Dartmouth Events

Neither Saints, Nor Prostitutes: The Complexities of Imprisoned Women’s Lives in Stalin’s Gulag

Although women constituted a significant portion of the Soviet forced labor concentration camp population in the Stalin era, their lives have rarely been studied. Those who have written about these women’s lives, whether scholars or memoirists, they have typically been portrayed as either saintly heroes—determined preservers of feminine purity and national identity—or as soiled victims—willingly or unwillingly the objects of sexual conquest at the hands of camp guards or common criminals. Steven Barnes will attempt to present a more complex understanding of women’s experiences in the Gulag, restoring agency to women in the conditions of a forced labor camp. He will share the story of a group of women arrested in 1937-1938 for no crime but merely as “wives of traitors to the motherland.” Sent to a special isolated camp in Kazakhstan, these women’s experiences reveal how cultural expectations, lost privilege, and the battle for survival shaped a variety of different responses to imprisonment.

Steven A. Barnes is Associate Professor of Russian History at George Mason University. He is the author of the multi-award winning Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society and is currently working on a new book titled The Wives’ Gulag: Gender, Family, and Survival in Stalin’s Terror.

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Russian Department