Bodies in captivity. Survival prostitution. Motherhood behind bars. Even in poorly-lit, insufficiently ventilated, freezing-cold barracks, a society of women somehow managed to sing, to write poetry, and to keep it all together. They ultimately formed national solidarity, brewing an impenetrable camp sisterhood.

These scenes portray the lives of women in the Gulag – forced labour camps during Stalin’s reign – in 1940-50s’ Ukraine. Only half of these women survived, and only a fraction of them lived on to tell their stories today.

Dr. Oksana Kis, President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, is an academic who devotes her scholarship to the retelling of the female experience in recent Ukrainian history. Having studied a history degree from the late 80’s to the early 90’s, Kis was disillusioned by the limited theoretical frameworks of history studies in Soviet times. ‘We had no access to western scholarship’, she recounted, ‘so we had no idea that anything like women’s history or gender studies existed’.

“There are many universal patterns in women’s experiences, across different cultures, and across different historical periods.”

But things took a turn when Kis moved on to study her Master’s degree in psychology, where she became inspired to pursue the concept of gender. Under the encouragement of her father, she became a pioneering academic force, unspooling the deeper meaning of femininity in post-industrial Ukraine. Her most recent book, Survival as Victory, has been released by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. From descriptions of camp leisure to heavy discussions of dehumanisation resistance, this book encapsulates engagingly-told episodes of females imprisoned in the Ukrainian Gulag.

Collecting these episodes together and placing them side by side brought Kis to conclude: ‘There are many universal patterns in women’s experiences, across different cultures, and across different historical periods’. The women we encounter in Kis’ book lack legal avenues to protect themselves and therefore pursue informal, often illegal methods such as bribery and manipulation to gain access to food, resources and security for their families. It is this caregiving role as well as the flexible, informal methods used to achieve it, which characterise women’s responses to extreme hardship – whether it be political persecution, famine, war, or genocide.

“It was forbidden to embroider, to sing, and to pray, but all of these things women did every day — adding up to the mass-scale, barely detectable, yet ubiquitous transgressions that ‘undermined the very totality of the Gulag’.”

For a long time, though, historians of the Gulag remained gender-blind. The past decades embedded gender deeply into scholarship on mass violence and genocide, yet Kis says that until recently, the only gender differences noted in Gulag histories were related to women’s sexuality and reproductive function. Survival as Victory explores how women used their sexuality as a resource and their bodies as exchangeable goods, but Kis also pushes beyond this to argue that ‘women have used a variety of gender-based resources’. Gendered socialisation gave women knowledge of nursing and nutrition, traditions of storytelling and practices of housekeeping, all ‘skills, beliefs, and behaviours which they actually turned into the tools of survival in the Gulag.’ Paradoxically, normative femininity could be empowering, providing a transferable skill set and the stable identity of a ‘good Ukrainian woman’ to hold onto.

This book, then, does not reduce female experience to the body, but uncovers the cultural, spiritual and political identities of women in the Gulag. A ‘good Ukrainian woman’ was a caregiver, but also typically a Christian and a nationalist. By maintaining these identities, Kis argues, ‘women broke the rules at every step.’ It was forbidden to embroider, to sing, and to pray, but all of these things women did every day — adding up to the mass-scale, barely detectable, yet ubiquitous transgressions that ‘undermined the very totality of the Gulag’.

But ubiquitous as transgressions were, surviving records of them are scarce. Thousands of Ukrainian women went through the Gulag system, but often only handwritten memoirs were produced which were left to family and friends and, over time, forgotten. Pain is still vivid in the testimonies that the book uses, though, and this presented a methodological – and moral – dilemma to Kis. Pointing out that she was just two generations away from these women, Kis said that she felt ‘connected by gender, by ethnicity’ to these women, as if they were her foremothers. Yet a historian is schooled to keep emotional distance, and Kis also wanted to avoid the common victimisation of women’s historical experience. Emotionally loaded though these narratives are, the women were speaking of their experience from the point of view of the winners; they saw themselves as those who overcame. Rather than digging into their suffering and pain, Kis decided to focus on their survival strategies and resistance methods in order to preserve their human dignity. ‘Even those who died’, she says, ‘deserve to be respected, not just presented as victims.’

“When women are limited in their rights and resources, ‘they are stronger if they protect their interests together’.”

Despite focusing on a particular population in a specific time in history, the book is not exclusively directed to academics. Kis presents memoirs in a style that could captivate readers within and beyond the circle of history buffs, and further, her work serves as a critical reminder that generalisations stand weak when researching socially complex phenomena. Although Russians did constitute the majority of Gulag prisoners, Kis maintains that ‘Ukrainians also made up 20% of the inmates, so we cannot just discard that group and neglect their specific experiences’. This argument stands solid if we consider Ukrainian women’s particular oppositions of the Soviet regime – a theme that, according to Kis, was virtually non-existent in Russian Gulag memoirs.

Ultimately, Kis wrote this book not to victimise women nor to incriminate men, but quite the contrary – to celebrate ‘those who overcame, who made it through’. Her work recognises female adaptability, strength, rebellion, and solidarity during extreme hardships – a perspective that has arguably been undermined in history. In light of International Women’s Day, Kis’ message has the power to inspire womanhood beyond Ukrainian borders: when women are limited in their rights and resources, ‘they are stronger if they protect their interests together’.