The first posting about the Annals of Communism edited by Anne Applebaum gave a summary of the memoirs that gave a view into daily life in the camps called the Gulag, which was an acronym for the Soviet term, “Main Camp Administration.” This posting is about women in the camps. Most of the memoirs have descriptions that are difficult to read, but I consider these memoirs to be the most difficult. Women were gang raped and/or had to use sex to survive. There is a very brief mention that it wasn’t just women who were victimized. It is described that sexual depravity was rampant, and that raping men was common. My interpretation is that the brutally inhumane conditions and treatment of the people resulted in destruction of their health, but also destroyed the humanity of many if not most of the prisoners. The memoirs of Elena Glinka and Hava Volovich are particularly disturbing.

Elena Glinka was a young engineer when she was arrested in 1950 and imprisoned for six years. She talked little about her experiences. There is a description of how women on a prison transport ship were raped, killed, and thrown overboard. Elena’s third-person memoir, the “Kolyma Tram,” describes how the prisoners gave the guards alcohol until they were in a drunken stupor after the word spread that women had arrived in the camp. (No explanation is given why they had access to so much alcohol.) The prisoners threw rags on the ground for makeshift bedding, lined up, and began to rape the women. One prisoner was the “Kolyma Tram driver.” He would shout, “Mount Up!” to signal it was the next man’s turn until the driver shouted “Show’s over!” Women who died were dragged to a pile of bodies while survivors were doused with water. The lines then formed again. Elena was spared the treatment of the other women. She was young and pretty, and the camp boss chose her for himself. She “…thanked God that she’d become the property of just one.

Nina Gagen-Torn was an ethnographer and the daughter of a respected physician. Her father’s reputation afforded her special treatment on occasion, but she did serve a six year sentence followed by a five year sentence beginning five years after her first release. She described the faith of Trotskyites and “Lenin loyalists” who believed Lenin’s deathbed letter denouncing Stalin. They were treated brutally, but seldom renounced their beliefs. She also admired the nationalists from the Baltics and Western Ukraine who also often bravely refused to change their loyalties. There were Catholics, including nuns, Russian Orthodox, Baptists, and “Subbotniki Christians” (who Ivan the Terrible had tried to destroy). Nina’s memoir focused on the stubborn resistance of all these groups in holding on to their religious beliefs despite the danger.

Isaak Filshtinsky was an expert on Arab culture and literature and was a popular teacher at Moscow State University who was arrested as a potential spy and served six years. The memoir selected from his book describes how the Gulag changes a young woman, a commercial artist, from sensitive and frightened to coarse and vulgar. She “…makes the extraordinary but not altogether transformation from prisoner to guard.” She was in a small group of women forced to join a detail of men, and was clearly frightened by the leers and comments. She latched onto Isaak, held tight to him as they marched to the work site, and told her story of how she was arrested and that her husband had divorced her and sent her son to live with his mother immediately after her arrest. One after another of the women slipped away for sex during the work day. She was eventually sent to another detail, and reappeared as an unsupervised prisoner guarding a crossing gate. She was exchanging obscenities with the prisoners. “She had gone to fat…Her eyebrows, as Gulag fashion dictated, were plucked bare, then penciled in. Her cheeks were plastered with a thick layer of cerise and rouge.” She saw Isaak looking at her, and almost ran away. The next time he saw her she was married to the deputy commandant in charge of discipline. They talked briefly, and she dismissed him as a “goner,” the term used for prisoners who were likely to die quickly. He began to walk away, glanced back, and was startled to see her “wide-open, endlessly despairing eyes…Another second passed, and her gaze turned calm and hard once more.”

Hava Volovich was a typesetter and newspaper subeditor in a small Ukrainian town, and had watched friends and family die in the famine of 1932-1933 (that Stalin engineered). She lived because of the ration card she received at work, but she began to speak openly about what was happening in the peasants. Hers is a heart-breaking story of the child born to her in a prison camp. A 1949 report said there were 503,000 women imprisoned in the Gulag, 9,300 were pregnant, and 23,790 had children living with them. Stalin declared “sons are not responsible for the crimes of their fathers,” and that edict theoretically demanded the children be given good care. Reality was much different. Many babies died of starvation, even though the women were given twenty minute breaks to go to the nursery and breast feed them. The children who didn’t starve “…were often deeply damaged.” Many of the children “…had so little human contact they could barely speak: ‘Inarticulate howls, minicry, and blows were the main means of communication’.” Hava’s child was “…an angelic little girl with golden curls. (Hava shaved off her own hair because of the lice.) “Every night for a whole year, I stood by my child’s cot, picking off bedbugs and praying.” Elenora had barely begun to walk and had said “Mama” when she was “turned into a pale ghost.” Eleonora grabbed Hava’s neck one day and pled, “Mama, want home!” remembering the slum where she had been with her mother all day. One evening Hava found her daughter’s cot empty. Elenora had died at the age of 16 months. The memoir ends with, “That is the whole story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.”

The recent obituary of Eugene Iwanczko, who was born on February 8, 1953 in a Soviet Gulag, presents a story of a life that is much different than Hava’s story. He had a productive career at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO and was described as having numerous interests including studying the Bible, mushroom hunting, fly fishing, and classical music. According to Hava Volovich, his story must have been an exception.