Around the World in Books / Russia

The Heroic Women of the Gulag

Female prisoners were forced to work as loggers in Siberia — in snow up to their waists — but went on to lead inspiring lives

Cover of “Dressed for a Dance in the Snow” / Credit: Other Press

This is the 23rd post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books about 30 countries in the first 30 days of March. Tomorrow: Scotland

In a just world, this post would focus on a book like War and Peace, The Complete Stories Anton Chekhov, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s great novel of the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, all of them masterpieces of Russian literature.

Also in a just world, the stories of female prisoners of the Gulag would have had far more attention than they have, so this post wouldn’t be necessary. As it is, too many of them have died with their stories untold. Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag: A History has a chapter on the women and children of Joseph Stalin’s enslaved-labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere.

But the Soviets sent fewer women than men to their vast system of barbarous prisons, and that fact — combined with history’s neglect of women’s stories in general — has resulted in fewer books about the extraordinary suffering they faced. Monika Zgustova, a…