Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives

by Paul R. Gregory

Overview

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, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of 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. The book 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 20th century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817915742
Publisher:	Hoover Institution Press
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul R. Gregory is the director of the Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes at the Hoover Institution, where he is a research fellow. He is also the Cullen Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. He is the author of Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin; Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives; The Political Economy of Stalinism; Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin; and Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, among other books. His publications based on work in the Hoover Institution Archives have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J. M. Montias Prize for the best article in the Journal of Comparative Economics. He lives in Houston.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Terrors Human Face 1

2 Stalin: Struggles and Successes 5

3 Agnessa: Elite NKVD Wife 13

4 Maria: Portrait of the New Soviet Family 29

5 Evgenia: Luxury with a Beast 37

6 Adile: Princess Bride of Abkhazia 49

7 Fekla: Child of the Kulaks 61

8 Stalin: The Storm Descends 71

9 Agnessa: Crashing a Funeral 79

10 Stalin: Launching the Great Terror 83

11 Agnessa: The Purge Spreads Far and Wide 91

12 Maria: A Narrow Escape 103

13 Evgenia: Socialist Realist 111

14 Adile: The Master Will Not Abandon Us 117

15 Fekla: Becoming a Bolshevik 133

16 Stalin: The Master Needs a Scapegoat 147

17 Agnessa: New Year's Eve with the Master 153

18 Maria: Wife of a Traitor of the Motherland 165

19 Evgenia: Losing Everything 167

20 Adile: Return and Arrest 175

21 Fekla: Face of the Future 185

22 Aftermath 189

Sources 221

About the Author 227

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

"[...] Women of the Gulag tells the fascinating stories of five representative Soviet women—Agnessa, Maria, Evgenia, Adile, and Fekla—drawn from across the class and geographic spectrums of the Soviet empire. Three of these women were connected to the highest echelons of the nomenclatura by marriage, though the common denominator is that all were arrested for the actions of their husbands or fathers." —Vladislav Davidzon, tabletmag.com

From the Publisher