This article is part of a larger, ongoing project on the formations of sexuality and class in memoirs of Soviet prisons and camps and their circulation in various Soviet and post- Soviet domains. I would like to thank the participants in the Modern Russian History and Culture discussion group (Manchester and Sheffield Universities, United Kingdom) as well as participants at two conferences, “Queering Central and Eastern Europe: National Features of Sexual Identities” (London, 2008) and “Emotions in Russian Literature and History” (Moscow, 2008), for insightful discussions of this project. I am grateful to Dan Healey, Jan Plamper, Mark D. Steinberg, Vera Tolz, and the two anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review for their productive comments on an earlier draft of this article. The epigraph is taken from Jonathan Dollimore, “Sexual Disgust,” in Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, eds., Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001), 368

1. Pidory is usually used for passive homosexuals; kobly is often used for the women who play the “masculine” role in same-sex relations; kovyrialkiis often used for the women who play the “feminine” role in same-sex relations. The link between homosexuality and criminality is almost a commonplace in Soviet and post-Soviet collective imagery, largely due to tile criminalization of male homosexuality by Iosif Stalin in 1933, when Article 121 was instituted, sentencing men to up to five years of imprisonment. Female sexuality in the Soviet years was medically pathologized rather than criminalized, but same-sex relations between women were often mentioned in references to prisons and camps, in particular in Soviet penal literature and in the late Soviet years also in the media. For more details, see Essig, Laurie, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and Other (Durham, 1999)Google Scholar; Healey, Dan, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kon, Igor'Semenovich, Lunnyi svet na zare: Liki i maski odnopoloi liubvi (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar.

2. Kuntsman, Adi, “Between Gulags and Pride Parades: Sexuality, Nation and Haunted Speech Acts,” GLQ A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2 -3 (2008): 263-87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. For a detailed discussion of the literary corpus of gulag memoirs, its history, development and internal tensions, see Toker, Leona, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington, 2000), 28-72Google Scholar. See also Holmgren, Beth, “Introduction,“ in Beth, Holmgren, ed., The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, 2003), ix–xxxix Google Scholar.

4. See, for example, a brief note on homosexuality in Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 61. On sexual relations between women, see Veronica, Shapovalov, ed. and trans., Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons (Lanham, Md., 2001), 39 Google Scholar.

5. For a discussion of intimacy among women in the camps, see Peterson, Nadya L., “Dirty Women: Cultural Connotations of Cleanliness in Soviet Russia,” in Goscilo, Helena and Holmgren, Beth, eds., Russia-Women-Culture (Bloomington, 1996) 171–208 Google Scholar. For a brief but insightful analysis of the way some women memoirists described same-sex relations, see Beth Holmgren, “For the Good of the Cause: Russian Women's Autobiography in the Twentieth Century,” in Clyman, Toby W and Greene, Diana, eds., Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, Conn., 1994), 133-35Google Scholar. Both Peterson and Holmgren emphasize the importance of class position in the memoirs of political prisoners; both address the relations of distance and repulsion expressed by women from the intelligentsia towards the “common criminals.“

6. Kozlovskii, Vladimir, Argo russkoi gomoseksual'noi subkul'tury: Materialy k izucheniiu (Benson, Vt., 1986)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Bulkin, Andrei, Zapiski golubogo (Moscow 1997), 326 Google Scholar.

7. Zhuk, Ol'ga, Russkie amazonki: Istoriia lesbiiskoi subkul'tury v Rossii, XX vek (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 97. Translation from Russian is mine.

9. Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual'noi subkul'tury, 338.

10. Zhuk, Russkie amazonki, 97.

11. Dollimore, “Sexual Disgust,” 368.

12. Ibid.

13. Ginzburg, Evgenia, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Boland, Ian (New York, 1981), 101 Google Scholar.

14. See, for example, Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 237.

15. For more examples of such descriptions in the memoirs, see Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual'noi subkul'tury and Zhuk, Russkie amazonki.

16. Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, 2004).Google Scholar

17. Jakobson, Roman, “Zametki o proze poeta Pasternaka,” Raboty po Poetike (1935; Moscow, 1987), 21–44 Google Scholar.

18. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. For a detailed discussion of cleanliness and its relation to gender, class, and morality in Soviet Russia, see Peterson, “Dirty Women,” 177-208.

20. I want to distinguish these women's masculine appearance by choice from a general degendering of women's appearance in the camps. Many imprisoned women resented and mourned die destruction of their femininity by extreme conditions, camp clothes, and hard physical labor.

21. Olitskaia, Ekaterina, Moi vospominaniia (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 243-44Google Scholar. Translation from Russian is mine.

22. The motive of fear is echoed by Vasilii Grossman, who describes lesbian relations in the camp as a “tragic and ugly world” that “caused chilling horror in the souls of thieves and killers.” Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich, Vse techet: Pozdniaia proza (Moscow, 1994), 319 Google Scholar. Translation from Russian is mine.

23. This was also true more generally for the descriptions of intimate relations between political prisoners. For an excellent analysis of the relations between class, sexual and moral purity, and the construction of memoir narratives, see Peterson, “Dirty Women,“ 177-208.

24. Ulanovskaia, Nadezhda and Ulanovskaia, Maiia, Istoriia odnoi sem'i: Memuary (St. Petersburg, 2003), 249-50Google Scholar. Translation from Russian is mine.

25. Shalamov, Varlam, “Women in the Criminal World,” in Kolyma Tales, trans. Glad, John (New York, 1980), 205 Google Scholar.

26. A passive role was linked to low status in the criminal hierarchy; many men were raped and abused and then forced into the status of passive homosexuals. See Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

27. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in James, Strachey, ed. and trans., Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1905), 7:123–245 Google Scholar.

28. Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, 2d ed., trans. Edmund, Jephcott (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

29. Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich, “Zhul'nicheskaia krov',” Preodolenie zla: Izbrannoe (Moscow, 2003), 564 Google Scholar. Translation from Russian is mine.

30. For an interesting discussion of animal metaphors in relations to sex between men in Soviet camps and the ways these metaphors are played out in post-Soviet popular fiction, see Borenstein, Eliot, “Band of Brothers: Homoeroticism and the Russian Action Hero,” Kultura 4, no. 2 (May 2008): 17–22 Google Scholar, atwww.kultura-rus.de (last accessed 26 February 2009).

31. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 97'.

32. Miller, William Ian, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 11 Google Scholar

33. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.

34. Tyler, Imogen, “Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain,” M/CJournal, 9 no. 5 (November 2006)Google Scholar, at journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/ 09-tyler.php (last accessed 26 February 2009); Skeggs, Beverley, Class, Self, Culture (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

35. Tyler, “Chav Scum.“

36. Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code was used for a variety of “antirevolutionary“ or “anti-Soviet” activities. In addition, the camps had their own “class system,“ as several survivors have noted: this system distinguished between different lengths of imprisonment, the denial of rights of settlement, and other civil rights.

37. Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, Eng., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Mosse, George L., Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Peterson, “Dirty Women.“

39. Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem'i, 250.

40. See Peterson, “Dirty Women.“

41. Shapovalov, ed. and trans., Remembering the Darkness, 279.

42. Svetlana Boym, “Loving in Bad Taste: Eroticism and Literary Excess in Marina Tsvetaeva's ‘The Tale of Sonechka,'” in Costlow, Jane T., Sandler, Stephanie, and Vowles, Judith, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1993), 158 Google Scholar.

43. The memoirists’ own silence is reinforced by editorial practices, not only samizdat and tamizdat during the Soviet regime, but also post-Soviet ones. For example, in Shapovalov's edited collection of women's memoirs of Soviet camps, sexual relations between women are confined to a single footnote. This is particularly surprising since one section of the book is devoted to sexuality. Shapovalov explains this absence by the lack of research on the topic. She then cites the memoir of V. R. Nikitina who describes the prostitutes she encountered in the camp in 1931—apparently the only example of lesbian relations known to the author. The prostitutes mentioned by Nikitina had girlfriends whom they were protecting with knives. The second part of the editor's long footnote takes an unexpected turn: she quotes extensively from Maiia Ulanovskaia, who mentions lesbian relations among both political and criminal women. The reader is left to wonder why Ulanovskaia has not been included in the collection. Her testimony should have been especially valuable for Shapovalov's collection because of its rarity and openness, its understanding and compassion towards love among women, and its approach, almost unique among women memoirists of the gulag.

44. We find similar stories in Shapovalov's collection. Most women describe sexual relations and partnerships with the criminals with reservation and shame; a notable exception is the story of Valentina Ievleva-Pavlenko, “Unedited Life,” in Shapovalov, ed. and trans., Remembering the Darkness, 317-53. Her narrative is structured as a series of love affairs, passion, and friendship with various male prisoners, “political” as well as “criminal.“

45. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 12-13.

46. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 12. Some women married former criminals after they were released and had setded in Kolyma. Having been denied die right to return to big cities and to their former lives, they settled and created new families there.

47. Ibid. Emphasis added.

48. Ibid., 104.

49. Ibid., 101.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 102.

52. Metaphors of hell are not unique to Ginzburg and are common in many memoirs of the former political prisoners.

53. As Peterson notes, for Ginzburg and odier women of her generation, the criminals are dirty inside and out; they are repulsive both physically and morally. Peterson, “Dirty Women,” 192.

54. Shalamov, “Women in the Criminal World,” 204-5.

55. Shalamov, “Zhul'nicheskaia krov',” 565.

56. Toker, Return from the Archipelago. See also Toker, Leona, “A Tale Untold: Varlam Shalamov's ‘A Day Off,'” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 1–8 Google Scholar; and Toker, Leona, “Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma,” in Galya, Diment and Yuri, Slezkine, eds., Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York, 1993), 151-70Google Scholar.

57. Shalamov, “A Day Off,” in Kolyma Tales, 110. Emphasis in the original.

58. “Beyond the turning the going became easier and our steps more rhythmical. At this pace I could recite poetry to myself, which is what I proceeded to do.” Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 100.

59. Bourdieu, Outline ofaTheory of Practice.

60. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.

61. Probyn, Elspeth, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London, 2000), 131 Google Scholar.

62. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 3-4.

64. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 86.

65. Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 153.

66. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 13.

67. The description of the puppy, licking the hand of its killer, has simultaneous associations with public execution, martyrdom, and religious sacrifice.

68. Shalamov, “A Day Off,” 110.

69. Ibid., 111.

70. Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 152-55.

71. Ibid., 153.

72. Shalamov, “A Day Off,” 111.

73. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.

74. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust.

75. Tellingly, Lev Samoilov (Klein), a Soviet ethnologist and a former camp prisoner, who in the 1980s was sentenced to a criminal colony outside Leningrad on grounds of homosexuality, called his book on the criminal subculture A Journey to the Upside-Down World. Samoilov, Lev, “Puteshestvie v perevernutyi mir,” Neva 4 (1989): 150-64Google Scholar.

76. Dollimore, “Sexual Disgust,” 368.

77. Two notable examples of such a shift are Guberman, Igor’, Progulki vokrug baraka: Roman (Moscow, 1993)Google Scholar and Ratushinskaia, Inna, Grey Is the Color of Hope, trans. Kojevnikov, Alyona (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. Both refer to the camps of the early 1980s.

78. Some papers and magazines of the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, offered accounts of same-sex abuse in male as well as female prisons.

79. Gidoni, Aleksandr, Solntse idet s zapada: Kniga vospominanii (Toronto, 1980)Google Scholar.

80. Healey's pioneering work on the history of homosexuality and lesbianism in die early Soviet period and his particular emphasis on die role of the gulag and die clinic as two sites where same-sex relations were contained begs for a much needed continuation into die late Soviet decades. See Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. Zhuk's Russkie amazonki is yet to be translated into English.

81. Gennadii Trifonov, “Sovetskie gomoseksualisty: Vchera, segodnia, zavtra,” at az.gay.ru/articles/articles/slavlc.html (last accessed 26 February 2009).

82. Plamper, Jan, “Foucault's Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 267 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83. Notably, the two sometimes intersect: former political prisoners became audiors of academic articles on the “criminal subculture.“

84. Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, 1997), 195 Google Scholar.

85. Holmgren, “Introduction.“