12 a.m., OEG 3790
Nguyen Thi Dien (FSO)
Employment, food security and social protection for migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic
Everyday experience and prison narratives: Female political prisoners in the late Soviet Union (1956-1980s)
Research project of Elizaveta Olkhovaia
After the ‘dissolution’ of the GULag and the reorganisation of the Soviet penitentiary system in the second half of the 1950s the number of political prisoners (especially those convicted under the infamous Article 58 — ‘counter-revolutionary activity’) diminished significantly. Since then it became customary for the Soviet authorities to declare that there are no political prisoners in the USSR. In reality, the stream of people being imprisoned for political reasons hasn’t ceased until the very end of the Soviet era. A noticeable minority of those prisoners were women, who were usually detained either in ‘common criminal’ camps or in a political camp in Barashevo, Mordovia.
The aim of this project is to illuminate and provide a systematic analysis of the everyday experiences of female political prisoners in the late Soviet era from a gender perspective. The project will take a close look at the ways both prisoners’ femininity and political and religious views affected their incarceration, and eventually will try to answer the question: what did being a woman imprisoned for political reasons mean?
The significance of this study is that, while the experience of Gulag survivors has in the last decades been well documented and researched, the studies of the post-stalinist penitentiary system are still quite rare. And while certain aspects on the subject have been highlighted, there are still no comprehensive works available on the late Soviet women ‘politicals’’ life in the prison camps.