Video - Friendship among the horror: Female prisoners of the Russian Gulags.

Video - Friendship among the horror: Female prisoners of the Russian Gulags.HT: RBTH.

GULAG was originally an acronym meaning Main Camp Administration, but it has come to signify the whole system of imprisonment and forced labor that Stalin expanded in 1929 and which grew until his death in 1953. 

Anne Applebaum, in her comprehensive book “GULAG: A History”, estimates that between these dates “some 18 million people passed through this massive system,” with millions more compelled to migrate. 

Conditions were terrible; the death rate was high. But “in the end,” writes Applebaum, “statistics can never fully describe what happened.” 

We can only begin to comprehend the suffering behind the numbers by reading the eyewitness accounts of survivors. 

Russian woman Tamara Petkevich spent seven years in labor camps. In her autobiographical “Memoir of a Gulag Actress” she mentions a former NKVD (security services) official who ended up in prison. 

“The bloodiest page of our history had firmly projected itself onto the aggravated consciousness of this functionary,” writes Petkevich. He wanders about muttering deranged decrees for shootings, exile or the arrest of “all the women of Moscow” and finally runs amok with an ax, hacking off limbs as “streams of blood gushed everywhere.” 

A female doctor eventually stops him by asking in a commanding voice: “Where’s the verdict? When did the court confer?” This crazy episode functions as a microcosmic metaphor for a senseless era. 

 Eugenia Ginzburg, a professor in Kazan, was to spend 18 years in the Soviet prison camp system. Her memoir, “Into the Whirlwind,” describes the mundane details that underline the horror, like washing her bra over the slop bucket, or darning it with fishbone needles “extracted from the evening stew.” 

In parentheses, as though it were nothing remarkable, she writes about the moment when a peaceful, easy­going woman called Nadya collapses on the frozen ground, one “purple evening in Kolyma” in arctic Siberia. The guard prods her body with his rifle and shouts at her to get up until one of the other prisoners points out that she is dead. 

Crushed by the dreary life in labor camps, some women found ways to exchange sexual favors with the camp officials for better food and living conditions. 

Not everyone, though, succumbed to this temptation, which led to disdain and hostility from fellow prisoners.  

“His blue, frost­bitten hands with their crooked fingers stretched out towards me,” writes Ginzburg. When she is offered money for sex, she comments wryly that she has previously encountered the question of prostitution only as a social problem or a theatrical device.

The memoirists have mostly been arrested for political reasons under the infamous Article 58 of the penal code. Labeled as a “daughter of an enemy of the people,” Petkevich was arrested in her early 20s in 1943. A beautiful young woman, she was the target of frequent sexual assaults. When she fights off the head of the cultural­educational department, he growls: “You’ll rot. You’ll be groveling at my feet for help.” 

Petkevich later describes how mothers were separated from their children and recalls one prisoner stripping herself naked and “cursing and swearing that she was pregnant again and that they had to let her stay.” The guards take her to the punishment block, “from where her screams reached us for a long time afterward.”
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