Small Victories: Identity, Autonomy, and Female Memory of Soviet GULAGs
Humanities
HIS196V: The Soviet Experience
My Senior Seminar research paper explores the relationship between Soviet authority and female identity within Soviet GULAGs, or forced labor camps. Focusing on written memoirs, diaries and letters, this work argues that many women exercised a surprising amount of individual autonomy through sex, pregnancy, work, and the “small victories” of everyday resistance, identifying spaces of limited power within GULAG existence by these means. Beginning with an examination of eminent GULAG literature, this paper offers a synthesis of these ideas applied specifically to the genre of female GULAG memory, concluding that while the Gulag system reflected larger totalitarian aspects of Soviet society, GULAGs still existed as a more concentrated system of authoritarianism centered on efforts to dehumanize prisoners.
