Survival as Victory

Based on more than 150 memoirs and testimonies, Oksana Kis’s Survival as Victory provides a subtle and nuanced portrait of Ukrainian women prisoners in the Gulag. Kis is not afraid to tackle all of the aspects of life in the camps, from pregnancy and motherhood to rape and torture, showing how women brought traditionally ‘female’ habits and customs from home into the camps, effectively creating a counterculture to the brutal regime. Survival as Victory is a must-read for students of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine, as well as for anyone interested in moving stories of real women’s lives. -- Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History
Relying on by far the richest collection of memoirs and creative artifacts of Ukrainian women imprisoned in Stalin’s Gulag between 1939 and 1956, Survival as Victory portrays a generation of politically active women punished for loyalty to their nation and opposition to Soviet Communism. Oksana Kis focuses on the women’s agency and analyzes the practices and beliefs that allowed them to maintain their identity and humanity despite brutal conditions. An important corrective to historiography on Ukraine, this book for the first time showcases overlooked female experience of Soviet repression and contribution to the national struggle. -- Katherine R. Jolluck, Senior Lecturer in Modern East European History, Stanford University, and author of Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II
Crisp, factual, original, and eminently readable—this gem of a book on a painfully overlooked topic captures the resilience of Ukrainian women prisoners in the vast Soviet Gulag system. -- Martha Bochachevsky-Chomiak, author of Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939
Kis’s book adds to the growing body of literature on the questions of gender and women’s experiences in the Gulag forced labour camps…Shows how in the face of hard labour, hunger, poor living conditions, rape, sexual violence and loss, prisoners have maintained hope, and how their survival became their way of defiance of the Soviet state…A valuable contribution to the field. -- Olga Khrushcheva * Women's History Review *
A particular strength of Kis’s study is that it presents the multiplicity of Ukrainian women’s voices and occasionally draws on the perspectives of Polish, German, Russian, and Russian speaking Jewish female Gulag survivors…Survival as Victory makes a significant contribution to the emerging scholarship on women’s Gulag experience and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers. -- Oksana Husieva * Canadian Slavonic Papers *