GULag NKVD - Women of the Gulag: portraits of five remarkable lives

Women of the Gulag

Women of the Gulag

Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives

Paul R. Gregory

HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS

Stanford University . Stanford, California

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 631

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First printing 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gregory, Paul R., author.

Women of the Gulag / Paul R. Gregory.

pages cm. (Hoover Institution Press Publication ; No. 631)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8179-1574-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8179-1576-6 (ebook)

1. Women political prisonersSoviet UnionBiography. 2. Gulag NKVD. 3. Political persecutionSoviet Union. 4. Concentration campsSoviet Union. 5. PrisonsSoviet Union. 6. Forced laborSoviet Union. 7. Soviet UnionHistory19251953. I. Title. II. Series: Hoover Institution Press publication ; 631.

DK268.A1G724 2013

.45092520947dc23 2012045817

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Contents

Preface

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Women of the Gulag is my third book on political repression under Soviet socialism. My first, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (Yale University Press, 2009), analyzed how Lenin, Stalin, and their successors used the political police in a systematic way to repress the citizenry. But the faces of the victims became lost in the horrendous statistics and the incredible numbers of human tragedies. My second book was Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalins Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). In it, I used Stalins most prominent victimsBukharin and his wife, Annato give human faces to his top political rivals.

Women of the Gulag is based on an often overlooked point: most of Stalins victims were quite ordinary people. Only a tiny percentage belonged to the political elite, like Bukharin. Women of the Gulag tells the stories of ordinary women and reveals how adversity can make ordinary people do extraordinary things.

To truly understand Stalins terror and its impact on Russian society and history, we must see the faces of the victims up close. We must follow a peasant girl growing up while confined to a special settlement tucked away in the remote Urals. We must observe the life of an engineers wife and family in Eastern Siberia as ordinary rail accidents somehow become acts of sabotage. We must sit with the teenage sister-in-law of a high party official in a Sukhumi mansion as the secret police close in on family and friends.

Not all the stories of Women of the Gulag are of ordinary women and their families coping with tragedy. Under Stalin, the dividing line between victim and executioner was razor-thin. More than a third of the leading executioners were executed themselves. We see repressors turned into the repressed as we visit the luxurious villas, dinner parties, literary salons, and vacation resorts of the wives of Stalins executioners, and we see their horror as they grow increasingly aware that they are about to cross that line.

Women of the Gulag tells the stories of five women and their families. By Gulag I mean more than the barbed wire, camps, and prisons which the term usually conjures up. Instead, the Gulag refers to a state of mindto the knowledge that anyone and everyone could be shot, jailed, or exiled as the victim of mass insanity and hysteria originating from somewhere above. In this topsy-turvy world, a wrong word or association becomes a crime against the state punishable by the highest measure of social defense, execution. Neighbors and friends are potential informants. A false move at work becomes deliberate sabotage. The camp system into which enemies of the people poured was simply the end stage of the world of the Gulag, reserved for enemies who escaped the anonymous execution pits.

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s made possible a new scholarly literature that is completing our understanding of the Gulag. This literature instructs us on the size and scope of the Gulag, as in Oleg Khlevniuks The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale University Press, 2004) and Anne Applebaums Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003). Its human costs are explored by Norman Naimark in Stalins Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2011) and its use as an economic institution is the subject of essays in The Economics of Forced Labor (Hoover Institution Press, 2003), which I edited with Valery Lazarev. Jrg Baberowski describes how Stalin and his henchmen used political repression to serve their ends in Verbrannte Erde: Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (C. H. Beck, 2012) while Stephen Cohen delves into the impact on civilian society in The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (PublishingWorks, 2010).

I use these archives to visit Stalins office, apartment, and dacha as he and his henchmen set terror in motion. We watch as they sit and draft decrees in the antiseptic bureaucratic language, such as first category enemies of the people, that condemns hundreds of thousands to prison or death. We use the archives to follow these Kremlin orders as they filter down to Stalins loyal executioners, among them the husbands of two of our women of the Gulag.