European Memories
of the Gulag
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Young people on the kolkhoz
© Valli Arrak
Drawing of “Siberian costumes” of Valli Arrak’s friends, drawn by her on 23 November 1952
© Valli Arrak
A brigade of working girls
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
A women’s brigade building a railway
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
A working brigade logging
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
Women working
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
Women working
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
A birthday
© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz
Anatanas Kybartas’s mother in a group of women
© Anatanas Kybartas
Resettlers from the same railway wagon. Anatanas Kybartas is the youngest
© Anatanas Kybartas
Funeral of Danuta Wojciechowska’s sister in Kazakhstan
© Danuta Wojciechowska
Celebration in a resettlement village
© Irina Tarnavska
In a resettlement village
© Irina Tarnavska
Lithuanian women in Kaltuk, 1950s
© Larissa Salakhova
Lituaniennes à Kaltouk, années 1950
© Larissa Salakhova
© Alexandra Fotieva
© Alexandra Fotieva
© Alexandra Fotieva

© Valli Arrak

© Valli Arrak

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Rimgaudas Ruzgyz

© Anatanas Kybartas

© Anatanas Kybartas

© Danuta Wojciechowska

© Irina Tarnavska

© Irina Tarnavska

© Larissa Salakhova

© Larissa Salakhova

© Alexandra Fotieva

© Alexandra Fotieva

© Alexandra Fotieva
Women in deportation
These photographs are not all intended to show how many women there were in deportation. Some rather reveal the sharp segregation: the work brigades were often arranged like that, separating men and women. Social life also often depended on gatherings of girls together or boys together.
But some photographs do clearly show the high proportion of women.
In every case, they reveal a certain atmosphere, underpinned by gender relations.