Bondarenko P. Women’s Experience of Stalinist Repressions in the 1930s (based on the materials of the Ukrainian SSR)

Object: Stalinist totalitarian system of the 1930s; purpose: the analysis of the women’s experience of Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, based on the materials of the USSR; methods: principles of historicism, comprehensiveness, impartiality, general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis), special-historical (critical analysis of sources, historical-comparative, chronological, historical-genetic, problem-chronological, method of archival heuristics), historical-anthropological, socio-cultural, gender, microhistorical approaches, methodology of everyday history, case method, system-structural and statistical methods; the scientific novelty of the study is due to the formulation of the problem in which the issue of women's experience of Stalinist repressions of the 1930s first became the subject of a special study. For the first time: the general features of Stalinist terror against women in the 1930s were identified and the place of a woman convicted as an «enemy of the people» in the repressive policies of the Bolshevik regime of the 1930s was shown; on the basis of criminal investigation case of Tsilia Zaslavska and other women, an attempt to recreate the mechanism of repression in the USSR was made; based on the analysis of ego-documents of women convicted as «wives of traitors of the Motherland «, their perception of the brand «enemy of the people», «family member of a traitor of the Motherland», «wife of an enemy of the people», «wife of a traitor of the Motherland», as well as ways to survive in prison. Specified: the process of repression of «wives of traitors of the Motherland»; the history of the creation of the Akmola camp for «wives of traitors of the Motherland»; everyday life of women in the GULAG camps. Further developed: the issue of gender aspects of repressive policies in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The practical significance of the work. The materials and results of the research may be of interest to history teachers, graduates of all levels, schoolchildren who study the processes of forming a culture of memory, issues of historical guilt, historical and collective memory. The materials can also be useful for the politicum in the process of developing the foundations and building a policy of national memory. A special course «Everyday life of women in the GULAG camps in 1933-1953» has been introduced in Horlivka Institute of Foreign Languages.