A Gendered Gulag: Exploring Parenthood in the Stalinist-era Gulag through Comparative Analysis of Motherhood and Fatherhood as Factors of Memory, Experience, and Survival in Prisoner Narratives

• In Event: Gendered Perspectives of Repression: Identity and Survival in Gulags

Abstract

This paper examines memoirs written by women and men who were imprisoned in the Gulag during the period from 1929 to 1956, and who left children behind, or who gave birth to children while in the camps or exile. It compares the ways in which being mothers or fathers shaped their camp experiences, informed or influenced their capacity to survive, and the extent to which their role as mothers or fathers figures in their narratives and in the memory of what they endured in the camps and what enabled them survive. The essential question being asked is whether or not being a parent had different meaning and significance for women than it did for men imprisoned in the Gulag, and whether or not it factors differently in their memory as they wrote about their experiences and survival as prisoners.

Author

• Elaine Marie McClarnand MacKinnon, U of West Georgia