Women of the Gulag

[Larry1]

I noticed a review of an upcoming book entitled "Women of the Gulag" by Paul Gregory.  The book describes the experiences of five women:

These five women put a human face on the terror of Stalin’s purges and the Gulag in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. They show how the impersonal orders emanating from the Kremlin office of “the Master” brought tragedy to their lives. They cover the gamut of victims. Two are wives and daughters in ordinary families unable to comprehend why such misfortune has overtaken them. A third is a young bride living in the household of a high party official. The last two are wives of the Master’s executioners. These stories are based on their memoirs—some written by themselves, others by close friends or by their children.

The review briefly describes the circumstances of each of these five women.  Here is one:

Evgenia Feigenberg, born in 1904, had no intention of remaining in her hometown of Gomel, Belorussia, close to Poland and Ukraine but far from the European capitals where she was sure she belonged. Nor did she intend to follow the normal life course for the daughter of a rabbi: an early marriage and many children. Her first marriage took her to Odessa. She left her husband for a better catch, who took her to Moscow and to the Soviet Embassy in London. But it was her third partner who took her with him as he climbed ruthlessly to the highest levels of Soviet power—only to doom them both to destruction when Stalin tired of his purges and looked for a scapegoat for the Great Terror.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/140866

Here is the book's Amazon description:

During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution.

In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, Paul Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply in the literature. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of these five women—from different social strata and regions—in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state.

Gregory begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the twentieth century.

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Gulag-Paul-R-Gregory/dp/0817915745/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361385270&sr=1-13

For those who would like to know more about the operations of the gulag, see the Pulitzer prize winning "Gulag: A History", by Anne Applebaum.

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361384695&sr=1-2&keywords=Women+of+the+gulag

[calmissile]

Thanks for the links Larry.  I don't usually read books that are depressing, but this appears to be worth it as an educational piece, as well as linking the history to real people.  I pre-ordered it.  Looks like delivery at end of April.

[mies]

I noticed a review of an upcoming book entitled "Women of the Gulag" by Paul Gregory.  The book describes the experiences of five women:

The review briefly describes the circumstances of each of these five women.  Here is one:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/140866

Here is the book's Amazon description:

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Gulag-Paul-R-Gregory/dp/0817915745/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361385270&sr=1-13

For those who would like to know more about the operations of the gulag, see the Pulitzer prize winning "Gulag: A History", by Anne Applebaum.

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361384695&sr=1-2&keywords=Women+of+the+gulag

Larry, thank you!

I read the Chernavin's memoirs (can be downloaded in English here http://archive.org/details/ispeakforthesile013752mbp), and 2 books by Shalamov (unfortunately, not all of them yet).
Highly recommend both, although - definitely not an easy read. His words are light as a feather, and weight many tonns at the same time. They possess inevitability, simplicity, awe, relief and definitive lightness, probably similar to that of death. Shalamov's stories are probably the most profound and powerful I ever read. And I read a lot. He is a genius. Amazon sells his "Kolyma tales" book translated to English, for just $12, and translation is quite good - I checked.


Shalamov writes quite much about the destiny of the women in the camps. Even though the women lived in a separate camp, and there were very few women to be seen around, he analyzes the experiences of women, how the camp affected them. He had quite many female characters in his stories: a young and kind-hearted woman who was shot dead by the jealous policeman, an exceptionally cruel and ruthless young lover of the high camp official, nurses and doctors who worked in the camps, women from the criminal world, wives of camp officials and security, and so on.

Next I plan to read Primo Levi.

[mendeleyev]

An interesting period film of the time was "The Edge" in which a Russian train engineer ends up in Siberia and falls in love with a woman in a Gulag. The storyline can give a feel of what the Gulag system was like at the time.