ABSTRACT
Women’s memoir literature and testimonies about the Gulag and deportations under Joseph Stalin—many of which were released during the collapse of communism and democratization in the late eighties and nineties in the Soviet Union and its successor states—depict issues such as motherhood, gender relations, and sexual violence that tend to be absent from the mainstream literature on the Gulag. They suggest that in the Gulag women suffered certain types of gendered violence specific to women. This chapter presents a gendered analysis of these experiences and reveals how power structures in the Gulag both informed and were informed by understandings of gender and nationality outside this institution. Women’s narratives, especially those from outside of Russia or from non-Russians, not only enrich our understanding of the Gulag, but also played an important political role in delegitimizing the communist regime by exposing the wrongs committed under Stalin.
