Survival as Victory

Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book tells the stories of Ukrainian women who were sentenced to the GULAG in the 1940s and 1950s. With this book, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.
It details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences.