How to Survive Stalin's Gulag and Remain Human

Date: 

Wednesday, March 17, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

YouTube

A Discussion of Oksana Kis's New Book, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag

Martha Kebalo, UN/ECOSOC, World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations
Oksana Kis, Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Lynne Viola, Department of History, University of Toronto

Attendees will receive a link to purchase the book at a 30% discount through Harvard University Press.

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Poster for Survival as Victory event

 

Abstract

Lynne Viola and Martha Kebalo will join author Oksana Kis to discuss her latest publication, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag. The book offers a poignant look at the devastatingly harsh and dehumanizing conditions in Stalin’s forced labor camps. Imprisoned for their political beliefs and struggle against the Soviet regime, Ukrainian women fought to retain their identity as well as simply to survive. Based on Kis’s research, our panelists will explore how women lived and survived in the Gulag, the role of creative expression and religion, the endurance of nationalism and political thought, and the tension between rejecting traditional gender roles while embracing the conventionally female activities - such as knitting, caregiving, cooking, and embroidery - as a means of survival.

Book Description

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s. Only about half of them survived. With Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. It details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following on from the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003) and Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (2007), Survival as Victory is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

Attendees will receive a link to purchase the book at a 30% discount through Harvard University Press.

Read more about the book

About the Speakers

Oksana Kis is a historian and anthropologist, author of Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (HURI, 2020) to which this discussion is dedicated, Acting Head of the Department of Social Anthropology, and a Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Lviv). She taught at Columbia University, University of Alberta, Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She is the award-winning author of Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukraïns’kii kul’turi druhoï polovyny 19–pershoï polovyny 20 stolittia (2008), recognized as the best book in Ukrainian women’s studies by the Ukrainian National Women's League of America and by an award from the Lesia and Petro Kovalevy Foundation, and of Ukraïnky v HULAHu: Vyzhyty znachyt’ peremohty (2017; 2nd ed. 2020), as well as the editor of Ukraïns’ki zhinky v hornyli modernizatsiï (2017), recognized as the best book on history at the Lviv Book Forum.  Oksana Kis
   
Martha Kichorowska Kebalo received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center at CUNY, having done fieldwork in the Cherkasy area of central Ukraine among women’s organizations arising in the post-Soviet period. She continues to maintain collaborative contacts with women activists Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora. A member of branch 64 of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, she serves since 2013 as the Main Representative to the UN for the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations (WFUWO), an international NGO in consultative status with UN’s ECOSOC. She is currently preparing for publication a history of “The UNWLA 1925-2020: Women’s Community, Citizenship, and Commitment in the Ukrainian Diaspora.”   Martha Kebala
   
Lynne Viola is University Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include women, peasants, political culture, and Stalinist terror. She is the author of Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes of the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine and The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements, among many other books and articles. Lynne Viola

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UNWLA logoThis event is co-sponsored by the Ukrainian National Women's League of America.

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