‘Good fortune in the camps never lasted’: Gendered experience of carceral labour in the Soviet Union, 1930–1953

Abstract

Gendered order in the Soviet camp system shaped women inmates’ experiences of labour and factored in their survival. This article zooms in on the published memoirs of four women political prisoners who survived the Gulag and explores how they experienced and narrated carceral labour. It focuses on three types of labour taking place in the carceral setting – forced labour, care work and clandestine crafts – and investigates the gendered dynamics that surrounded each of these interrelated types of labour. Historically-situated forms of women inmates’ constrained labour-related agency, as the memoirs show, were diverse and not always limited to outright resistance or compliance.