Women of the Gulag

The stories of five very different women who endured Stalin s Gulag from a peasant girl sent to a remote Ural special settlement to the fearful teenage sister-in-law of a high party official. The five firsthand stories presented in this book shed much-needed light on the little-known women victims of the Gulag, Stalin s vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, and reveal just how far-reaching and frightening the specter of the Gulag was. In vivid detail, Paul Gregory brings to life the stories of five women whose lives were torn apart by the Gulag system, illustrating how even the wrong word or the wrong husband or father could constitute a crime against the state. In recounting these stories, he reveals that, although some of the imprisoned and executed were of the political elite, the majority of Gulag victims were ordinary people, leading ordinary lives. Drawing from the Soviet archives that were opened in the 1990s and personal, handwritten, or typed accounts that have been hidden away for decades, Gregory takes us on five separate journeys of fear, betrayal, hardship, and survival. These personal stories reveal the particular punishments reserved for women, such as sexual enslavement, and describe the difficulty the four surviving women had in adjusting to a post-Gulag life. Woven throughout the narratives are real-life accounts of Stalin and his henchmen as they drafted their draconian decrees."