

on motherhood, 493

interrogations, 327–30, 372–73, 433

religious practices and, 241

Intyns´ki snihoviï (Zakydal´s´ka,

on self-­defensive behavior, 410

Anastasiia), 24–25

on self-­education, 313

involuntary prostitution, 422–31

uniqueness of testi-

isolation

mony of, 74–75

informational, 180–87 overcoming, 506

voluminous nature of, 52 kasha, 520

Iurchyk-­Ivasenko, Hanna, 153

Katamai, Nusia, 269

Iurchyts´ka, Olena, 129

katorga, 3, 6, 273, 520

Ivanova, Galina, 175

Kavets´ka, Hanna, 227f

Ivanyts´ka (Bardyn), Hanna,

Kengir camp uprising, 119,

110, 214–15, 220, 231

129, 223, 435, 441 keptar, 520

Jacobs, Janet L., 26–27 Jolluck, Katherine R., 12, 14, 175, 216–17

Kersnovskaya, Eufrosinia (Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia) artwork of, 308 on child separation, 484–85

Kamins´ka-­Iurchuk, Oksana, 162, 335

childbirth in prison and, 461 on living conditions, 110

Karay, Felicja, 415

on searches, 418–19

Karpenko-­Karyi, Ivan, 276

on sexual abuse, 421, 423, 426

Karwańska-­Bajlak, Anna

on temperature, 131

on clothing and appearance, 386

visualized memories of, 20

on defensive behavior, 335

Khobzei, Olenka and Kuz´ma, 446

on ethnic groups in

Khomiak, Anna, 38f, 292f, 478f

camps, 217–18

Khomii-­Kamins´ka,

on family-­like relations, 363 on hair, 374

Ievheniia, 219–20, 373 Khrashchevs´ka, Oksana

on harmony, 360

on clothing and ap-

on holidays, 285

pearance, 373, 381

on humaneness/compassion, 352

on criminals, 344, 345

INDEX

625

on disease, 152–53

on medical treatment, 164, 169

on hair, 376

on motivation for writing, 68, 70

on lack of water, 417–18

on nature, 314, 319

on living conditions, 107

on perfume, 394

on motivation for writing, 70

on physical condition, 410–11

nationalist underground and, 17

on prison shops, 137

on packages from home, 207

on release of foreigners, 224–25

on relations with men, 443

on sanobrabotka, 419

in remand prison, 334–35

on sexual abuse, 417, 426–27

on sexual abuse, 417, 424

on singing, 262

on storytelling, 309

on storytelling, 308–9

on urki, 28

as well-­known memoirist, 24

kindness, acts of, 335–39 kirza, 520

on work, 129, 160–61 koliada (pl. koliady), 258, 259,

knitting needles, 116

271–72, 280–81, 283, 286,

Kobryn-­Senyk, Volodymyra, 420

288, 290, 369, 520. See

Kocherhina, Svitlana, 293–94 Kokhans´ka, Halyna

also singing; caroling Kolomyia Prison, 282f

on acts of kindness, 336

Kolyma fellowship, 371, 450

on clothing and appearance, 391

Kolyma tram, 432, 520

on communication

komandirovka (pl. ko-

with home, 196

mandirovki), 520

on correspondence, 193, 195

komisovka, 521

on daily rations, 140

Korchak, Dariia, 52, 64–65, 226,

on disease, 158

262, 265–66, 271–272, 351

on ethnic groups in

kordy, 521

camps, 212, 213, 219

Koroliuk, Vira, 350

on exhaustion, 146

Korpan, Vira, 377

on family-­like relations, 362

Koshak-­Svystel´nyts´ka,

on friendships, 371, 441 on holidays, 286 later publication of memoirs of, 52 on life after release, 444 on living conditions, 110, 119–20

Dariia, 124, 311, 346 Kostenko, Nataliia, 112–13, 132–33, 298, 462–63, 470, 475, 477, 488, 491 Kostiuk (Protsak), Stefaniia, 342, 345, 400

626

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

Kot, Liusia, 142 Kotelko (Kapko), Ievdokiia, 290, 343

Lavriv-­Skrentovych, Mariia, 161–62, 336

Kotliarevs´kyi, Ivan, 276

Lazda, Mara, 222

Kotsur, Anna (Hanna Kotsur),

“left parcel room,” 207

66f, 194f, 197f, 206f, 229, 231,

Lemekha, Vira, 278

257–58, 302f, 307f, 318f, 347

Lentin, Ronit, 21, 95

Koval´chuk, Iryna and Iaroslav, 446 Koval´-Nadorozhniak, Stefaniia, 223, 256, 263, 339, 374

lesbianism. See homosexual relations letters, 8, 192–204, 194f, 197f. See

Kozlovs´ka, Anna, 241, 243

also correspondence; greeting

krashanky, 283, 521

cards/postcards; bathrooms/

Krem’ianets Remand Prison, 328–29

toilets, communication using

Kropyvnyts´kyi, Marko, 276

Levyts´ka, Olia, 267

Kruglov, Sergei, 123

Liads´ka, Ol´ha, 189–90, 441–42

Krutiak (Rudnyk), Kateryna, 357

libraries, access to, 312

Kryshtal´s´ka (Iemchyk),

lice, 121–22, 152, 420

Tamara, 434, 465 Kryvuts´kyi, Ivan, 50 Kryzhanivs´ka-­Hasiuk, Iaroslava, 251, 275, 421–22

Lincewicz, Captain (camp supervisor), 337 Linden, Ruth R., 401 Lipper, Elinor, 113, 414

Kuibida, Stepan, 447

literary evenings, 308–9

Kuntsman, Adi, 428

Liudkevych, Slava, 313

Kurochka, Mariia, 497

living conditions

kutia, 281, 283, 286, 288, 521

health, 147–63

Kuziak, Oksana, 209

housing, 103–17

Kuzin, Vladimir, 431

hygiene, 117–24

Kvas, Stefaniia, 298, 385, 442

medical services, 163–70

KVCh (cultural and education-

nutritional norms, 139–47

al departments), 127, 254–55,

production quotas, 126–30

273, 274–78, 306, 322, 392

rations, 139–47

Kyslytsia-­Skavins´ka, Hanna, 106, 126, 297, 354, 442

sanitary conditions, 117–24 sickness, rates of, 147–63 stimulating prison-

lagpunkt (pl. lagpunkty), 521

ers to work, 135–38 working conditions, 130–35

INDEX

living spaces, arranging, 395–402, 504, 506, 507. See also barracks

627

Marmash, Iryna-­Sofiia, 252, 254 marriages

logging, 132–33, 161

after release, 443–44, 446–50

Lontskyi Prison National

camp, 437–39

Memorial Museum, 298 Lontskyi Remand Prison, 272, 309, 337, 411, 420, 460f

See also families Martyniuk, Anna, 169, 336, 475–76, 484, 491

Luk’ianivska Prison (Kyiv), 475

Marunchak, Anna, 147,

Lutsk Remand Prison, 195, 308

357, 395, 490–91

Lviv Historical Museum, 293–94, 301

Mashchak (Pshepiurs´ka), Ivanna

Lviv Prison, 69f

on artwork, 306

Lviv Transit Prison, 483f

biographical sketches from, 86 on blankets, 117

MacKinnon, Elaine, 498

on camp correspondence, 440

Maiboroda, Platon, 278

on camp mail, 190

Main Administration of Labor

on clothing and appear-

Camps and Colonies (GULAG), 2 Main Prison Administration of the NKVD, 31

ance, 384–85, 392, 393 on correspondence, 193, 195 on criminals, 342, 344

makhorka, 521

on hair, 376

Makohon-­Duzha, Mariia, 105,

on holidays, 284

132–33, 146–47, 156, 377

on humaneness/com-

Maksimova, Liubov´, 463, 498

passion, 346, 348

Maksymovych, Kateryna,

on motherhood, 496

309, 424–25, 497

on sexual harassment, 423

Maksymyshyn, Mariia (Mariika

mass rape, 432

Maksymyshyn), 348, 376

mastyrky, 521

malaria, 148, 149

matchsticks, needles from, 293

Malsagoff, Sozerko, 431

Mateshuk-­Hrytsyna, Iryna (Orysia)

Mandryk-­Kuibida, Kateryna, 232, 260, 267, 357, 447

on acts of kindness, 338 on artwork, 304

Mani, Lata, 91

on camp correspondence, 439–40

Man’s Search for Meaning

on clothing and appearance, 388

(Frankl, Viktor E.), 18 Marchenko, Zoia, 272

on criminals, 342 on disease, 157

628

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

on ethnic groups in camps, 213 on family-­like relations, 363

on use of quotations from, 25–26 men

on hair, 374

after release, 443–50

on humaneness/compassion,

emotional needs of, 436

347–48, 350–51, 352, 354

ersatz families and, 435–39

on humanity, 401

friendship and ro-

husband of, 442–43

mance with, 439–43

on mutual support, 84

loss of identity for, 415

poetry of, 267, 269

physical condition of, 412–14

religious practices and, 231 in remand prison, 328

Meni bulo 19 (Pozniak [Skrypiuk], Hanna), 63

on singing, 257

menstruation, 120, 408, 417

singing and, 260

Meshko, Oksana

song by, 260

on abortions, 468

Matkovs´ka, Mariia, 238–39f, 244f

avoidance of mention-

Matseliukh-­Horyn´, Ol´ha,

ing son of, 464

304, 338, 383, 429

on clothing and ap-

Mazepa-­Kuchma, Hanna, 223

pearance, 372, 386

medical services, 163–70, 477–81

on communication

medications, lack of, 167–68, 169–70

with home, 195

Melish (Mel´nyk), Kateryna, 371

on creative endeavors, 251–52

Mel´nychuk, Pavlina, 496

on dehumanization

Mel´nyts´ka, Kateryna, 134f

of prisoners, 332

memoirists

on depersonalization, 381

overview of, 57–76

on depression, 358

See also individual memoirists

on despair, 355

memoirs

on deterioration of fem-

differences among, 53–54

ininity, 408–9

finding, 24–25

as educated memoirist, 58

as hybrid forms, 48

on emotional needs of men, 436

motivations for writing, 57–59,

on humaneness/compas-

62–65, 67–68, 70–71, 73–76

sion, 336, 352, 354

reliability of, 22, 23–24

on informational isola-

as separate genre, 48

tion, 182, 184, 187

as sources, 45–57

INDEX

later publication of memoirs of, 52 on living conditions, 121, 131 on medical treatment, 164, 168 on motivation for writing, 74

629

as protectress, 231–32 motherhood, 88–89, 455–68, 482–98. See also children motivations for writing memoirs, 57–59, 62–65, 67–68, 70–71, 73–76

nationalist underground and, 84

Mudra, Nadiia, 234f

on poetry, 267

music, 254–55. See also singing

on Polish prisoners, 216

mutual-­support networks,

on prayer, 240 on prison shops, 138

175–80, 355–62, 508 Muzyka, Iaroslava, 306

on prostitution, 425 on religious holidays, 285

N., Doma, 370f, 406f

on searches, 385

N., Hanna, 108f, 364f

uniqueness of testi-

N., Iryna, 191f, 268f

mony of, 71, 73–74

N., Mariia, 178f, 200f, 349f, 375f

as well-­known memoirist, 24

N., Valentyna, 288

on work, 130–31

N., Iuliia, 387f

on work accidents, 162

Nakonechnyi, Petro, 447

Mets, Ivan, 254, 456–57 Ministry of State Security (MGB), 31 Mis´kiv, Ivanka, 477

Nam duzhe treba zhyty (Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Mariia), 65

Mochul´s´ka, Orysia, 156, 177

napkins, 250f, 253f, 299f, 300f

Moda-­Pokaliuk, Ol´ha,

Nasedkin, Viktor, 104, 126

135, 284, 304, 354 mogar, 521 Moia doroha (Vahula, Mariia), 64

Nashe Zhyttia (Our Life), 20 Natalka Poltavka (Kotliarevs´kyi, Ivan), 276

Moisein, S., 445f

nation, concept of, 179–80

moments of reprieve, theme of, 78

national memory politics, 42

monotypic narratives, 76–77

national solidarity

moral communities, 366

camp mail and, 187–92

Morse code, 188

ethnic communities and, 175–80

Mother of God

isolation and, 180–87

embroidery portraying, 111f, 125f, 134f, 151f, 159f, 203f, 230f, 233f, 238f, 471f, 492f

See also solidarity nationalist organizations, 97

630

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

nationalist underground, 81, 84, 217, 455 nature, 314–22 Nazar Stodolia (Shevchenko, Taras), 276 needles, 293, 385 Nepip, Natalia, 151f newspapers camp, 274, 313 restrictions on, 4, 180, 182, 192, 196 night blindness. See nyctalopia Noch´ pered Rozhdestvom (Hohol´, Mykola [Nikolai Gogol]), 276 Norilsk camp uprisings, 49–50, 222, 223, 256 normative femininity, 96–98 northern lights, 319 notebooks, 181f nudity, forced public, 419–22 numbering of prisoners,

On Measures to Further Improve the Physical State of Prisoners Held in NKVD Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, 104 On Measures to Improve the Work of the Forced Labor Camps, 423 On Preserving and Improving the Physical Condition of Prisoners Being Held in NKVD Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, 147 On the Regimen for Holding Prisoners (1939), 6 On the Regimen for Keeping Prisoners in Forced Labor Camps and Colonies (1947), 6 One Hundred Heroines of the World, 254 on-­the-­job injuries (“industrial” injuries), 160–63 open space, access to, 107, 109, 110, 112

332–34, 381, 389, 504

oral history, 48, 50–51, 57

Nych-­Strakhaniuk, Mariia,

Organization of Ukrainian

221–22, 447 nyctalopia, 156

Nationalists (OUN), 67, 70, 252, 286, 360, 447, 455. See also nationalist organizations;

Obertyńska, Beata (­Marta Rudzka), 160, 236 objectives and emphases of study, 30–32

nationalist underground Orwellian Room 101, theme of, 79 Ostarbeiters, 5, 521 overcrowding, 103–4, 110, 123

Oi, ne khody, Hrytsiu, ta i na vechornytsi (­Staryts´kyi,

Palahiichuk, Dartsia, 257

Mykhailo), 276

Pal´chevs´ka, Liubov, 301

OLPs (otdel´nye lagernye punkty), 184–85

parasha (pl. parashi), 109, 184, 521 paratyphoid fever, 150

INDEX

631

parcels from home, 204–12, 288, 312

demographics of, 96–97

Pasichnyk, Milia, 362

families of, 40

paska, 283, 284, 521. See also Easter

lack of focus on person-

Pauchel, Sofa, 85

al histories of, 39–42, 44

pellagra, 148, 149, 152, 153

lack of studies on, 39

perestroika, 10

“politicals” (political prison-

perfumes, 393–94

ers), 2, 27, 141, 178f, 179–80,

personal effects, 23. See also

215, 222–23, 277, 330, 364f,

“left parcel room”

367f, 375f, 387f, 399

Petkevych, Tamara, 434, 467

renewed interest in expe-

Petrashchuk, Lina, 241, 243

rience of women, 49–51

Petrov, Nikita, 422–23, 458

during Stalin’s regime, 39

petty criminals, 27, 124, 141, 254, 339. See also bytovik, bytovichka (pl. bytoviki, bytovichki) photographs, 361f, 364f, 367f, 375f, 382f, 387f, 390f, 406f, 445f

See also individual prisoners Poliuha (Masiuk), Dariia on acts of kindness, 337 after release, 446 on camp mail, 189

physical sexual abuse, 416

on clothing and ap-

physical space allotments,

pearance, 389, 393

103–5, 147–48. See also bar-

on criminals, 343

racks; living conditions

on embroidery, 294

phytotherapy, 170, 354

on hair, 392

plants and flowers, 399–400

husband of, 442

Plechii, Hanna, 336

on living space, 397, 399

pneumonia, 148, 149, 167, 481

on packages from home, 207

Pobachene i perezhyte

on sharing food with men, 416

(Korchak, Dariia), 64–65

on shaving of prisoners, 421

Pocheptsov, Vladislav, 59, 192, 371

on singing, 258, 275

poetry, 252, 263–70, 264f, 268f

on torture, 18

Polish Home Army, 217–18, 219, 521

Poliuha, Liubomyr, 446

Polish prisoners, 215–21,

Poltareva, Viktoriia, 299f

222, 225–26, 352, 374 political indoctrination, 273–74 political prisoners criminals and, 141, 330, 339–45

Popovych, Nataliia, 278, 378f, 411, 497 portrait galleries, 86 portraits, 306

632

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

positive moments, focus on, 26–29

on national solidarity, 179

postcards/greeting cards, 56f,

on prayer, 232, 235

66f, 87f, 154–55f, 186f, 191f,

on release, 368–69

206f, 268f, 301, 302f, 303f,

on storytelling, 309

304, 305f, 307f, 356f

on torture, 327–28, 329

Potiuk, Hanna, 282f

pragmatic feminism, 97

Potykevych-­Zabolotna, Mariia

Praporonostsi (Honchar, Oles´), 312

childbirth in prison and, 462

prayer books, 235, 241

criminals and, 141

prayers

on ethnic groups in camps, 217

joint, 237–46

in infirmary, 167

private, 226–37

later publication of

Predshakhtnaia camp, 20

memoirs of, 52

pregnancy in camps, 7, 434,

on motherhood, 490 on motivation for writing, 65

441–42, 457–58, 465–67. See also children; motherhood

on packages from home, 208

pridurki, 381, 521

poetry of, 265, 266–67

prison songs, 255–63

singing and, 259–60

prisoners

Pozniak (Skrypiuk), Hanna

conflict among, 27–28

on acts of kindness, 335–36

counterculture of, 504

on attempted rape, 433–34

dehumanization of, 327–35, 504

on children in camps,

hierarchy among, 112–13,

477, 482, 484

133, 141, 380–81

on clothing and appearance, 388

integration of after re-

on communication with

lease, 369, 371

home, 193, 198, 211

numbering of, 332–34,

on disease, 168

381, 389, 504

on food, 140, 141, 145

“reeducation” of, 503–4

on freedom, 63

shaving of, 419–21

on holidays, 289 later publication of memoirs of, 52 on life after release, 448 on living conditions, 107, 112 on motherhood, 469

See also individual prisoners prisons camps compared to, 109, 110, 112 descriptions of, 109–10 privileged positions, 112, 120, 133, 141, 205, 339, 343, 347–48

INDEX

production quotas, 126– 30, 139–41, 352

633

religious practices Christian feast days, 280–91

prostitution, involuntary, 422–31

feast days and, 179

Protsak, Paraska, 447

joint prayers, 237–46

Protskiv-­Liven´, Hanna,

national solidarity and, 179

125f, 166f, 296f, 382f, 390f,

private prayer, 226–37

454f, 471f, 489f, 492f

values and, 507

Provisions on Forced Labor Camps (1930), 135

remand prisons communication in, 187–88

prozharka, 521

definition of, 522

Pshepiurs´ka. See Mashchak

descriptions of, 110

(Pshepiurs´ka), Ivanna

prayer in, 231

psychiatric hospital wards, 110

role of, in system, 31–32

psychological support,

See also individual prisons

mutual, 355–62

representation, through art, 321

psychotherapeutic effects of art, 321

research challenges, 21–30

Pushkareva, Nataliia, 90–91

resistance to camp regime, 81

Pyliavs´ka, Zonia, 433

retellings of literary works, 308–13

pyodrema, 160

Rivne Remand Prison, 288

Pyrih, Mariia, 342

rodents, 122

pysanky, 281, 288, 521

rosary beads, 234f, 235, 236 Rudenko, Raïsa, 163, 334, 399

quarry accidents, 161

Rudzka, Marta. See Obertyńska,

radios, 273

Rules for Internal Routines

Beata (Marta Rudzka) rape, 88, 431–35. See also sexual abuse/sexualized violence rations, 139–47, 157

for Prisoners in Gulag Camps and Colonies, 117, 119, 123, 193, 273, 385

rats, 122

rural communities, 96–98

Ravensbrück, 121

Russian women, 215, 217, 219, 397

Razgon, Lev, 431

Ruzhentseva, Tamara, 423–24

reading, 273, 308–13

Rzeszów Prison, 476

“reforging” prisoners, 144–45 release, camp sisterhood after, 366–71

Salamon, Vasylyna, 409, 485, 488 salo, 146–47, 522

634

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

sanitary conditions, 117–24

poetry of, 252, 265, 267

sanobrabotka, 419–20, 422, 522

on storytelling, 309

Savchuk, Kateryna, 215

sewing shops, 127–28

Schliess, Walli

sexual abuse/sexualized violence

on blankets, 116–17

involuntary prostitution, 422–31

on camp correspondence, 439

overview of, 416–22

on camp mail, 185, 187

rape, 431–35

on clothing and appearance, 393

scant mention of, 86, 88

commitment of to testify, 20

sexual harassment, 423, 426, 427

on correspondence, 195

sexuality, 86, 435–39, 505

on embroidery, 291

Shalamov, Varlam, 20

on ethnic groups in camps, 223

Shandarak-­Brovchenko, Halyna, 131,

on packages from home, 208

263, 265, 312, 335, 430, 433, 497

on performances, 278, 280

Shanhutova, Mariia, 1

on plays, 276

Shapovalov, Veronica

on religious holidays, 284–85

on cleanliness, 397

religious practices and, 237, 240

on family-­like relations, 365

on sense of community, 176

on gender distinctions, 80

Scott, Joan W., 91–92, 93

grouping of memoirists by, 57–58

scrub typhus, 150

on motherhood, 467

scurvy, 148, 152, 153, 156, 170, 414–15

on motivation for writing, 59

searches, 418–19

on rape, 432–33

“second department,” 276

references to amen-

self-­censorship, 48, 407, 433

orrhea and, 408

self-­education, 308–13

on self-­affirmation, 89

self-­financing, 137 Senkivs´ka-­Onuferko, Iaroslava, 154–55f Senyk, Iryna on clothing and ap-

shchedrivky, 281, 522. See also religious practices shchi, 522 Sherbakova, Irina, 46, 50, 57, 80–81, 86, 89, 401

pearance, 381, 383

Shevchenko, Taras, 276, 278, 287f

on disease, 165

Shiriaiev, Boris, 431

embroidery of, 252, 297, 499f

shmon, 522

on flower beds, 400

shock worker, 112, 522

injury of, 161, 162–63

Shubs´ka, Halyna, 289

INDEX

635

Shukhevych, Nataliia, 217, 491, 493

on Polish prisoners, 216

Shukhevych, Roman, 252

on prostitution, 427

Shuns´ka-­Shvediuk, Iryna, 118f

on psychology of pris-

Shuplat (Bodnar), Stefaniia,

on environment, 29

277, 288, 424

on relations with men, 443

Shustakevych, Mariia, 143, 421

on singing, 261

sickness, rates of, 147–63

on work, 127

sign language, 188

Skavins´kyi, Iaroslav, 442

singing, 223, 231, 255–63,

skin diseases, 158

274–75, 283, 344. See also koliada (pl. koliady)

sleep, allowances for, 123–24, 138, 147

sister prisoners, 84–86

sleep deprivation, 122–24

sisterhood, after release, 366–71

sleeping arrangements, 103, 104

Skarga, Barbara

Slipyj, Josyf, 238–39f

on animals, 317

Slobodian-­Kovaliuk, Oleksandra

on apathy, 357

after release, 443

on art, 306

on attempted rape, 433

on basic necessities, 113

on communication

on camp correspondence, 440–41

with home, 202

on camp families, 438–39

on depression, 357–58, 360, 362

on clothing and appear-

on ethnic groups in camps, 215

ance, 383–84, 389, 391

on food, 144

on communication with

on informational iso-

home, 202, 204

lation, 180, 182

on criminals, 344

later publication of

on disease, 163

memoirs of, 52

on ethnic communi-

on living space, 396

ties, 175–76, 224

on medical treatment, 169

on ethnic groups in camps, 20

on patriotism, 65, 67

on ingenuity, 116

on selective memory, 28

on lesbianism, 429–30

on sexual harassment, 423

on living space, 397

value of testimony of, 58

on medical treatment, 164, 165

soap, 120–21

on mutual support, 359

socialist emulation, 274

on need for love, 467

sod houses, 105

636

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

solidarity

Steplag, demographics of, 3, 5–6

in adversity, 508

sterilization, involuntary, 416

after release, 366–71

Stets-­Ivanchuk, Ol´ha,

camp mail and, 187–92

149–50, 348, 350

as common theme, 84

Storozhuk-­Androzhyk, Katrusia, 267

compassion and car-

strength, work assignments and, 129

ing and, 345–55

structure, agency and, 91–92

ethnic communities and, 175–80

suicidal thoughts, 357, 491, 507

family-­like relations and, 362–66

Sunday Mass, 237–46. See

interethnic relations and, 212–26 isolation and, 180–87

also religious practices Surovtsova, Nadiia

mutual psychological sup-

on camp families, 438

port and, 355–62

on camp mail system, 189

“politicals” and, 222–23

on camp mothers, 464–65

survival and, 505

on children in camps, 467–68,

writing about others as, 86

470, 472, 480–81, 482

solitary confinement, 3

on clothing and ap-

Solomon, Vasylyna, 483f

pearance, 372–73

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 20,

on communication

408, 412, 431, 437, 438

with home, 208–9

Sosiura, Volodymyr, 335

daily routine of, 409–10

sotnyk, 67, 522

on dehumanization

special camps, 3, 522

of prisoners, 332

Spodaryk, Ol´ha, 161, 213, 240, 274

on dishes and utensils, 113, 116

Stadnyk, Mariia, 156

on embroidery, 301

stages, theme of, 77–78

on humaneness/compas-

Stalin, Josef, 2, 3, 7, 39, 70

sion, 350, 352, 355

Starik-­Palamarchuk, Valentyna, 426

on hygiene, 120

Stark, Meinhard, 14

length of incarceration of, 15

Staryts´kyi, Mykhailo, 276

on lice and fleas, 122, 152

stealing, 117, 143–44

on life after release, 448

Stefanovich, Iuliia, 223

as literary memoirist, 58

Stefanskaia, Militsa, 383

on living space, 398–99, 400

Stefanyshyn, Sofiia, 161

as Marxist, 84

Stepaniv, Olena, 362, 389, 411

on medical treatment, 169

INDEX

637

on motivation for writing, 71

themes, recurring, 77–80

on nature, 314, 316–17, 320

Thomas, Lynn M., 94

on night blindness, 156

thread, 291, 293

on other women prisoners, 85

Tiutiun, Natalka, 258

on perfume, 394

Tkachuk, Hania, 449

on plays, 272

tobacco use, 413–14

on rape, 434

Tofri, Asta, 223

on relations with men, 436, 437

toilets/bathrooms, commu-

on sexual abuse, 417, 421, 430–31

nication using, 189

on storytelling, 309, 311

Toker, Leona, 77, 86

on trafficking in women, 425

torture, 327–30, 346, 416

uniqueness of testimo-

trafficking in women, 425

ny of, 12, 51–52, 73

traitors of the homeland, 40, 58, 522

on use of rags, 386

transfers

as well-­known memoirist, 24

conditions during, 330

on will to survive, 334

frequent, 184–85, 187

Suzdal City Prison, 418

transit prison (camp), 522

Syniuta, Lionia, 392

Treiman, Kateryna, 306

syphilis, 163

tuberculosis, 148, 150, 157, 160, 168

Sysyn, Frank, 24

Twentieth Congress of the

Taka nasha hirka pravda

Tykhan, Teklia, 161

Communist Party of the USSR, 7 (Benoni, Polina), 64 Tamarina, Ruf´, 177, 222 temperature

Tykhovliz (Dzhulyns´ka), Lidiia-­Oleksandra, 218 typhus, 150

requirements for, 148 work assignments and, 130–31, 132 tents, 105–6 Terebovlia Local History Museum, 177 Teslia-­Pavlyk, Mariia, 136, 187–88, 196, 351, 363, 393, 396 theatrical performances, 270–80 thematic foci and lacunae, 76–90

Ukradene shchastia (Franko, Ivan), 276 Ukraïna: Nauka i kul´tura (journal), 51 Ukraine, independence of, 18 Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, 45 Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 73

638

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), 67, 252, 286, 427, 455 Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, 20

on prayer, 231, 232 on reading, 312 on storytelling, 309 value of testimony of, 58

Ukrainian resistance movement, 41

valianki, 380, 383, 523

Ukrainian Sich Riflemen,

vatnik, 378f

275, 362, 523

venereal diseases, 163, 424

Ukraïns´kyi Visnyk, 24–25

ventilation, lack of, 121

Ulanovskaia, Nadezhda, 428

verbal violence, 416

underwear, lack of, 386

Veres-­Shtundak, Oleksandra, 141

uniforms, 376–85, 378f.

Verkhneuralsk Prison, 475

See also clothing untidy spots, theme of, 79 Upokorennia strakhom: Simeine

vertep, 271–72, 280, 369, 523. See also religious practices Vilenskii, Semen, 51

zaruchnytstvo u karal´nii prak-

Vintoniv, Oksana, 340

tytsi ra­dians´koï vlady (1917–

Virchenko, Nina, 254, 262, 265, 269

1953 rr.) (Vrons´ka, Tamara), 40

Vislapuu (Hryb), Mariia, 420, 434

urka (hardened criminal; pl. urki), 27–28, 339–45, 523

Vitko-­Stakh, Kateryna, 347, 476 Vivcharyk, Iryna and Mykhailo, 446

uzvar, 286, 523

Vladimir Central Prison,

vaginal searches, 416, 418. See

voices of study, 17–21

114–15f, 181f, 399 also cavity searches Vahula, Mariia on ethnic groups in camps, 217, 220–21 on family-­like relations, 363

Voitolovskaia, Ada, 414 Voitsekhovych-­Rafal´s´ka, Omeliana, 190, 223 Volia v’iaznia (The Prisoner’s Freedom), 313

in infirmary, 167

Volians´kyi, Nadiia and Iaroslav, 446

later publication of

Volodymyrs´ka, Irena, 169

memoirs of, 52

Volovich, Hava, 437, 466–67, 472

on life after release, 449

Vorobii, Lesia, 72f

on living conditions, 110

Vorobii, Oksana, 362, 389

on motivation for writing, 64

Vorobii-­Bereza, Mariia, 203f

on packages from home, 209

voyeurism, 416, 417–18, 419, 421

INDEX

639

Vrons´ka, Tamara, 14, 40

on gender distinctions, 412

Vuitsyk (Susol), Stefaniia, 496–97

later publication of

Vykovych, Ivanna, 167–68

memoirs of, 52

Vynnyts´ka, Teodoziia, 411

on literacy, 312–13 on living space, 395, 398

wandering plots, 76

on motivation for writing, 63

Wat. See Chwat, Aleksander

on national solidarity, 177

weeping eczema, 158

on performances, 271, 277

women’s bodies, 86, 88

on prayer, 243

women’s history, absence of as

on singing, 255

subject in Ukraine, 44–45 work conditions for, 130–35 illness and, 156–57, 160

value of testimony of, 58 on work, 153 on work accidents, 161 Zakydal´s´ka, Anastasiia

production quotas, 126–30

on clothing and ap-

protests about, 258–59

pearance, 377, 388

remuneration for, 136–38

on communication

stimulating prisoners to, 135–38

with home, 204–5

work sites, communication using, 189–90 World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations, 49, 254

on dehumanization of prisoners, 333–34 on disease, 158, 160, 168 on educated prisoners, 313 efforts to find memoir of, 24–25

Z arkhiviv VUChK-­GPU-­ NKVD-­KGB, 40 Za Ukraïnu! Za ïï voliu (Slobodian-­ Kovaliuk, Oleksandra), 65, 67

on ethnic groups in camps, 213, 218 on family-­like relations, 363 later publication of

Zadorozhan, Larysa, 182, 240, 258

memoirs of, 52

Zaiachkivs´ka-­Mykhal´chuk, Hanna

on life after release, 446

on art, 306, 308

on living conditions, 106, 117

on blankets, 117

on motivation for writing, 62–63

on camp correspondence, 440

on mutual support, 358

on child separation, 488, 490

on nature, 316

on ethnic groups in camps, 225

on poetry, 267

on friendships, 368

on release, 368

640

OKSANA KIS. SURVIVAL AS VICTORY

religious practices and, 231–32

nationalist underground and, 17

on storytelling, 309

notebook of, 181f

value of testimony of, 58

reading and, 312

on work accidents, 161

sharing food with men, 416

Zamarstyniv Remand

son of, 491, 493

Prison, 177, 236

Zaverbna, Ol´ha, 174f

Zaporozhets´, Nataliia, 461–62

Zelena (Abramchuk), Hanna, 433

Zaporozhets´ za Dunaiem (Hulak-­

ZhIR (zheny izmennikov

Artemovs´kyi, Semen), 274, 279f Zaruchnytsia imperiï (Zaiachkivs´ka-­ Mykhal´chuk, Hanna), 63 Zaryts´ka, Kateryna

rodiny), 40, 58 Zholdak, Iosyfa, 161, 217, 337, 341, 357, 465 “Znovu tsvitut´ kashtany” (Maiboroda, Platon), 278

on access to open spaces, 107, 109

Zolochiv Remand Prison, 298

embroidery of, 114–15f, 499f

zona, 523

on flower beds, 400

Zona (periodical), 44

on holidays, 281, 316

zone within larger zone,

on living space, 399 on mutual support, 358

theme of, 79–80