1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - overseer of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Among the nicknames of Irma were "Blond-haired devil", "Angel of death", "Beautiful monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, bludgeoned women to death, and reveled in the arbitrary shooting of prisoners. She starved her dogs to set them on her victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Greze wore heavy boots, and in addition to a pistol, she always had a wicker whip.

In the Western post-war press, the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer (“Belsen Beast”) were constantly discussed.
On April 17, 1945, she was taken prisoner by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Josef Kramer, warden Joanna Bormann, nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang along with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese's neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was "Faster", addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. Best known under a pseudonym as "Frau Lampshade" Received the nickname "Buchenwald Witch" for the cruel torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and in 1947 sentenced to life imprisonment. However, a few years later, the American General Lucius Clay, the military commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of issuing execution orders and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused a protest from the public, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in a cell in the Bavarian Eibach prison.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then she was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said that they were subjected to ill-treatment by Danz. She beat them, confiscated their winter clothes. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners without giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed an underage girl.
Danz was arrested on 1 June 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 for health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said that Danz would be too hard to endure a re-imprisonment. She lives in Germany. Now she is 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) Between 1940 and December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a warden at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them she beat to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel, but also very beautiful, that the female prisoners called her "Beautiful Ghost".

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the train station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the policemen guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed a great pleasure, and the pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged on Biskupska Gorka near Gdansk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned, and the ashes were publicly washed away in the closet of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrud Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942 she received an invitation to work as a warden in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp near the city of Gdańsk. In it, Bothe was nicknamed "The Sadist of Stutthof" because of her mistreatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944 she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a warden during the death march of prisoners, which took place from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a group of women, consisting of 60 people and engaged in the production of wood.

After the camp was liberated, she was arrested. At the Belzensky court, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than the specified date on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she is directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Colleagues in the service described Mandel as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. The Auschwitz prisoners among themselves called her a monster. Mandel personally selected prisoners, and sent them to the gas chambers by the thousands. There are cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when they bored her, she put them on the lists for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and the creation of a women's camp orchestra, which met new prisoners at the gates with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, she personally came to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of head of the Muldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown, Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, as a war criminal, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia -?) - senior warden in the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming a head overseer. Due to good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and another 55,000 died in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and was not prosecuted for war crimes. Hildegard Neumann's subsequent fate is unknown.

Next, you will find the history of the German Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was built specifically for female prisoners who worked here for the benefit of the Third Reich, and liberated on April 30, 1945 by the Red Army.

Guarded Detention Camp for Women" Ravensbrück was built in 1939 by prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The camp consisted of several parts, one of which had a small men's section. The camp was built for the forced labor of prisoners. Here, products were manufactured by the CC Gesellschaft für Textil und Lederverwertung mbH (“Society for Textile and Leather Production”), the German electrical engineering concern Siemens & Halske AG and
some others.

Initially, German women were sent to the camp, "dishonoring the nation": "criminals", women of "antisocial behavior" and members of the Jehovah's Witnesses sect. Later, gypsies and Poles began to be sent here. In March 1942, most of them were sent to build the Auschwitz death camp, and in October 1942, the “liberation of the camp from the Jews” began: more than 600 prisoners,
including 522 Jews, were deported to Auschwitz. In February 1943, the first Soviet prisoners of war appeared here. By December 1943, there were 15,100 female prisoners in Ravensbrück and in the outer camps.

Blanca Rothschild, prisoner of the camp: “In Ravensbrück, hell awaited us. All of our clothes were taken from us. They forced us to undergo a medical examination, and it was ... even the word "ashamed" does not fit here, because there was nothing human in the people who performed it. They were worse than animals. Many of us were very young girls who had never been examined by a gynecologist, but they were looking for, God knows, either diamonds or something else. We were forced to go through this. I have never seen such a chair as there in my life. Every minute there was a humiliation."

All belongings were taken away from those who arrived in the camp and they were given a striped dress, slippers and a stripe, colored depending on the category to which the prisoner belonged: red for political prisoners and members of the Resistance movement, yellow for Jews, green for criminals , purple - for Jehovah's Witnesses, black - for gypsies, prostitutes, lesbians and thieves; in the center of the triangle was a letter indicating nationality.

Stella Kugelman, a camp prisoner who ended up in Ravensbrück at the age of 5: “I was in the camp under the care of other women who fed and hid me, I called them all mothers. Sometimes they showed me my real mother in the window of the barracks, where I was not allowed to go. I was a child and I thought that this was normal, that it should be so. Once my next camp mother, a German, anti-fascist Klara, told me: “Stella, your mother was burned, she is no more.” To my surprise, I did not react, but then I always knew and remembered this - that my mother was burned. I realized this nightmare much later, five years later, already in an orphanage near Bryansk, on the New Year tree. I was sitting near the stove, watching the firewood burning, and suddenly I realized what exactly the Nazis had done to my mother. I remember that I screamed, told the teacher about this - we cried with her all night.

There were many children in the camp. Many were born there, but they were taken from their mothers. According to the records, between September 1944 and April 1945, 560 children were born in the camp (23 women had premature births, 20 children were stillborn, 5 abortions were performed). About a hundred of them survived. Most of the children died of exhaustion.

The prisoners lived according to a strict schedule. Waking up at 4 am. Later - breakfast, consisting of half a glass of cold coffee without bread. Then - roll call, which lasted 2 - 3 hours, regardless of the weather. Moreover, checks were deliberately extended in winter. After that, the prisoners went to work, which lasted 12 to 14 hours with breaks for lunch, which consisted of 0.5 liters of water with rutabagas or potato peels. After work - a new roll call, at the end of which they gave out coffee and 200 gr. of bread

Memoirs of a camp prisoner Nina Kharlamova: “The chief physician Percy Treite, an executioner with a medical degree, killed. How many of his patients he killed by ordering his SS sisters to inject poison into their veins! How many tuberculosis patients sent to the gas chamber! How many he assigned to the “black transport”, which was also called “himmeltransport”, that is, “transport to heaven”. He was called so because he went to the camps, where there were crematoriums, in which all those who arrived with such transport were burned.
In 1944, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler personally visited Ravensbrück. He gave the order to destroy all the sick, unable to move independently. This was done by the chief camp doctor Percy Treite, known for his cruelty. According to the recollections of the prisoners, he killed everyone indiscriminately, he himself daily selected batches of prisoners for burning and liked to perform operations without anesthesia.

Between 50,000 and 92,000 people died there during the camp's operation. Most of the prisoners died from malnutrition, exhausting work, poor sanitary conditions, bullying guards. Twice a month, a selection of prisoners to be destroyed was carried out. Up to 50 people were killed in the camp every day. Medical experiments were constantly carried out: the prisoners were injected with staphylococci, causative agents of gas gangrene and tetanus, as well as several types of bacteria at the same time, women were specially mutilated, healthy limbs were amputated, and then they were “planted” with other prisoners, sterilizations were carried out. In the fall of 1943, a crematorium was built for the concentration camp.

On April 27, 1945, the evacuation of the camp began. More than 20 thousand people were driven away by the Germans in the western direction. 3.5 thousand people remained in the camp. On April 28, the march reached the commune of Retzow, the outer camp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The next and last stop was the outer camp of Ravensbrück Malchow. Here the SS guards locked the gates of the camp and the barracks and abandoned the prisoners. The next day, Malchow was liberated by the Red Army.
In the photo: liberated Ravensbrück prisoner Henrietta Wuth.

On April 30, 1945, on the day the camp was liberated, the prisoners of Ravensbrück took an oath: “In the name of the many thousands of victims of the tortured, in the name of mothers and sisters turned into ashes, in the name of all the victims of fascism, we swear! Never forget the black night of Ravensbrück. Tell children about everything. Strengthen friendship, peace and unity until the end of your days. Destroy fascism. This is the motto and the result of the struggle. Already on May 3, 1945, the camp began to work as a military hospital, in which the best Soviet doctors from the nearest military locations worked. The Book of Memory of those killed in Ravensbrück was created many years later, since just before the liberation, the Germans destroyed almost all the documents.

SISTERS AND CAPTIVES

How women in labor were divided in the Gulag on Women's Day

Yaroslav TIMCHENKO

Morning in Solovki.

Only during the years of Stalin's stagnation, more than a million women passed through the labor camps, and by no means criminals. Wives, sisters and daughters of "enemies of the people", "accomplices", "spies", and during the war years - "violators of labor discipline" fell into the moloch of the Gulag. They also had March 8 ... Their own and very scary. Somehow I came across a thin magazine "Will" for March 1953 - a publication of former Soviet political prisoners, brought to the West by the wave of the war. This magazine is dedicated to March 8, and it contains short memories of prisoners miraculously escaping from the camps. One of them, written by the wife of the "enemy of the people" V. Karde, we bring to your attention.

ELGENOVSKAYA CHILDREN'S COMBINE

I don't remember if it happened exactly on March 8 or on another day. In any case, it was in the spring of 1944. I recalled this especially vividly today, when preparations were underway throughout the Soviet Union for International Women's Day, when much was said about the rights of women in general and the rights of mothers in particular. When the words about the "liberated woman" did not leave the columns of Soviet newspapers.

We were away from the battlefields. Neither the thunder of guns hitting the Germans, nor the roar of salutes, from which the capital and "hero cities" trembled in those days, reached us. We were prisoners in a taiga penal camp in distant Kolyma. Many of us were imprisoned even before the war, many of us arrived last year.

We were in the penal camp because, despite all the prohibitions and isolation, we remained, contrary to expectations, alive, young, passionately loving women, and therefore, to the displeasure of the camp authorities, became mothers.

“I can’t understand,” one of us shouted when the authorities from the center one day arrived at the penal camp, “I can’t understand why giving birth to children is a crime in the Soviet state? When thousands die at the front!”

However, it was difficult to convince the Chekists, and no one thanked us for our children. We weren't even considered mothers. They just called them "moms". We were just mothers, nurses of our children, who were taken away from us immediately after childbirth and given to a specially built "children's home", right there, in the remote taiga, in the Elgen area.

Dick, our life was inhuman. Five times a day they drove us under escort to feed us. Our babies were taken out to the "feeder" for us, and when the child was saturated, they were taken away again. Eagerly we tried to see our child, and were afraid to untie it so that it would not freeze. We lashed out at the nannies and quarreled among ourselves, trying to get our child before the others in order to hold him longer in our arms.

Our milk quickly disappeared, and we trembled so that the doctor would not notice this, because when there were only two feedings a day, we could already be driven to another camp, and then we would lose the child completely.

The impending victory over Germany, the successful advance of our troops or huge losses - I don’t know what was the immediate cause, but in the spring of 1944 an amnesty for imprisoned mothers was announced throughout the Soviet Union. All Elgen was excited - the dawn of freedom flashed over this accursed place. Hope, lost by all those driven here, has awakened again.

But there is no equality in a communist state, and there is no equality before what is called law in the USSR. Amnesties here have never yet touched on the so-called 58s - the political ones. Of the approximately 250 children of the Elgenovsky Children's Combine, only about 40 were released "home", to freed mothers, exclusively children of "bytovichek". It is about these children and their mothers that I would like to tell today - on the day of the "liberated Soviet mother."

"MAMS-POINTS"

Most of the now-liberated "mothers" came to Kolyma already during the war. It was the young growth of the "military recruitment" of prisoners, as we said, the so-called "pointers", who ended up in the camp for violating work discipline. In other words, these were girls and women sentenced to five or more years, sometimes only guilty of being late for work, that they lingered in the village.

“I went to visit my mother, we were sent to rebuild Stalingrad on mobilization,” Anya said. “And my mother, as she saw me, she cried: “You are my dear, but who did you look like, stay a day!” There was no strength to leave, it's so good with my mother - and there, in Stalingrad, the barracks are dirty, cold. I stayed - not for one day, but for three whole days. On the collective farm, someone noticed and reported, of course. So they put me in."

It was easy to sue 17-year-old Anya. It was easy to send by train to Vladivostok and further to Kolyma. They took her among the lesson and the thieves, disgraced and expelled from the society of her friends. Who is to blame for the fact that she learned to swear, that she did not have enough internal resistance to what awaited the hungry and unhappy girls in Kolyma? Who is to blame that Anya went into the hands of criminals, that a broken girl was taught to steal and sell herself? Who will return to her the life stolen by communism? Who will answer for this crime?

But not all "pointers" suffered the fate of little Anya. Many also found good people in the camp (not yet in the taiga, but in the city, in comparatively easy jobs). They greedily clung to the possibility of at least some happiness. They took risks, in front of the watchmen they ran through the wire to their lover and, in the end, became completely “criminals”, having ended up in a penal camp as soon as it was discovered that they were pregnant.

The general joy of the impending liberation was poisoned by another question. What will happen to mothers and babies? Where will the pregnant women who are so suddenly thrown out by the camp go?

In Elgen, a tiny village on the banks of the Tuscan River, there was not a single building where women who suddenly found themselves on the street could take shelter, not a single place where they could work. Everything was done by prisoners, and it was not profitable for anyone to hire a freed woman, and even a pregnant woman or with children. The government's "generous" gesture has effectively left these young women and their children to fend for themselves. The chiefs, however, were not worried. Maybe they guessed or knew what would happen the next day? And this is what happened...

THEY WERE "Married", ALMOST NOT LOOKING

On the morning of this spring day, "mothers" with bundles and wooden suitcases gathered at the camp watch at the gate. Many of them found it difficult to stand due to pregnancy. Others impatiently asked when they would finally be allowed to even look at the children - after all, they are free now!

See a little! - the camp "morons" objected. - You have to take it now. - Is there any junk? What will you wrap yourself in?

- Right now? the women asked in horror. — Where to?

- How where? came the rude reply. - You know where! To husbands! Now they can't wait!

Indeed, "they" were already waiting. It is not known how they learned in the distant and near gold mines around Elgen that women would be released today. In a harsh and ferocious land, where there are almost no women, this news was enough. The "grooms" arrived in trucks at the gates of our camp.

They were not repelled by the fact that the women who were being set free were mothers of infants, that they had husbands or lovers somewhere. Longing for family life, the taiga residents were not embarrassed by the fact that the woman they brought to their barracks was pregnant from another and was soon to give birth. They were so tormented by a gloomy, restless existence in the taiga that they went to any lengths ...

Not even half an hour had passed since the gates opened for the "mothers", and all of them were already on their way to the registry office. They were married almost without looking.

When I hear the praises of the dignity and freedom of women in the Soviet Union, when they tell me how she became the mistress of her life in a communist country, I am reminded of this big bargaining under the gates of the Elgenovsky women's camp.

Polina also comes to mind. She worked for us in the laundry room of the children's home. Good, pure woman. She was arrested exactly a year ago, right after her fiancé went to the front. They did not have time to get married, but in fact they were already husband and wife. When they took her, Polina did not know that she was pregnant. But when it turned out, she proudly accepted the pregnancy, and with it, the sentence "for violating labor discipline."

Having learned about the amnesty, Polina begged on her knees to arrange so that she would be left to work as a civilian in the laundry for the time being. At least for a couple of weeks, she will settle down later, if only she does not have to forcefully marry the first person she meets. “I love Misha,” she said. “He is the father of my child. He will return from the war, we will live together!” Good words. Besides, she was a good worker. We managed to persuade the manager. We left Polina in the laundry.

She worked for exactly 10 days, until higher authorities found out about her. Polina was kicked out. “It’s unprofitable for us to keep freemen, expensive and generally useless. And does it really matter who she lives with?” ...

Polina left with the boy in her arms. She left with a straight, straight gait. She didn't have far to go. Kolka, a former recidivist, a baker, has long asked her to become his wife. So she became his wife - "pointer", the hero's bride, perhaps.

The Soviet government "punished and forgave"! But who will forgive her?

The concepts of Gulag and violence are inseparable. Most of those who write about the Gulag are trying to find an answer to the question: how did men and women survive there? This approach leaves aside many aspects of violence against women. The American writer Ian Fraser, in the documentary “On the Prison Road: The Silent Ruins of the Gulag,” writes: “Women prisoners worked in logging, road construction, and even in gold mines. Women were more resilient than men, and they even endured pain better.” This is the truth, which is evidenced by the notes and memoirs of former prisoners. But can it be argued that women were more persistent, all other things being equal?

1936 The heroes of Grigory Alexandrov's film "Circus" - Marion Dixon, pilot Martynov, Raechka and others - march victoriously on Red Square and on the screens of the country. All the characters are wearing the same turtleneck sweaters and unisex tracksuits. The transformation of a sexy American circus star into a free and equal Soviet woman is complete. But the last two female lines in the film sound dissonant: “Do you understand now?” - "Do you understand now!" Non-understanding? Irony? Sarcasm? Harmony is broken, but all free and equal heroes continue their joyful march. Free and equal?

27 June The Central Election Commission and the Council of People's Commissars adopt a resolution "On the Prohibition of Abortions", depriving a woman of the right to dispose of her own body. On December 5, the “Constitution of victorious socialism” was adopted, which for the first time granted equal rights to all citizens of the USSR. On August 15, 1937, by order of the NKVD No. 00486, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Committee of the Central Committee of the Central Committee) decides to organize special camps in the Narym Territory and Kazakhstan and establish a procedure according to which “all wives of exposed traitors to the Motherland of Right-Trotskyist spies are subject to imprisonment in camps of at least like for 5-8 years. This ruling considers a woman as the property of her husband, not deserving of any legal proceedings or articles of the Criminal Code. The wife of a traitor to the Motherland is practically equated to property (“with confiscation of property”). It should be noted that among the accused at the high-profile Moscow show trials of 1936-1937. there was not a single woman: a woman is an enemy, not worthy of either Stalin or the Soviet state.

The Soviet punitive system was never specifically targeted at women, with the exception of prosecuting under laws related to the sexual sphere: women were prosecuted for prostitution and for committing a criminal abortion. In the vast majority of cases, women were members of various social and social groups and thus fell into the category of class, criminal and political criminals. They became an integral part of the Gulag population.

In the women's barracks of the forced labor camp. RIA News

Deprivation of liberty in itself is violence against the person. The convict is deprived of the right of free movement and movement, the right to choose, the right to communicate with friends and family. The prisoner is depersonalized (often just a number) and does not belong to himself. Moreover, for the majority of guards and the prison camp administration, the prisoner becomes a creature of the lowest rank, in relation to which the norms of behavior in society can be violated. As American sociologist Pat Karlen writes, "Women's detention not only includes, but multiplies, all the anti-social methods of control over women that exist at large."

It has been repeatedly noted that the GULAG modeled Soviet society as a whole in a grotesquely exaggerated form. There was a "small zone" - the Gulag and a "big zone" - the whole country outside the Gulag. Totalitarian regimes, with their focus on the male leader, on the paramilitary order, on the physical suppression of resistance, on male strength and power, can serve as examples of a patriarchal society. Suffice it to recall Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the USSR. Under a totalitarian system, the punitive system has a primitive patriarchal character in all its manifestations, including in the gender aspect. In the Gulag, all prisoners - both men and women - were subjected to physical and moral violence, but female prisoners were also subjected to violence based on the physiological differences of the sexes.

There are no canons in the literature about the prison and the camp, created by women. Moreover, traditionally, both in Russian and in Western European women's literature well known to the Russian reader, the image/metaphor of prison is associated with the house and the domestic circle (for example, in Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elena Gan, Karolina Pavlova). This can be partly explained by the fact that even relative freedom is not available to the vast majority of women, either in the wild or in prison (due to social and physical restrictions). Therefore, domestic women's prison camp literature in most cases is confessional in nature: memoirs, letters, autobiographical stories and novels. In addition, all this literature was not created for publication and therefore has a more intimate connotation. This is precisely its value and uniqueness.

Women's camp memoirs have been little studied. This topic in itself is very voluminous, and in this work I consider only one aspect of it - violence against women in prisons and camps. I base my analysis on women's memoirs, letters, recorded and edited interviews that most vividly depict this side of camp life. Out of more than a hundred memoirs, I chose those that were written by representatives of all walks of life and that cover almost the entire period of the existence of the Gulag. At the same time, it should be taken into account that, as purely historical documents, they have many factual flaws: they contain numerous distortions, they are purely subjective and evaluative. But it is precisely the subjective perception, personal interpretation of historical events, and often even silence about certain well-known facts or events that make them especially interesting for historians, sociologists, and literary critics. In all women's memoirs and letters, the author's position, the author's self-perception, and the author's perception of the "audience" are clearly traced.

Memoirs are not only a literary work, but also testimonies. Upon release from the camp, all prisoners signed a non-disclosure agreement, for violation of which they could receive a term of up to three years. Sometimes memories of the camps were written under pseudonyms. However, the very fact of the existence of such letters and stories indicates that many regarded the subscription as a purely formal requirement. At the same time, we must not forget that all these memoirs became a kind of protest against the regime and the assertion of one's "I".

The experience of trauma in prison could leave an indelible mark on the mind and make the recording process itself impossible. She wrote about it in her diary. Olga Berggolts: “I don’t even write down my thoughts in my diary (I’m ashamed to admit) just because the thought: “The investigator will read this” haunts me<...>Even in this area, they broke into thoughts, into the soul, spoiled, hacked, picked up master keys and crowbars<...>And no matter what I write now, it seems to me - this and this will be underlined with the same red pencil with a special purpose - to accuse, denigrate and caulk<...>oh shame, shame!"

Life in a camp or prison is life in extreme conditions, associated with both physical and psychological trauma. Remembrance of trauma (and even more so recording of events associated with it) is a secondary experience of trauma, which often becomes an insurmountable obstacle for the memoirist. At the same time, recording events associated with physical and psychological trauma in many cases leads to finding inner peace and emotional balance. Hence the unconscious desire to tell or write about what left a heavy mark on the memory. In the Russian women's literary and memoir tradition of the XIX century. there was a certain kind of taboo on the detailed description of physiological functions, childbirth, physical abuse of women, etc., which were not subject to discussion and were not the subject of a literary narrative. The camp, with its simplified morality, it would seem, should have nullified many of the taboos of the "big zone".

So who wrote about the experience and how was the theme of violence against women reflected in the memoirs?

Quite conditionally, the authors of women's memoirs and notes can be divided into several groups. The first group of authors are women for whom literary work was an integral part of life: philosopher and theologian Yulia Nikolaevna Danzas(1879–1942), teacher and human rights activist Anna Petrovna Skripnikova(1896-1974), journalist Evgenia Borisovna Polskaya(1910-1997). Purely formally, the memoirs of political prisoners of the 1950s-1980s, such as Irena Verblovskaya(b. 1932) and Irina Ratushinskaya(b. 1954).

The other group consists of memoirists who are not professionally connected with literature in any way, but due to their education and desire to be a witness, they have taken up the pen. In turn, they can be divided into two categories.

The first is women who, to one degree or another, were in opposition to Soviet power. Teacher, member of the circle "Resurrection" Olga Viktorovna Yafa-Sinaksvich (1876-

1959), member of the Social Democrats Rosa Zelmanovna Veguhiovskaya(1904-1993) - author of the memoirs "Stage during the war." This also includes the memoirs of members of illegal Marxist youth organizations and groups that arose both in the post-war years and in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Maya Ulanovskaya(b. 1932), arrested in 1951 in the case of the Jewish Youth Terrorist Organization (“Union of Struggle for the Cause of the Revolution”), was sentenced to 25 years in labor camps, followed by a five-year exile. Released in April 1956. Elena Semyonovna Glinka(b. 1926) was sentenced in 1948 to 25 years in labor camps and five years of disqualification because, when she entered the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute, she hid that she was under occupation during the Great Patriotic War.

Glinka's memoirs stand apart because they are mainly devoted to violence against women.

The second category of non-professional authors of notes and memoirs includes members of the family of traitors to the Motherland (ChSIR), as well as members of the Communist Party and employees of the Soviet administrative apparatus. Ksenia Dmitrievna Medvedskaya(1910–?), author of the memoir Life Everywhere, was arrested in 1937 as the wife of a “traitor to the motherland.” Conservatory student Yadviga-Irena Iosifovna Verzhenskaya(1902-1993), author of the notes “Episodes of my life”, was arrested in 1938 in Moscow as the wife of a “traitor to the Motherland”. Olga Lvovna Adamova-Sliozberg(1902-1992) was a non-partisan, worked in Moscow, in 1936 she was convicted as a "participant in a terrorist conspiracy" against L. Kaganovich. She spent about 13 years in prison. The memoirs of Adamova-Sliozberg "The Way" are well known.42

The third (small) group of memoirists includes those who at the time of arrest did not have a definite established system of values ​​and who, realizing the injustice of the system, quickly assimilated the moral laws of the "thieves". Valentina G. Ievleva-Pavlenko(b. 1928) was arrested in 1946 in Arkhangelsk: during the Patriotic War. Ievleva-Pavlenko, a high school student and then a theater student, went to dances at the International Club and met with American sailors. She was charged with espionage, but convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda (sic!). Anna Petrovna Zborovskaya(1911-?), who was arrested in Leningrad during a raid in 1929, nowhere mentions either the reason for the arrest or the article under which she was convicted. She was serving a sentence in the Solovetsky camp.

The very biological differences between men and women create excruciating situations for women in prison. Menstruation and amenorrhea, pregnancy and childbirth - this is mostly written by women who have not mastered the Soviet sanctimonious-petty-bourgeois attitude to sex and the female body. Rosa Vetukhnovskaya in his memoirs, “A stage during the war” writes about a terrible walking stage from Kirovograd to Dnepropetrovsk (about 240 kilometers), and then moving in a wagon for transporting ore, in which prisoners were taken to the Urals for a month: “Women’s functions continued, but it was necessary to wash absolutely nowhere. We complained to the doctor that we just had wounds. Many people died from this - they die very quickly from dirt.

Aida Issakharovna Basevich, who remained an anarchist until the end of her life, recalls the interrogation on the assembly line, which lasted for four days: “I could barely walk. In addition, I had my period, I was just covered in blood, they didn’t let me change clothes and I could only go to the restroom once a day with a guard and it was generally impossible to do this with him<...>They kept me on this conveyor, I am very glad that I finally ruined this carpet for them, because the bleeding was very strong.

In a primitive patriarchal society, the role of a woman is reduced to the satisfaction of male sexual needs, the birth of children and the care of the house. Deprivation of liberty annuls the role of the woman-guardian of the hearth, leaving two other functions active. Prison camp language defines women in terms of motherhood (“mothers”) and sexuality (“litter”, “and ...”, etc.). "Sister" - a mistress, pretending to be a sister, or an accomplice in crime, "lady" - a woman.

Rape also has its own terminology: “to board”, “to shove”, “to fling on a stretch”. In women's memoirs, topics related to physical violence are common, but only what has become a collective experience is described or mentioned.

Among the types of violence, the most taboo is the topic of rape, and for the most part it was written by witnesses, not victims. Until now, the existing tradition of blaming a woman for provocative behavior, condemnation and misunderstanding of rape victims forced women not to write or talk about it. The worst beatings, being sent to an icy punishment cell, were not inherently as humiliating as rape. The theme of physical violence is connected both with the re-experiencing of trauma and with the full and absolute recognition of the position of the victim. It is not surprising that many women tried to erase from memory both their experiences and the events themselves.

The threat of rape was an integral part of the life of imprisoned women. This threat arose at every step, starting with the arrest and investigation. Maria Burak(b. 1923), arrested and convicted in 1948 for trying to leave for her homeland, Romania, recalls: “During interrogations, they used illegal methods, beat me, demanded that I confess to something. I didn’t understand the language well and what they wanted from me, and when they couldn’t get my confession about my plans to flee to Romania, they even raped me.” Such confessions are rare. About what you experienced Ariadna Efron during the investigation, it is known only from her statements preserved in her file. But is the whole truth in the statements? A prisoner's statement is most often the prisoner's word against the administration's word. The marks on the body left by the beatings can be witnessed by the inmates. Conclusion in a cold punishment cell, at least, can be recorded in the case as evidence of a violation of the prison camp regime by prisoners. Rape leaves no visible traces. No one will believe a prisoner's word, and besides, rape is often not considered a crime. There is simply a linguistic substitution: violence, that is, "taking by force", is replaced by the verb "give". This is reflected in the thieves song:

Hop-hop, Zoya!

To whom did you give standing?

Convoy leader!

Not out of order!

Therefore, it is useless to complain about the rapes committed by the guards and the administration. It is useless to complain about the rapes committed by other prisoners in the camp.

For Maria Kapnist, who served 18 years in prison, the camp was, according to her daughter, "a taboo subject." She was very sparing and reluctant to talk about what she had experienced, and only fragments of memories that her friends around her remembered can restore the details. One day, she fought off an attempt by her boss to rape her and from then on smeared her face with soot, which ate into her skin for years. Coercion to cohabitation was the norm, and for refusal, a woman could be sent either to a barracks to criminals, or to the most difficult work. Elena Markova, who refused to cohabit with the head of the accounting and distribution unit of one of the Vorkuta camps, was told: “You are worse than a slave! Complete nothingness! Whatever I want, I will do with you!” She was immediately sent to carry logs, the most physically demanding job in the mine. This work was only possible for the strongest men.

Hope Kapel, according to the memories Maria Belkina, was raped not by the investigator himself, but by one of the guards, who was called for physical torture. And if women could share their experiences in a cell or barracks, then when they were released, the topic was tabooed. Even in the Gulag, rape did not become a collective experience. Humiliation, shame and fear of public condemnation and misunderstanding were a personal tragedy and forced them to resort to the defensive mechanism of denial.

Gang rape also has its own camp terminology: “falling under a tram” means becoming a victim of gang rape. Elena Glinka describes gang rape in the autobiographical stories "Kolyma Tram of Medium Gravity" 1 and "Hold". In "Kolyma Tram" there is no author's "I". One of the heroines of the story, a Leningrad student, escaped gang rape, but she “for all two days<...>chose the party organizer of the mine<...>Out of respect for him, no one else touched the student, and the party organizer himself even gave her a gift - a new comb, the scarcest thing in the camp. The student did not have to scream, fight back, or struggle like the others - she was grateful to God that she got one. In this case, the third-person account makes evidence of the crime itself possible.

In the story “Hold”, which tells about the mass rape of 1951 in the hold of the steamship “Minsk”, sailing from Vladivostok to Nagaev Bay, the narrator managed to get out of the hold onto the deck, where she and a small group of female prisoners remained until the end of the journey. “No fantasy of a person endowed with even the most sophisticated imagination will give an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe most disgusting and ugly act of cruel, sadistic mass rape that took place there<...>They raped everyone: young and old, mothers and daughters, political and thieves<...>I don’t know what the capacity of the male hold was and what was the density of its population, but everyone continued to crawl out of the broken hole and rushed like wild animals breaking free from the cage, humanoid, ran skipping, like a thieves, rapists, stood in line, they climbed the floors, crawled along the bunks and rabidly rushed to rape, and those who resisted were executed here; in some places there was a stabbing, many lessons had finks, razors, home-made lance knives hidden; from time to time, to the sound of whistling, hooting and foul, untranslatable obscenities, the tortured, stabbed, and raped were thrown from the floors; a relentless card game was going on relentlessly, where the stakes were on human life. And if somewhere in the underworld there is hell, then here in reality there was its likeness.

Glinka was a participant in the events, but not one of the victims. Sexual violence is a very emotional topic, and addressing it requires a certain distance from the memoirist. The case of mass rape of women in the hold of a ship carrying prisoners was not the only one. About mass rapes at sea stages they write and Janusz Bardach, and Elinor Ligshsr. About one of these rapes that occurred on the ship "Dzhurma" in 1944, writes Elena Vladimirova: “A terrible example of thieves' revelry is the tragedy of the stage that followed in the summer of 1944 by the ship "Dzhurma" from the Far East to Nagaev Bay<...>The servants of this stage, which consisted mainly of thieves, came into contact with people from the free guards and free servants of the ship, and from the ship's exit to the sea, they took an uncontrolled position. The holds were not locked. A massive booze of prisoners and free servants began, which lasted all the time the steamer was traveling. The wall of the women's hold on the men's side was broken, and rapes began. They stopped cooking food, sometimes they didn’t even give bread, and the products were used for mass orgies of relapse. Having drunk, the thieves began to plunder the cargo holds, in which they found, among other things, dry alcohol. Quarrels and scores began. Several people were brutally stabbed to death and thrown overboard, and the doctors of the medical unit were forced to write false certificates about the causes of death. During the weight of the steamer, thieves terror reigned on it. Most of those who were tried in this case received a “execution”, replaced for the freemen by sending them to the front.” Vladimirova was not a direct witness to the events, she heard about them from her interrogator and from the prisoners who participated in the mass rape, whom she met in a camp called "Bacchante". Among the female prisoners of the "Bacchae" there were many patients with venereal diseases. Women served the processing plant and worked on the hardest physical jobs.

Fiction (including autobiographical) will create a certain distance between the author and the event; it is the difference between a witness and a victim. The feeling of helplessness (the inability to defend oneself) and humiliation is difficult to convey in words, whether it is an oral story or a record of what happened.

Julia Danzas writes about violence against women in the Solovetsky camp: “Men<...>circled around the women like a pack of hungry wolves. An example was set by the camp authorities, who used the rights of feudal rulers over female vassals. The fate of young girls and nuns suggested the times of the Roman Caesars, when one of the tortures was the placement of Christian girls in houses of vice and debauchery. Danzas, the theologian and philosopher, has a historical parallel with the first centuries of Christianity, but the same association removes reality and makes events more abstract.

Many have written about the impossibility of telling about their experiences. Suffice it to recall the lines of Olga Berggolts:

And I would be able to hold my hand over a burning fire,

If only they would be allowed to write about the real truth.

The inability to tell is not only the inability to publish or tell the truth about the prison camp years in the Soviet era. The understatement and the impossibility of telling is also self-censorship, and the desire to rethink the horror of what was happening, putting it in a different, wider context. This is how he describes his stay in the Solovetsky camp Olga Viktorovna Yafa-Sinakevich. She called her memories of the Solovetsky camp "Augur Islands". In them, the theme of violence is comprehended by her philosophically, as one of the aspects not of life or life, but of being: “Look, a girl who accidentally approached the window said to me, just like I was preparing some food for myself. Look, this red-haired Jew - head. yesterday received money from home and announced to the girls that he would pay them a ruble each for a kiss. Look what they're doing to him now! The forest distances and the mirror-like surface of the bay were illuminated with a golden-pink evening glow, and below, in the middle of a green lawn, in the center of a close round dance of girls, stood, arms outstretched, the head. in the punishment cell and, squatting on his rickety legs, would catch and kiss them one by one, and they, throwing back their heads and holding tightly to their hands, with wild laughter, madly circled around him, throwing up their bare feet and deftly dodging his hands. In short clothes that barely covered their bodies, with disheveled hair, they looked more like some kind of mythological creatures than modern girls. “A drunken satyr with nymphs,” I thought... This mythological satyr, with a bunch of keys on his belt, is in charge of the camp punishment cell set up in the ancient cell of the Monk Elizar, which serves mainly to sober up drunken thieves and prostitutes, and the nymphs were forcibly driven here from Ligovka , Sukharevka, from the Chubarov lanes of modern Russian cities. And yet now they are inseparable from this idyllic peaceful primeval landscape, from this wild and majestic nature. Yafa-Sinakevich, like Danzas, refers to comparisons with ancient times and the very name - "Augur Islands" - emphasizes understatement, irony, and the impossibility of revealing the truth. Are these not echoes of the dissonance in the conversation of the two heroines: “Now you understand?” - "Do you understand now!"?

Lyubov Bershadskaya(b. 1916), who worked as an interpreter and teacher of the Russian language in the American military mission in Moscow, was arrested in March 1946 and sentenced to three years in labor camps. She was arrested again in 1949 in the same case and sentenced to ten years in labor camps. She served her second term in Kazakhstan, in Kengirs, then in Kurgan and Potma.

Bershadskaya was a participant in the famous Ksngir uprising of prisoners in 1954. She writes about the destruction of the wall between the women's and men's camps in Kengirs before the uprising. “In the afternoon, the women saw that men were jumping over the fence. Some with ropes, some with a ladder, some on their own feet, but in a continuous stream ... ”All the consequences of the appearance of men in the women's camp are left to the reader's conjectures.

Tamara Petkevich witnessed a gang rape in a barracks: “Having pulled off one, the other<...>fifth resisting Kyrgyz women<...>the brutalized criminals who went into a rage began to undress them, throw them on the floor and rape them. A dump formed<...>Women's cries drowned out neighing, inhuman sniffling...” Five political prisoners saved Petkevich and her friend.

Reaction Maya Ulanovskaya to the appearance of men at the door of the women's barracks, she is quite naive and opposite to the animal fear that Glinka wrote about: “We were locked in the barracks, since the male prisoners who had lived here before us had not yet been sent from the column. Several men approached the door and pushed back the outer bolt. But we locked ourselves in from the inside, because the guards told us that if they break in, it is very dangerous: they have not seen women for many years. The men knocked, asked to open the door so that they could at least look at us with one eye, but we were frightenedly silent. Finally, I decided that it was all a lie that they were telling us about them, and I pushed back the bolt. Several people entered looking around<...>They just started asking where we're from<...>how the guards burst in and drove them out. 4

Ludmila Granovskaya(1915-2002), convicted in 1937 as the wife of an enemy of the people to five camps, in 1942 in the Dolinka camp she witnessed the return of raped women to the barracks: “Somehow, at one of the evening checks, we were counted not only guards, but also a whole crowd of young men<...>After checking, many were called out of the barracks and taken away somewhere. The summoned returned only in the morning, and many of them were crying so much that it was terrifying to listen to, but none of them said anything. For some reason, they refused to go to the bathhouse with us. One of them, who was sleeping on the bunks below me, I saw terrible bruises on her neck and on her chest, and I was scared ... "

Irina Levitskaya (Vasilyeva), who was arrested in 1934 in connection with the case of her father, an old revolutionary, a member of the Social Democratic Party, and sentenced to five years in labor camps, did not even remember the name of the person who saved her from gang rape at the stage. Her memory retained small everyday details associated with the stage, but the desire to forget about the psychological trauma was so strong that the name of the witness of her complete helplessness in this situation was consciously or unconsciously forgotten. In this case, oblivion is equal to the denial of the event itself.

Numerous examples are known when the camp authorities, as a punishment, locked a woman in a barracks with criminals. This happened to Ariadne Efron, but a chance saved her; The “godfather” heard a lot about her from her sister, who was in the same cell with Efron and spoke very warmly about her. The same incident saved Maria Kapnist from gang rape.

Sometimes gang violence was organized by female prisoners. Olga Adamova-Sliozbsrg writes about Elizabeth Keshva, which “forced young girls to give themselves to her lover and other guards. Orgies were held in the security room. There was only one room, and wild depravity, among other things, took place in public, to the bestial laughter of the company. They ate and drank at the expense of women prisoners, from whom they took away half of the ration.

Is it possible to judge the moral foundations of women if they were faced with the need to find means of survival in the camp? While food, sleep, painful work or no less painful death depended on the guard / boss / foreman, is it even possible to consider the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe existence of moral principles?

Valentina Ievleva-Pavlenko talks about her many camp connections, but nowhere does she mention sex as such. The word "love" dominates her descriptions of both camp "romances" and intimate relationships with American sailors. "I will never part with the hope of loving and being loved, even here in captivity I find love<...>if you can call it that word. In every vein the desire for passionate days<...>At night, Boris managed to negotiate with the Kondoyskys and we had a joyful meeting. True love conquers all obstacles on the way. The night passed like a wonderful moment.

In the morning Boris was taken to his cell, and I in mine. At the time of the arrest, Ievleva-Pavlenko was only 18 years old. Her system of moral values ​​developed in the camp, and she quickly learned the rule "you die today, and I tomorrow." Without hesitation, she drives older women from the lower bunk. Also, without hesitation, she rushes with a knife to the prisoner who stole her dress. She was well aware that without a patron in the camp she would be lost, and she took advantage of this when the opportunity arose. “One day I was sent to haymaking - head. kapterka. All the authorities were watching me - so that the Firebird would not fall into anyone's hands. They guarded me jealously." She has an illusion of power over the men around her: “For the first time, I knew the power of a woman over men's hearts even in this environment. In camp conditions.”23 Ievleva-Pavlenko's memoirs surprisingly clearly show that sexuality and sex in the camp were a means of survival (camp romances with the foreman, superintendent, etc.) and at the same time made women more vulnerable.

What were the consequences of camp sex? There are no statistics on women who were forced to have an abortion in prison or in a camp. There are no statistics on spontaneous abortions or miscarriages resulting from torture and beatings. Natalia Sats, arrested in 1937, in her memoirs “Life is a striped phenomenon” does not write about beatings or torture during interrogations. Only in passing does she mention the seizure and the cold water fire hose. 24 After interrogations and a night in a cell with criminals in Butyrka prison, she turned gray. She lost her child there in prison. According to the recollections of Olga Berggolts, who spent six months in prison, from December 1938 to June 1939, after beatings and interrogations, she prematurely gave birth to a dead child. She had no more children. Aida Baseevich recalled: “In the corridor, along which I was taken twice a week, there was a fetus, a female fetus of about 3-4 months of pregnancy. The child was lying. I roughly imagine how it should look at 3 to 4 months. This is not a person yet, but there are already arms and legs, and even the gender could be distinguished. This fruit was lying, decomposing right under my windows. Either it was for intimidation, or someone had a miscarriage there, right in the yard. But it was terrible! Everything was done to intimidate us.” In the prison and the camp, abortions were not banned, but on the contrary, they were encouraged by the camp administration. Moreover, the “convicts” were forced to have abortions. Maria Kapnist was not a "convict", but the camp administration forced her to have an abortion. During her pregnancy, Kapnist worked in the mines 12 hours a day. To force her to get rid of the child, she was dipped into an ice bath, poured with cold water, beaten with boots. Recalling this time, Kapnist spoke about her pregnancy as a test that not she, but her daughter, passed: “How did you survive? It's impossible at all!" The image of a child who survived the torment is drawn in memory, and the memoirist herself leaves the story.

Pregnancy could be both a consequence of rape and a conscious choice of a woman. Motherhood gave a certain illusion of control over one's life (precisely by one's own choice). In addition, motherhood for some time relieved loneliness, another illusion appeared - a free family life. For Khavy Volovich loneliness in the camp was the most painful factor. “Just to the point of madness, to banging your head against the wall, to death I wanted love, tenderness, affection. And I wanted a child - a creature of the most dear and close, for which it would not be a pity to give my life. I held out for a relatively long time. But the native hand was so needed, so desired, so that one could at least slightly lean on it in this many years of loneliness, oppression and humiliation to which a person was doomed. There were many such hands extended, of which I chose not the best. And the result was an angelic girl with golden curls, whom I named Eleanor. The daughter lived a little over a year and, despite all the efforts of her mother, died in the camp. Volovich was not allowed to leave the zone and bury his daughter, for whose coffin she gave five rations of bread. It is his choice - motherhood - that Hava Volovich considers the most serious crime: "I committed the most serious crime, becoming a mother for the only time in my life." Anna Skripnikova, having visited the basement of the Cheka in 1920 and seeing a prisoner woman dying of hunger with a dying child in her arms, she made a conscious decision "not to be a mother under socialism."

Women who decided to have children in the camps were humiliated by certain groups of female prisoners - ChSIRs, devoted communists and "nuns". Anna Zborovskaya, arrested in Leningrad during a raid, gave birth to a son in the Solovetsky camp. "Nurses" on Solovki were placed on Hare Island, next to the imprisoned "nuns". According to Zborovskaya, in the Solovetsky camp, the “nuns” hated women with babies: “There were more nuns than mothers. The nuns were evil, they hated us and the children.”

Motherhood in the camp often determined the social position of the prisoners. Elena Sidorkina, a former member of the Mari Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, worked in the Usolsky camps as a nurse in the hospital and helped to take birth. “Women from among the criminals gave birth. For them, the camp order did not exist, they could almost freely meet with their friends, the same thieves and crooks. Evgenia Ginzburg, who undoubtedly had a broader outlook and was more receptive to new ideas, writes about the “mothers” in the camp in the village of Elgen, who came to feed the children in the children's center: “... every three hours, mothers come to feed. Among them are our political ones, who risked giving birth to an Elgen child.<...>

However, the bulk of mothers are thieves. Every three hours they organize a pogrom against the medical staff, threatening to kill or mutilate the very day Alfredik or Eleonorochka dies. They always gave the children luxurious foreign names.”

Tamara Vladislavovna Petkevich(b. 1920), author of the memoirs “Life is an unpaired boot”, was a student at the Frunze Medical Institute when she was arrested in 1943. She was sentenced to ten years in a strict regime labor camp. After her release, she graduated from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematography, worked as an actress in the theater. In the camp, Petkevich met a free doctor who saved her life by sending her to the hospital and thus freeing her from hard work: “He really is my only protector. If he had not snatched me from that forest column, I would have been thrown into a dumping pit long ago. Man can't forget that<...>But at that moment, contrary to common sense, I believed: this person loves me. It was more a confused than a joyful feeling of finding. I didn't know who. Friend? Men? Intercessor? Petkevich worked in the camp hospital and in the theater brigade. “The fact of pregnancy is like a sudden “stop”, like a sobering blow<...>They gnawed, clouded the mind of doubt. It's a camp after all! After the birth of the child, they will have to stay here for more than four years. Am I okay?" It seemed to her that with the birth of a child, a new life would begin. Petkevich describes in detail the difficult birth that the doctor, the father of her child, took. The child did not bring the expected happiness and new life: when the child was one year old, the boy's father took him from Petkevich and raised him together with his wife, who could not have children. Tamara Petkevich had no rights to this child. Memoirists often describe cases when the children of convicted women were taken in by strangers, brought up as their own, the children later did not want to recognize their mothers. Maria Kapnist recalled: “I experienced such terrible camps, but I experienced more terrible torture when I met a daughter who did not want to recognize me.” The same stories are written about Elena Glinka, and Olga Adamova-Sliozberg. According to “worldly wisdom”, it is better for children to live in a family, and not with a former prisoner, unemployed or working in a physical and low-paid job. And for a woman who was convicted of fictional crimes, humiliated many times, who lived in the hope of meeting a child and starting a different life, this was another torture that lasted the rest of her life. Motherhood and the protection of infancy were widely promoted in Soviet Russia. Since 1921, posters and postcards have been circulating calling for the proper care of infants: “Do not give your child chewed nipples!”, “Dirty milk causes diarrhea and dysentery in children,” etc. Poster images of mother and child were printed for a long time in memory. Women who were arrested with babies or who gave birth in prison could be allowed to take their children to jail and camp. But was it an act of mercy or just another torture? The most detailed description of the stage with infants is given by Natalia Kostenko, convicted in 1946 for ten years "for treason" as a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. She recalled: “Later, when I realized what kind of torment I took the child (and this happened soon), I regretted it more than once: I should have given it to Gertrude, even to my husband.” The stage was also physically difficult for healthy adults. Children were not given food. The female prisoners were given herring and some water: “It's hot, stuffy. Children began to get sick, vilify. Diapers, rags are not something to wash - there is nothing to wash. You take water in your mouth when you have it, and you don’t drink it (but you’re thirsty) - you pour it out of your mouth onto a rag, at least wash off the dressed up, so that later you can wrap the child in it. Elena Zhukovskaya writes about the stage that her cellmate went through with a baby: “So with this weak baby she was sent to the stage. There was no milk in the breast at all. Fish soup, the gruel that was given at the stage, she sipped through a stocking and fed the baby with it.

There was no question of any milk - cow's or goat's. The stage with children was not only a test for the child - it was torture for women: in the event of illness and death of the child, the mother felt guilty for her "incompetence" and helplessness.

Motherhood is one of the most difficult topics for camp memoirists. The explanation for this must be sought in the stereotype of the ideal mother firmly established in Western culture - loving, devoid of any egoism, calm, giving herself to children without a trace. Beverly Brinet and Dale Hale believe that “mothers may try to imitate the mythical image/stereotype, follow the advice they are given. When the myth moves away from the real conditions of life, when advice does not help, mothers experience anxiety, guilt and despair. The slightest deviation from the stereotype or stereotypical behavior immediately destroys the ideal.

Motherhood for those who left children in the wild was a painful topic in every sense. There were numerous cases of torture by children. The staunch anarchist Aida Issakharovna Basevich (1905-1995) gave birth to three children in exile and camps. In June 1941, she was arrested along with her two daughters and placed in a prison in Kaluga. At first, the daughters ended up in the juvenile delinquent home of the same prison, and were subsequently transferred to an orphanage at Berdy station. The investigator demanded that Basevich sign evidence against her friend Yuri Rotner. For four days, Aida Basevich was interrogated non-stop - "on the assembly line." At the same time, the investigator sometimes picked up the phone and allegedly talked to the house of a juvenile delinquent: “... and he says that it is necessary to evacuate (Kaluga was evacuated, they bombed in the very first days), and one child fell ill, what should I do? She is seriously ill, what to do with her? Well, to hell with it, let it remain the Nazis! And who is this? And he calls the name and surname of my youngest daughter. These are the steps taken." Unlike Aida Baseevich, Lydia Annenkov they didn't interrogate her on the assembly line, didn't beat her, and didn't even yell at her. “But every day they showed a photograph of their daughter, who had become very thin, had her hair cut, in a large oversized dress and under a portrait of Stalin. The investigator kept repeating the same thing: “Your girl is crying a lot, she doesn’t eat and sleep well, she calls her mother. But you don’t want to remember who visited you from the Japanese concession?”

The memory of the children left in the wild haunted all women. The most common theme in memoirs is separation from children. “Most of us were sad about the children, about their fate,” writes Granovskaya. This is the most “safe” topic, since separation is caused by forces independent of female mamoirs, and the stereotype of the ideal mother is preserved. Verzhenskaya writes about a gift that she was able to send to her son from the camp: “And the foreman allowed me to take the remains of the floss from the day of embroidery of a shirt for my three-year-old son. Mom, at my request, sent a meter of canvas in one of the parcels and I, in between work<...>embroidered and sewed an expensive shirt. The whole shop rejoiced when I read the letter. That Yura did not want to give away his shirt for anything and put it on a chair next to him at night.

Evgenia Ginzburg writes about how, on the way to Kolyma, women recall the days they spent with their children on the eve of their arrest: “The dam broke. Now everyone remembers. In the twilight of the seventh car enter the smiles of children and children's tears. And the voices of Yurok, Slavok, Irochek, who ask: “Where are you, mother?” The mass hysteria caused by memories of children in the camp is described by Granovskaya: “Georgians<...>began to cry: “Where are our children, what is the matter with them?” Behind the Georgians, all the others began to sob, and there were five thousand of us, and there was a groan, but such a force as a hurricane. The authorities came running, began to ask, threaten<...>promised to allow children to write. Evgenia Ginzburg recalls: “An outbreak of mass despair. Collective sobbing with cries of: “Son! My daughter!” And after such attacks - an annoying dream of death. Better a terrible end than endless horror." Indeed, there were cases of suicide attempts after mass hysterics: “Soon the first answers came from the children, which, of course, caused bitter tears. About ten young, beautiful women went crazy. One Georgian woman was dragged out of the well, others, without ceasing, tried to commit suicide.”

In the Tomsk camp Xenia Medvedskaya I witnessed how women cried when they saw the mother’s separation from her one-year-old daughter Elochka, who was taken in by her grandmother: “In our cell, everyone was crying and even sobbing. One of our women had an epileptic seizure - some held her hands, others held her legs, and still others held her head. We tried not to let her beat on the floor. The fate of Yolochka was still enviable: the grandmother was allowed to take her granddaughter from the camp for education. Most often, young children of prisoners from the camps were sent to orphanages. Natalya Kostenko recalls parting with a one and a half year old child: “They began to take him out of my hands. He clings to my neck: “Mom, mom!” I keep it and don't give it away<...>Well, of course, they brought handcuffs, handcuffed me and dragged me by force. Igor escapes from the guard's hands, screaming. I don’t even remember how they sent me to the stage, you can

say she was unconscious. Some of the women collected my things, some of them were carrying them on the stage. They brought me to another zone, to a sewing machine. I can’t work, and I don’t sleep at night, crying and crying.” The child was taken by the state and society to bring him up in the spirit of the party and socialism. Wasn't that what the last shots of the movie "Circus" were about? The child is taken up by society, and the mother goes in a column. "Do you understand now?" - "Do you understand now!"

Motherhood in the camp was torment. In addition, the punitive system worked in such a way that, when released, motherhood often became impossible. The punishments that women were subjected to often permanently deprived them of the opportunity to have a child. A lot of people write about imprisonment in an ice cell or a punishment cell (SHIZO), both victims and witnesses. Ariadna Efron, Valentina Ievleva, and Anna Zborovskaya were put in the ice cell. In the post-Stalin years, the camp authorities frankly and competently spoke about ShIZO Irina Ratushinskaya, “how cold it is there, how bad it is there, how healthy people become crippled there. It hits the most vulnerable spot of the female soul: “But how will you give birth after ShIZO?”.55*

Life in prisons and labor camps is always especially hard for women, if only because the places of detention were created by men and for men. Violence against women in detention is seen as the natural order of things: violence is power and control, and power and control in places of deprivation of liberty belonged and belong predominantly to men. The working methods of the GULAG in general and, in particular, crimes against women have not been studied to this day. During mass rehabilitation, the victims of repression themselves did not have the opportunity to bring criminals to justice and make such crimes public and public condemnation. The process of rehabilitation of former prisoners did not turn into a process of criminal prosecution of those who systematically violated the laws of the country. He did not touch power as such.

However, crimes against women would not even be considered - sexual crimes are practically unprovable, and time has worked and is working against justice: victims of crimes, witnesses and the criminals themselves die. The dominant feature in the collective memory of the 1ULAG era was not a crime against a person, but a fear of force and authority. The son of Natalia Kostenko, in her words, "does not remember anything, and does not want to remember."

Official documents do not tell the whole truth about crimes against women. Only letters and memoirs testify to the crimes, which only slightly lift the veil over the crimes. The perpetrators received no punishment. Therefore, all their crimes can and will be repeated. "Do you understand now?" - "Do you understand now!"

Veronika Shapovalova

From the collective monograph "Domestic violence in the history of Russian everyday life (XI-XXI centuries)"

Notes

On the gender aspects of the film "Circus", see: Novikova I. "I want Larisa Ivanovna ...", or The Pleasures of Soviet Fatherhood: Negrophilia and Sexuality in Soviet Cinema // Gender Studies. 2004. No. 11. S. 153-175.

According to the decision of the 13th Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of June 27, 1936, a doctor who performed an illegal abortion was subjected to a prison term of three to five years. A woman who had an abortion and refused to cooperate with the authorities received a sentence of one to three years. See: Zdravomyspova E. Gender citizenship and abortion culture // Health and trust. Gender approach to reproductive medicine. SPb., 2009. S. 108-135.

Decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks No. 1151/144 of July 5, 1937. See: Lubyanka. Stalin and the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD. Documents of the highest bodies of party and state power. 1937-1938. M., 2004.

On prostitution in Soviet Russia, see: V. M. Boner. Prostitution and ways to eliminate it. M.-L., 1934; Levina N. B., Shkarovsky M. B. Prostitution in St. Petersburg (40s of the XIX century - 40s of the XX century). M., 1994.

Carlen P. Sledgehammer: Women's Imprisonment at the Millennium. London, 1998. P. 10.

The house/prison metaphor has been noted many times by Western literary scholars, see for example: Auerbach N. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. New York, 1985; Pratt A. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, Bloomington, 1981; Conger S. M. Mary Shelley’s Women in Prison // Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein / ed. by C. M. Conger, F. S. Frank, G. O'Dea. Madison, 1997. In Russian literature, the image of the house-prison is clearly seen in the story of Elena Gan "Vain Gift". See: Andrews J., Gan E. A Futile Gift// Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature. The Feminine and the Masculine. New York, 1993. P. 85-138. For Elena Gan, see: Shapovalov V. Elena Andreevna Gan. Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose, Detroit, Washington, D.C.; London, 1999. P. 132-136. On the lack of freedom of women in Russian women's literature, see: Zirin M. Women's Prose Fiction in the Age of Realism // Clyman T. W., Greene D. Women Writers in Russian Literature. London, Westport, Connecticut, 1994, pp. 77-94.

For camp literature, see Taker L. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington, 2000.

“Then I sign that I am aware that I will be given three years if 1) I carry out the assignments of prisoners in the wild and 2) I disclose information about the prison camp regime.” Ulanovskaya N., Ulanovskaya M. History of one family. New York, 1982, p. 414. See also: RossiZh. Guide to GULLGU. M., 1991. S. 290.

For example, in the archives of the Memorial Research Center in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, there are memories of G. Selezneva, whose real name is unknown.

Bergholz O. Forbidden diary. SPb., 2010. Entry dated 1/111-40.

Skritotsrapia was noted by Freud when he advised Hilda Doolittle to write down all the events associated with the trauma of the First World War. For screen therapy and autobiographical literature, see Henke S. A. Shattered Lives: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York, 1998.

Shoshana Felman believes that it was the need to talk about their experiences that made the prisoners survive in the most extreme conditions. Felman Shüll D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York, 1992. P. 78.

On the presence of taboos and taboo topics in women's autobiographical literature, see O. Demidova. On the issue of the typology of women's autobiography // Models of Self: Russian Women's Autobiographical Texts / ed. M. Lilijcstrom, A. Rosenholm, I. Savkina. Helsinki, 2000. P. 49-62.

Cooke O. M., Volynska R. Interview with Vasilii Aksenov // Canadian American Slavic Studies. Vol. 39. N 1: Evgeniia Ginzburg: A Centennial Celebration 1904-2004. P. 32-33.

Religious and philosophical circle, created on the initiative of Alexander Alexandrovich Meyer (1874-1939). The circle existed from 1919 to 1927. In 1929, all members of the circle were arrested but charged with counter-revolutionary activities and propaganda. About "Resurrection" see: Savkin I. JI. The Case of the Resurrection // Bakhtin and Philosophical Culture of the 20th Century. SPb., 1991. Issue. 1. Part 2; Antsyferov II F. From the thoughts of the past: Memories. M., 1992.

“The wives of traitors to the Motherland, who have babies in their arms, after the verdict is immediately arrested and sent directly to the camp without being taken to prison. Do the same with convicted wives who are of advanced age. Order of the NKVD00486 of August 15, 1937

Kostenko I. The fate of Natalia Kostenko. S. 408.

The theme of motherhood and the so-called criminals in the memoirs of prisoners is always negative. At the same time, the division of prisoners according to articles of accusation is unlawful. For example, Evgenia Polskaya writes about criminals who sought to obtain a "political article" - Art. 58.14 for sabotage in the camp. While the trial and investigation were going on, these prisoners did not work or got rid of being sent to the stage. “And the fact that they received a “political” addition to their original term did not bother them: “prison is their mother!” - they had a conviction.” Polskaya E. This is us, Lord, before you ... Nevinnomyssk, 1998 pp. 119.