Survival Strategies in Stalin’s Exile: Reading the Siberian Diary by Arpenik Aleksanyan (1949-1954)

• In Event: Networks, Collaborations, and Identities: Women’s Agency in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union

Abstract

Arpenik Aleksanyan was a 24-year-old medical student living in Tbilisi, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, when almost all her family was deported to Siberia — together with about 13,000 representatives of several local ethnic minorities. For four years, the family lived on a collective farm where all of them were forced to work and were constantly monitored by the regional authorities. The family could return home only after Stalin's death. All these years, Arpenik Aleksanyan had kept a diary in which she carefully recorded everything that had happened to her and her relatives. In her writings, Aleksanyan paid particular attention to strategies she employed to protect herself and her family in exile. In my presentation, I will discuss these strategies and show how gender and belonging to an ethnic minority could not only create additional vulnerabilities in Stalin's exile but also provide sources for political agency and identity building, which turns out helpful in extreme conditions.

Author

• Ella Rossman, U College London (UK)