Veranstaltung: Ukrainian women's creative activities as everyday resistance in the Gulag*

*Gulag - forced labor camps in the Soviet Union.

Abstract

In the 1940s-early 1950s, thousands of Ukrainian women from western Ukrainian regions were sentenced to long-term imprisonment in the Gulag for (real or alleged) collaboration with the anti-Soviet Ukrainian national underground. Despite strict prohibitions and punishments, they engaged in a variety of unsanctioned cultural activities rooted in traditional Ukrainian folk arts and crafts (group singing of folk songs, embroidery, versifying, staging amateur spectacles, praying and celebrating Christian feasts, etc.)

These activities, carried out secretly and collectively, helped the prisoners to resist the comprehensive and ruthless dehumanization to which they were subjected. In songs, poems, embroideries, performances, etc., the women were able to recharge, manifest and preserve their threatened social identities (gender, national, religious, political), thus helping to prevent the desintegration of the prisoners' personalities. These clandestine but regular and large-scale amateur creative activities helped to establish and strengthen the Ukrainian women's community.

Some of the therapeutic effects of art helped to mitigate the destructive influence of the Gulag regime on prisoners' minds, as creativity was a source of positive emotions that lifted prisoners' spirits and withstand despair. Seemingly simple and clearly gendered women's artwork took on special significance in terms of maintaining social relations in captivity. Moreover, these seemingly non-confrontational practices undermined the very idea of the Gulag's ability to establish total control over prisoners and should therefore be understood as a form of everyday resistance to the totalitarian regime.

Oksana Kis

Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, PhD in history/ethnology, a senior scholar, Head of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine, a president of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. She explored Ukrainian women’s experiences of survival and resistance under extreme historical circumstances, including in times of the Holodomor (Great Famine 1932-33), in the Ukrainian nationalist anti-soviet underground in the mid 20th century and in the Stalin’s Gulag, as well as gender transformations in post-socialist countries. Her recent book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag was published within the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies in 2021. She edited and co-edited several volumes and thematic issues of academic journal on Ukrainian women’s history in Ukraine and beyond. She was a recipient of several academic awards, research grants and scholarship, including Fulbright research fellowship. Currently Oksana Kis is a VUIAS visiting research fellow at Inre Kertesz Kolleg, Schieller University in Jena.