Eighty years ago (November 17, 1938) Stalin ended the Great Terror, citing “local excesses” that had come to his attention. It wasn’t until two decades later that the KGB tallied the victims of the sixteen-month reign of terror at 1,334,360. Half were shot, and the rest sentenced to the Gulag. The Gulag itself continued to grow during and after the Second World War. It reached its peak of 2.5 million prisoners shortly before Stalin’s death. Of these, one out of five were women. Press Women of the Gulag has
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The stories these women tell could just as well have been told by any number of the women in Stalin’s Russia who ended up in the Gulag. Some fared better than the women here, others did considerably worse, and many died. None who survived, I suspect, will have been able to leave the experience behind them. We are fortunate that Fekla, Vera, Nadezhda, Elena, Ksenia and Adile subsequently dedicated their life to letting it be known what happened to them and recounting the atrocities they witnessed. Marianna Y