Soviet Gender Equality and the Women of the Gulag
The Gulag system serves as a stark example of "women's liberation" in the Soviet Union.
Many hoped the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago would usher in a new era of gender and class equality. Following the revolution, Soviet Russia declared “International Women’s Day” an official holiday, and “Marxist feminists” romanticize communism to this day. Women of the Gulag, both a remarkable book and a documentary film, highlights the disparity between the Soviet Union’s alleged gender equality and the reality of life for women under communism.
There is a popular claim that Soviet women “enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time,” so it is worth noting some of the ways that communism tyrannized women in particular. Those who claim the Soviet Union liberated women would do well to learn the stories of the women of the Gulag.
The Gulag forced labor camp system, created under Lenin and massively expanded under Stalin, was only one of many horrors in the Soviet Union. At least five million prisoners toiled in the camps at any given time during the system’s peak from 1936 to 1953, mining radioactive material, hauling logs barefoot in winter, or performing other forms of slave labor. The camps were allegedly for “class enemies” (anyone insufficiently poor) and traitors.
“[S]ome 18 million people passed through this massive system,” with millions more compelled to migrate to special settlements with similar conditions, according to Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History. It is estimated that harsh conditions and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag’s total prisoner population each year. Although only between 10 and 15 percent of Gulag inmates were women, their imprisonment had some uniquely horrible features.
First, they were almost all arrested for the alleged crimes of their husbands or fathers. Communist officials saw women as just another means of punishing men, rather than as individuals with distinct identities. One of the few ways for a woman to avoid arrest alongside her husband was, perversely, to accuse him of treason before anyone else did. Signed by the head of the NKVD on August 14, 1937, Operational Order of the Secret Police No. 00486, “About the Repression of Wives of Traitors of the Motherland and the Placement of Their Children,” stated:
Women married to husbands at the time of their arrest are to be arrested with the exception of … wives who provide information that leads to their husband’s arrest… The wives of traitors are to be imprisoned… no less than five to eight years. Children… are to be placed in orphanages of the ministry of health in other locations.
That brings us to the second horror unique to women’s persecution. Upon a mother’s arrest, the Soviet system declared her children orphans and sent them as far away as possible. After regaining freedom a woman would often never learn of their fate. In the state-run orphanages, children of traitors and class enemies faced social stigma. They were taught to feel shame and loathing for their parents.
The book describes how the secret police kidnapped Maria Ignatkina’s children and “before their horrified eyes… beat her to the ground.” Her husband was tortured into giving a false confession and killed. Maria spent eight years in a Gulag for the crime of being married to him. She attempted suicide but failed. Fortunately, her children were rescued from the orphanage by an aunt. Maria was eventually able to reunite with them and meet her grandchildren—a rare happy ending.
Finally, in addition to all the other horrors of the Gulag – forced labor, hunger, beatings, harsh cold, and unsanitary conditions — women prisoners were also subject to the experience of institutionalized sexual violence. A woman named Elena gave an unsettling account of how on a ship transporting prisoners to the Gulag, women were raped by multiple men, beaten and doused with cold water in an organized process called a “Kolyma streetcar,” and the bodies of the women who did not survive were thrown overboard. Other similar accounts corroborate her story.
Of course, the Gulag system was not the only way the Soviet Union harmed women. Its disastrous economic policies led to far deeper and more widespread poverty and scarcity than under capitalism (which has helped bring global poverty to an all-time low), affecting women and other vulnerable members of society the most. Still, the Gulag system serves as a stark example of how, despite a proclaimed commitment to gender equality, the Soviet Union accomplished the exact opposite of “liberation” for women.
A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/15/2017.
Yes Chelsea............but even so............we now have Academic "Elite" Professors proffering Marxism as "a solution to the woes and inequalities and iniquities of the Western Free-Enterprise Capitalist System "............you know ..................the system that has made us all so wealthy and well-off that we have had to create artificial problems to distract us from expressing our amazement and our gratitude to all the preceding generations that worked so hard and so long to establish it !
"Goodness knows , Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Warren Buffett have more money than me !!
How unfair , inequitable and unbearable is that !! I shall probably have to change my gender
and go on a protest march to support murderous Arabs in the middle-muddle-east or whatever !
Poor me ! How hard done by can I be !??? ".........................."Why is it so ?"
You are far too young to be able to remember that CATCH-PHRASE by Prof. Julius Sumner-Miller
https://www.facebook.com/groups/memorylaneaust/posts/8205193069503611/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo
THAT was back in the days when TRUTH and FACT was not ideologically imposed.....it was actually EMPIRICALLY DEMONSTRATED and thoroughly explained ! Ah ! Those were the days my friend !
So....now.....today......we have gender confusion , global warming .........er......BUT , it's stopped ..............er.....rename it quickly.....er...CLIMATE CHANGE .....because we signed the Paris Agreement
[ Phew !! Saved by the past participle ! But....not the scientific principle of course ! Who cares !?? ].
Pronouns......now there's a thing ! We can be perpetually upset by those ! Let's call it "triggering"
[ Pity you weren't around in i956 in Vietnam......then you would understand the real meaning !!]
And so on and on with stupid , inconsequential , trivialities ! Can't afford a modern mansion......er... ......house ......so of course that is "unfair" and "discriminatory" and "inequity" .....mind you.....I have NEVER had a job either.....but.....it's the principle of the thing ! I am being deprived of my rights !! "
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THE REALITY IS , of course , that people everywhere HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER OFF MATERIALLY THAN THEY ARE AT PRESENT.....but have been totally DIVERTED away mentally from reality and because of our lousy education system they have NEVER been exposed to the HORRORS of
FASCISM and /or COMMUNISM [ they both come from Marxist Doctrine ! ] and this article on the HORRORS faced by prisoners in the Russian Gulags [ In Russian, Gulag (ГУЛАГ) is an acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey, which translates to "Main Directorate of Camps" or "Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps". It was the government agency that managed the Soviet system of forced labour camps, which became synonymous with the brutal, state-run detention and labour camp system itself ] .........and women and children , being more physically fragile than men , were undoubtedly treated worse and fared worse. The death toll was horrendous !
BUT "OUR ACADEMIC ELITE" DON'T TEACH THAT IN HISTORY ANYMORE ! NO ! THEY TEACH THAT IT WAS THE "EVIL" COLONIALISTS and CONQUISTADORS that ravaged the innocent indigenous populations , exploiting all the "riches" and seizing their homelands !
[ While building magnificent infrastructure , schools , hospitals , trading and businesses and industries etc. which today give us all this material comfort , wealth and security ....BUT LET US NOT DWELL ON ANY POSITIVES ! .........Much better "to dumb down the population" !!!]
.Ah ! Nostalgia ! Far better than all the other "...algias" , but it still hurts me when I realise what we have ALL lost due to the modern-Marxist-indoctrination inflicted by a pretty evil elite !
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So...Thanks for this article and HOPEFULLY some other age-groups benefit from the exposure to the TRUTH and the REALITY of previous , far worse times and regimes , than the ones we enjoy today !
Regards , Trevor.