VITSCHE TALKS: Beauty That Saved Their Worlds: Ukrainian Women’s Creativity in the Gulag
22 November 2025, 17:00Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, BerlinLanguage: ENEntrance: free donation
Registration is required: Click here
Between the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of Ukrainian women were imprisoned in the Gulag for real or alleged ties to the national anti-Soviet resistance. Despite hunger, violence, and dehumanizing conditions, they sang, wrote poetry, embroidered, and created art. What meaning did creativity hold for women facing daily survival? And what can their handmade artifacts tell us about resilience and dignity under total oppression? The lecture draws on Oksana Kis’ award-winning book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard, 2021).
Speaker: Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, a head of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine and a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History.