Authors

Discussion

In April 1961, as part of the process of consolidating most remaining political prisoners in several corrective-labor camps, a large prisoner transfer from Tayshet, Irkutsk oblast, to Dubravlag, Mordovian ASSR, occurred; among those prisoners were at least 190 women "politicals". While women’s political camp unit(s) constituted a small portion of the Mordovian network of prison camps (at its fullest it held around 200 prisoners, and from the 1970s on, no more than a couple of dozen women), throughout the late Soviet period it remained the main place of detention for women convicted of “particularly dangerous state crimes”, mostly those sentenced under Article 70 (agitation and propaganda against the Soviet state) and 190-1 (dissemination of false fabrications defaming the Soviet state) of the RSFSR Criminal Code. 

While certain aspects of survival of women in late Soviet Mordovian camps were approached by researchers before (Pallot, Piacentini, and Moran (2010); Hauser (2012); Renner-Fahey (2019)), existing research mainly concentrates on the Barashevo camp ZhH 385/3-4, where women political prisoners were transferred to in 1969, and is using as the main source Irina Ratushinskaya’s memoir  “Grey is the Color of Hope” (1988), depicting Barashevo in the 1980s; a history of the Mordovian political camp(s) for women has not yet been attempted. 

In my presentation I would like to attempt to chart history of the women’s political camp units in Dubravlag in the late Soviet Union, from the initial unit 17-A in Ozerny village, where the women were held throughout most of the 1960s, to the transfers of late 1960s, when the women political prisoners’ camp population dropped significantly, to the dismantling of the Barashevo unit in the late 1980s. Although the main obstacle for writing a comprehensive institutional history of Dubravlag, the lack of official archival sources regarding the late Soviet camps, still prevails, combining different types of sources — personal record cards of Dubravlag prisoners copied by the Memorial society in Mordovia in the early 1990s, samizdat bulletins and tamizdat publications, lists of political prisoners, Radio Liberty reports, and recollections of former political prisoners — makes it possible to acquire an initial understanding of the history of the women’s camp(s), with the record cards providing some indispensable quantitative data. Hopefully, this will allow in later research for a deeper analysis of the experiences of women who were imprisoned in Mordovia and of the ways they processed their imprisonment, at different points in time and from different perspectives, depending on their life situations.