Threats of rape and head shaving. From the Gulag to the colony in Olenivka — women in Russian prisons (Part 1)

In the methods of torture and destruction of Ukrainians, Russians use the same practices as decades ago: torture and imprison people with an active pro-Ukrainian position, trying to erase identity and break them psychologically.

Hundreds of Ukrainian women, military and civilian, remain in Russian captivity. On October 17, Ukraine managed to return 108 of them as part of the exchange.

In this text, together with the researcher Oksana Kis, we compare two experiences: the memories of women who were political prisoners of the Gulag and the current testimonies of liberated Ukrainian women.

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“The situation in which Ukrainian female prisoners find themselves today, in my opinion, is much worse than it was during the Gulag,” says Oksana Kis. The scholar researches women and gender issues within the framework of Ukrainian history and historical ethnology, including the everyday life of Ukrainian women, who were political prisoners of the Gulag.

The researcher notes: some things unite these two experiences, but some things significantly distinguish them.

“The Gulag is a penitentiary system, a state institution. It was a structure that existed within the criminal but legal framework of the Soviet Union of the Stalinist era. The activities of the Gulag were determined by certain official normative acts, documents, resolutions, and regulations that governed various aspects of the functioning of this structure, in particular, the conditions of detention and the rights of prisoners. Of course, the camp administration, guards, and convoys violated them.

However, it is known that sometimes prisoners wrote complaints and tried to appeal to higher state authorities. At least formally, certain established rules could theoretically be insisted on, such as the right to write two letters a year to relatives.

Instead, now our prisoners are being held, in particular, in the territories that are generally outside the law, outside any legal field, in unrecognized quasi-state formations where the rule of force reigns — in the colonies of the "DPR" and "LPR". There are no state institutions there, there is no one to demand or expect observance of any rights or norms. We have no lists of who exactly is held captive by the Russians, where and in what conditions they are kept, and what their status is.

In this case, there is a situation of complete powerlessness of prisoners and unlimited arbitrariness on the part of those in power, who have weapons or other resources that they can manipulate. Prisoners are completely powerless, dependent on the personal voluntaristic decisions of those who have power and force.”

“I was very worried that they would shave me. For me, it was worse than dying”

Teacher Viktoriia Andrusha, freed from captivity, sits at her first public press conference with her hair neatly braided and styled. She tells journalists about her experience in Russian captivity. In March, the occupiers kidnapped her from her parents' house in Chernihiv Oblast, found chatbot messages on her phone about the movement of Russian hardware, and accused her of being a spotter. The occupiers transported the woman from one place of detention to another and did not give her relatives confirmation of where she was being held.

“Every time we arrived at a new place, we were examined by nurses. They checked our hair and stripped us naked. Everyone had to undergo "sanitary treatment" in the detention facility. At that time, men were shaved bald, and very often girls were threatened with the same. I was threatened too. But then one worker called someone and said that they would leave my hair. For another month I was harassed and threatened that they would cut it off”, the woman says.

Military medic Maryna Holinko, who was released from captivity along with 107 other women on October 17, tells us in an interview about similar things. Russians threatened women to cut their hair off all the time.

“I was very worried that they would shave me. For me, it was worse than dying. We were periodically frightened by this. We were not allowed to braid our hair. We had no comb and no shampoo; we washed our hair with soap in Taganrog. And it was sticking out in different directions. Then they said: if they see a French braid in someone else's hair, they will shave it bald. They did not explain to us why — maybe they wanted us to look like some kind of horror. But we braided our hair anyway, and before the inspections, we let it down.”

Obviously, such threats from the Russian supervisors were not empty words. The first servicewomen, who were exchanged back in spring, returned home with their heads shaved bald.

Oksana Kis notes that forced shaving and prohibition to take care of hair is one of the tools of humiliation of women, known in many traditional cultures, including Ukrainian, as a practice of public shaming for violation of moral norms.

“Most often, cutting hair very short was a way to punish a woman or girl for sexual behavior not allowed by custom — loss of virginity before marriage or adultery. It is a way to publicly shame a woman, to mark her as a sinner. There are known cases of public shaving of French women who had relations with the German occupiers after the war. And I assume that this practice is now taking place — to commit a symbolic humiliation over Ukrainian women, to cause moral suffering to our captives.”

There was no requirement for women, who were political prisoners of the Gulag, to shave their heads, the researcher says. Instead, when they entered the camp, they were forced to shave all parts of their bodies covered with hair, including their private parts.

“It was a very humiliating and painful procedure because it was performed by men. It was allegedly justified by hygienic sanitary rules. I am not sure whether such things were applied to our hostages in Russian captivity.”

Women in the Gulag tried to keep their hair on their heads by any means, although they had no opportunity to take care of it. They lost it due to a lack of vitamins, nutrients, and hunger, and had to constantly fight lice.

“When we look at the photos of women immediately after liberation in 1953-1955 (and there are most of such photos), we see women with hairstyles, with long hair. In those conditions, it was a huge effort. This means that it was important for female prisoners to keep their hair and look like ordinary women again after liberation.”

“There was another executioner who came to abuse the "Banderite". He liked to throw me on the floor and dance on my stomach...”

Hanna Pozniak-Skrypiuk wrote in her memoirs about her imprisonment in the Gulag camps: “Even more terrible beatings began. I was interrogated at night on the second floor, tied by the braids to the back of a chair, and beaten on the nose with fingers or on the head with a revolver (...) I was hung upside down, and it was very hard because of the blood pressing on my brain, there was crackling in my ears, it seems that my head was going to crack, my eyes were bulging out of their sockets, my tongue was squeezed out of my mouth — and there was terrible pain (...) There was another executioner who came to abuse the "Banderite" (...) He liked to throw me on the floor and dance on my stomach...”

Mostly, women were subjected to physical torture during the investigation, and during interrogations, when the officers tried to extract testimony from them before the court, says Oksana Kis. After the convicts were sent to the Gulag camps, they had to endure beatings, thefts, and humiliation by criminals who were in the same barracks and zones as them.

“Political prisoners were seen as the bottom of the Soviet system, they were considered worse than murderers, rapists, and robbers. They "betrayed the homeland" and were "enemies of the people" — this is the most terrible crime! Therefore, criminals felt superior to them and even authorized to "punish" them in their criminal way. The administration and convoys tolerated such abuse,” the researcher says.

Women released from the current Russian captivity tell little about physical abuse by the Russians.

“You only hear the screams of people being tortured, and the worst thing is to suddenly not hear a familiar voice,” says volunteer, human rights activist Liudmila Huseinova at the first public press conference about her stay in Donetsk “Izoliatsia”.

Natalia Zelenina, who was taken prisoner in 2017 in the occupied Donetsk Oblast, says that no force was used against her, but men were tortured before her eyes. The guards beat confessions out of them that Natalia was selling drugs to them (this is the article under which the woman was accused).

Oksana Kis suggests that perhaps too little time has passed for women to speak openly about what happened to their bodies in prison. Moreover, they may face condemnation in society.

“This is what the experience of other countries and the experience of the Gulag shows — women are very vulnerable in captivity not only because they can be beaten, but also because of their sexuality. Sexual violence is most often used against women as a tool to break their personalities. To break their will. For a woman, rape is an extremely traumatic experience, from which not everyone can recover, recuperate, cope with it.”

In the memoirs of women from the Gulag, there is virtually no mention of rape in the camps. Oksana Kis says that during her research she came across only memoirs of women who witnessed the rape.

“This is one of the most taboo topics in memories of the Gulag. While former prisoners recall the cases of forced nudity, and voyeurism (spying on women in baths or toilets), and tell how painful and shameful it was for them, there are very few mentions of cases of sexual harassment, sexual exploitation in the form of prostitution for survival, rape (forced rape, gang rape).

I found only two references to such events in Ukrainian memoirs, and in both cases, the narrators were witnesses to the rape, not victims. However, researchers of women's experiences of the Gulag believe that such stories can, in fact, be a safe way to indirectly report on personal experiences.”

Recently, the UN Monitoring Mission published its report on the treatment of prisoners of war. In particular, they interviewed 20 women released from Russian captivity.

Those held in the Olenivka colony reported that they were not subjected to physical violence, but suffered from psychological torment. They heard the screams of male prisoners of war who were tortured in neighboring cells. One of the women said: “I still can't stand the sound of duct tape. The guards used it to immobilize their victims and start torturing them”.

“Several women who were held in other places said that during interrogations they were beaten, electrocuted, and threatened with sexual violence. They were also subjected to humiliating treatment that constituted a form of sexual violence, such as being forced to run naked from one room to another in the presence of male guards,” the report says.

In the text, we used the memoirs of women, who were political prisoners of the Gulag, published in the monograph by Oksana Kis “Ukrainian Women in the GULAG: to Survive Means to Win”.

Read the continuation of this research material tomorrow on hromadske.

The text was published with the support of Mediaset.