Oksana Kis offers a multi-faceted analysis of the everyday experience of Gulag prisoners, filtered through the lens of the Ukrainian identity of the female protagonists whose accounts provided the basis for her book. This choice of approach was motivated by significant blanks in historiography. A product of ongoing primacy of political history over Ukrainian studies, these lacunae also stem from the reluctance of Russian scholars to tackle the issues of national identity and interethnic relations in their Gulag research. Until now, Katherine R. Jolluck and Meinhard Stark (who concentrated on Polish and German women, respectively) have researched the “national” dimension of the female experience of the Gulag. Ukrainian women, representatives of probably the biggest national minority imprisoned in the Gulag, have now become a topic of a separate study.

The author relied on 150 accounts in her book, the majority of which have been used for the first time. With a clear reference to feminist approaches in women's histories, Kis divided her material into seven chapters. They tackle: everyday life of women in the Gulag, housing and hygiene, working conditions, national identity and Christian beliefs (this naturally provokes a question about Ukrainian Jewish women), creative work and leisure, femininity, issues associated with body, sexuality, and love (including the under-researched question of homosexuality and tabooed issue of rape), and, finally, the tragic circumstances of mothering a child behind bars. The book scrupulously examines all these thematic foci and continues to ask the question as to how the Gulag experience affected the rest of those women's lives. It is also full of color reproductions of artwork created by women in camps, primarily embroidery (fish bones were used as needles) and poems, and explains their social functions.

Peppered with quotations from female Gulag prisoners, the book contains numerous quotes from former prisoners of other nationalities. They provide an outside perspective on the Ukrainian women. Repeatedly used (the Polish writer Barbara Skarga is cited thirty-four times) to make the general portrayal of life in the Gulag and its individual components more complete, the non-Ukrainian accounts dilute the Ukrainian perspective. Ultimately, the narrative is often grounded in the female perspective, which, incidentally, brings very valuable results. While writing about history through the lens of an identity matrix, be it national or gender-marked, is a productive methodological choice. In this book, both nationality and gender often gave in to the universal experience of a human being beaten down by the totalitarian regime.

In her analysis of the experience of Ukrainian women, the author—as indicated in the book's title—focuses primarily on the “personal victory over the regime” (1) or “sisterhood of the wretched” (68) consisting in psychological support and group empathy (and rarely compromised, despite hunger). Her attention is drawn to acts of resistance and triggers of agency that either have national roots (the majority of Ukrainian female prisoners came from western Ukraine and were convicted for collaboration with the underground), or are “gender-marked survival strategies” (95). The latter include, among others, an empowering experience of performing religious rituals in the absence of a priest or deacon. The reader gets the sense of the unimaginable losses of those women via carefully described dehumanization forming an integral part of those stories. The author chose to put emphasis on spiritual fortitude, with female prisoners seeking and finding a way to retain even a fraction of their dignity and trying to put up resistance in practically every situation, and eventually emerging “victorious.” Ultimately, this approach somewhat downplays both their misery and the criminal nature of the system. However, that was the risk involved in assuming such vantage point.

Interestingly, the book by Kis demonstrates that the broader research on the Gulag remains unfocused and fails to gravitate towards a center that could set a common scholarly course. The author's choice of the scope of analysis is a good example of the above: Kis investigates post-war women's prisons in Poland as part of the Gulag experience. This proposal would not be a natural choice for a Polish researcher. Right or wrong, representatives of other historiographies and witnesses would be more likely to extend the definition of the Gulag to, for instance, “posiolki,” settlements amidst taiga, never mentioned in the book by Kis. Differences in definitions and optics of a similar kind continue to present researchers of Soviet repression with an interesting challenge. Going beyond the title description of the labor camp diaspora of Ukrainian women, this systematized and sizeable study will provide them with a necessary and valuable point of reference.