In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis offers a ground-breaking feminist analysis of Ukrainian women’s experiences in the Gulag. The study is the first of its kind to examine a large collection of oral and written testimonies by former prisoners who were among the millions of Ukrainians arrested for nationalism and anti-Soviet activities. As an ethnographer and oral historian influenced by the cultural turn, Kis takes aim at top-down political and institutional perspectives both for their reduction of prisoners to statistics and for their reliance on state records, which regularly claimed that prisoners enjoyed adequate housing and safe working conditions. Her nuanced analysis of camp sisterhood, camp motherhood, and gender-defined national resistance work reveals that Ukrainian women deployed a repertoire of cultural practices to resist the Gulag and create vibrant communities that enabled them to survive the prison camps.
To identify the sources of agency in survivor testimony, the author analyzed how prisoners navigated turning points in their journey through the Gulag as well as events in daily life that gave them hope. The author notes that the moments her subjects mention in their memoirs are similar to those found in other narrative accounts by former political prisoners and cover many of the same challenges. They start with the shock of arrest and the terrifying conditions of pretrial detention, and then recall the disorienting and unsafe transit to and between camps. Accounts of daily life explore acts of kindness or good fortune that bring relief, as well as subtle forms of self-assertion that were motivated by the need to maintain hope and validate the subject’s dignity. Concurring with other studies of the Gulag, Kis reveals the women who survived to be extraordinarily resilient and creative in identifying sources of support. They cultivated relationships with other prisoners, individual prison guards, and camp authorities who exhibited compassion. These networks provided access to food and housing and protection from abuse, including sexual violence.
Survivors did not abandon their political ideals. One of her key findings is that the Ukrainian political prisoners regularly engaged in collective acts of resistance to the Gulag and shared a common political stance rejecting the Soviet system. Similar patterns of political resistance are evident in memoirs by Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian women. Ukrainians and others imprisoned within the camps for anti-Soviet activities also expressed mutual political solidarity for each other. Political resistance to the Soviet state was not evident in earlier memoirs written by women political prisoners who had been believers in the system prior to their arrest.
The survivors in the study utilized a culturally specific style of normative femininity that provided them with the knowledge, skills, and practices needed for survival. The author emphasizes that normative femininity does not uniformly serve as a source of subordination for all women. The memoirs reveal that in Soviet prison communities, where women were subjected to violent dehumanization and degendering, normative femininity and national identity were durable resources for asserting humanity and finding opportunities for survival. For Western Ukrainian women, this shared set of practices formed the basis of the relationships and communities that enabled them to resist brutality and quietly subvert the informal power dynamics in the Gulag.
This work contributes to recent scholarship and teaching on the Gulag, and will be useful to scholars engaged in decolonizing the fields of Slavic and East European literatures, languages, and historical studies. Most specialists are familiar with the memoirs of prominent Russian dissidents who were arrested in the twenties or thirties, but this book demonstrates the importance of studying the standpoint of Ukrainians and other populations on how they survived the mass deportations and arrests carried out over the course of the ethnic cleansing of western territories the Soviet state annexed during World War II.
Scholars within gender studies will want to familiarize themselves with the author’s intersectional argument about normative femininity and national identity as forces within the relationships of her survivors. Her study will no doubt prompt further consideration of counterhegemonic uses of femininity, respectability, and virtue as resources for resisting the despotic forms of control the Soviet system used to break the will of citizens.
Individual chapters of the book are also suitable as a resource for undergraduate or graduate seminars on contemporary East European politics. Richly illustrated with color photographs that depict greeting cards, books, and other prohibited items made by political prisoners, the book’s exploration of the ritual practices, theatrical performances, religious ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices of camp sisterhood humanizes survivors of Soviet state violence, while also inviting comparisons to women’s centrality to contemporary political struggles in Ukraine in the context of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
