Tatsiana Astrouskaya
Why one story – Ginzburg’s – is widely remembered and celebrated, while the other – Heniush’s – remained nearly unknown for decades? It is becoming increasingly clear that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the diversity of experiences of dissent and resistance has remained largely overlooked. This has led to a persistent paradox: many individuals who had once supported or even helped construct the Soviet repressive system, but later suffered under it, have been recognized as its most prominent opponents. Meanwhile, many others who consistently rejected the system and never participated in it have been largely forgotten.
The Memories of Gulag and Their Contemporary Dimension
The memory of the victims of the Gulag continues to disturb our minds. In recent years, it has again received renewed scholarly attention, with a growing focus on women’s memoirs. This renewed interest was, initially, triggered by the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Gulag remains one of the gloomiest aspects of Soviet history. Yet, the current outbursts of violence and repression in many parts of the former Soviet space also motivate us to engage with what Aleida Assmann has termed the “transformative power of memory.” It encourages a reconsideration of the meaning of dissent and resistance to the authoritative power of the state, again drawing on Assmann, by doing so in a more dialogic and inclusive way. Such a perspective keeps in that resistance practices were bound to, and rooted in, unique individual experiences and identities.
In the history of Belarus, Gulag memories entered public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the wave of democratization and nation-building. In Belarus, and not only there, this memory became one of the pillars of de-Sovietization. The horrors of the Gulag and the dreadful suffering of its victims, of which the average Soviet citizen had earlier only limited knowledge, now became embedded in the collective memory. But this knowledge was often used not only to understand and remember. Thus, the trope of genocide, as Alexandra Goujon already demonstrated in 1999, was effectively employed. Stalinist repressions – and later, Soviet state politics more broadly–were labelled as genocide by activists of the Belarusian People’s Front and its leader Zianon Pazniak, one of the first among the new intelligentsia to use this designation.
It was in this short moment of democratic upsurge in Belarus that the autobiography of the poet, activist, and Gulag prisoner Larysa Heniush was published. It first appeared as a journal publication in Maladosts’ (Youth) in 1990. The book, entitled Spovedz’ (Confession) – a title chosen by the publisher, not the author–was printed by the official publishing house Mastatskaia Litaratura in 1993, just one year before Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power and began to dismantle democratic initiatives. The print run was relatively small – 7,000 copies. Spovedz’ was not the only recollection of the Gulag published at the time: already in 1987/1988 the Russian-language journal Neman published a translation of Barys Mikulich’s (1912–1954) Apovesc’ dlia siabe (A Novel for Myself ), and in 1988 Polymia (Flame) began with the publication Siarhei Hrakhoŭski’s (1913–2002) trilogy, also titled Spovedz’. Mikulich and Hrakhoŭski were both authors and Gulag survivors. Still, Heniush’s memoir was certainly one of the rare ones. Notably, it was written long before the onset of perestroika and the relaxation of censorship in the Soviet Union, and by a woman intellectual.
In what follows, I will focus on Spovedz’ and its author, placing the text in its historical and political context, while drawing comparisons with another prominent work of this kind–Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (1967), originally written as Krutoi Marshrut: Khronika vremen kulta lichnosti.
The main interest of this short essay is how writings about the Gulag were determined by individual biography, particularly as they are shaped and expressed through gender. While Spovedz’ goes far beyond the immediate experience of the Gulag, the camp years were undoubtedly a formative event for Larysa Heniush–what Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine have described as “meaning-infusing” historical experiences.
A further dimension of this essay lies in the possible relevance of these historical practices of dissent for understanding women’s opposition to the Lukashenka regime. In particular, I am thinking of what has been described by Olga Shparaga (2021) and others as the “Revolution with a Womanly Face”.
Larysa Heniush and Evgenia Ginzburg: Lives as Reflected in the Testimonies
Evgenia Ginzburg was born in 1904 in Moscow into a well-to-do Jewish family. The family later moved to Kazan, Tatarstan, where she grew up and attended high school. She graduated from the Eastern Pedagogical Institute in Kazan in 1922. Ginzburg worked as a teacher, taught the history of the Communist Party, became a journalist, and later served as editor of the newspaper Krasnaia Tataria (Red Tataria). She joined the Communist Party at the age of 28 and became a devoted party member. In the mid-1920s she married Pavel Aksenov (1899–2001, later – also a victim of Stalin purges), the Chair of the Tatar’s City Workers’ Council and, since 1935 the Chair of the Kazan City Executive Committee, with whom she had her son Vasilii (1932–2009) – in the future – one of the most prominent Russian non-conformist writers of the late Soviet period.
In the Journey into the Whirlwind, the author’s narrative begins in 1934, with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (VKP(b)). This event had direct consequences for her. She was among the many communists caught up in the wave of purges that followed.
In 1935, she was expelled from the Party and suspended from her university work. In 1937, she was arrested, accused of belonging to a “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group,” and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment under Article 58, parts 8 and 11. Ginzburg was first held in the Yaroslavl prison and then sent to labor camps in the Magadan oblast. She was released in 1948, but was forced to remain in the city of Magadan until her full rehabilitation in 1955.
After her release, Ginzubrg moved to Lviv, Soviet Ukraine, with her new husband – she married the medical doctor Anton Valter during her imprisonment. It is believed that she wrote her memoir during this period. From 1966 until her death in 1977, Ginzburg lived in Moscow. Krutoi Marshrut was first published in 1967 in Milan. In the Soviet Union, it appeared as a book only in 1990, published by Sovetskii pisatel’. Notably, the prominent Belarusian war novelist Vasil Bykaŭ wrote the foreword to this edition.
Larysa Heniush (née Miklashevich) begins her recollection with the description of her place, paying much attention to her family. She was born into an impoverished petty gentry family in Zhlobaŭtsy, Vaŭkavysk region, Second Polish Republic (after 1945 – Belarus). She graduated from the Polish Gymnasium in Vaŭkavysk in 1928. Remarkably, Evgenia Ginzburg’s father stems from Hrodna, then the Russian Empire, and one of the most important centers and largest Belarusian cities today. There are about seventy kilometers between Hrodna and Heniush’s birthplace. In 1935, Larysa married Janka Heniush, a young medical student at the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague. During a semester break visit to his parents, he fell in love with the resolute and energetic Larysa–like himself, a devoted Belarusian.
In 1937, Heniush left Western Belarus (then part of the Second Polish Republic) and moved to Prague, in interwar Czechoslovakia. She relocated there with her young son Jurka (1935–1985), in the future a medical doctor and a talented author, to join her husband, Janka Heniush, who stayed in Prague after his graduation. In Prague, she became actively involved with the Belarusian People’s Republic government-in-exile and began writing and publishing poetry.
In 1948, the Heniush couple was forcibly expatriated from Czechoslovakia. Both were accused of “helping international bourgeoisie” and “participation in anti-Soviet organization” (articles 66 and 76 of the BSSR Criminal Code) and sentenced to 25 years in labor camps. Larysa Heniush spent seven years in the Gulag. She was released, but only partially rehabilitated in 1956.
Upon her return to Soviet Belarus, Heniush settled in Zelva, a small town in the Hrodna region. She continued to write poetry–some of it officially published, some circulated clandestinely. It was in Zelva that she wrote her autobiography. In the summer of 1982, just one year before her death, she secretly handed the manuscript to a friend, historian and archaeologist Mikhas Charniaŭski. The text was typewritten and almost unedited.
When publishing it, Charniaŭski gave the memoir the title Spovedz’ (Confession), possibly alluding to Heniush’s deep Christian faith. Yet Heniush does not confess in this text. Rather, she recounts the story of her life–with all its highs and lows–and tells of many others whose lives were affected, and often broken, by two totalitarian regimes. If anything, her memoir is not a confession but a testimony.
Writing as Resistance: Two Women, Two Fates, Two Testimonies
Spovedz’ includes Heniush’s reflections on her adolescence in interwar Poland and her ten years in Prague before, during, and just after the Second World War. Nearly half of the book is devoted to her years in the labor camps of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic–specifically in Inta (Intalag) and Abedz’ (Abez’).
Unlike Evgenia Ginzburg, whose narrative focuses primarily on personal suffering and the brutality of the system, Heniush weaves a broader story. She traces a continuity from her family’s legacy, to her intellectual and political work in Prague, to her stance on fascism and her perception of the Soviet reality she lived through, including the period of so-called Brezhnev Stagnation.
Still, the Gulag experience remains central in her narrative. It shapes how she understands and recounts both the past and the present. Spovedz’ is a unique text in the context of Soviet Belarus. It was written without regard for any censorship institution–a rare act in its time. The opposite was true for Evgenia Ginzburg. It is known that she once had a more radical version of her memoirs, which she destroyed in Lviv during the wave of repressions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the late 1960s.
Larysa Heniush openly condemned the Soviet regime as criminal. While Ginzburg exposed the atrocities of Stalin’s rule, Heniush went further, comparing Soviet crimes to those committed by Hitler’s Nazi regime. For her, there was no essential difference between the two. If discovered by the authorities, making such a comparison in the late 1970s or early 1980s could have easily earned her another prison term.
The act of writing memoirs in the 1960s–and even more so in the 1970s–was already an act of resistance. Ginzburg hoped to publish her recollections officially. There was, for a brief moment, a window of possibility during the height of Khrushchev’s liberalization, when the Soviet state cautiously tolerated public reflection on the Gulag experience. The most prominent example was the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича, 1962). It is known, however, that during this period, hundreds of Gulag testimonies were written and submitted to the editorial boards of Soviet literary magazines–only a few of them found their way to the reader. Ginzburg received support from several prominent literary figures. She corresponded with Samuil Marshak and consulted Aleksandr Tvardovskii, the poet and editor of Novyi mir literary journal. But in the end, Novyi mir rejected the publication.
The memoir written by Larysa Heniush, however, was unthinkable for official publication until the final years of the Soviet Union. Its only place was in samizdat. It is very likely that Heniush had heard of, or even read, Ginzburg’s memoir. By the 1970s, Krutoi marshrut was well known among the Belarusian intelligentsia. Perhaps it even served as an inspiration.
Before her arrest, Ginzburg was deeply convinced of the legitimacy of the Soviet order. Even after years in prison camps, she remained an adherent of communism. Heniush, by contrast, associated equality and personal dignity not with ideology, but with Christian morality. National identity was another central idea for her. Her strong sense of Belarusian identity shaped her discontent with the Soviet state, which she never accepted. Recently, Oksana Kis has also emphasized the central role of national and religious identity in her study of Ukrainian women’s experiences in the Gulag.
The Gulag Mothers and Their Sons
Both memoirs also deal with the complexity of family relations, particularly through the lens of gender. Gendered experience plays an important role in both texts. Sheila Fitzpatrick has argued that in women’s narratives of the October Revolution, one can observe a sense of superiority over men. As it seems, a similar pattern is evident in the memoirs of Ginzburg and Heniush. Both depict women–including themselves–as more faithful to ideas (whether communist or national), more intuitive, and better equipped to endure without making compromises with their own conciseness. While they do not abandon traditional female roles, they demonstrate agency by refining and adapting survival strategies.
Another powerful intersection is the relationship between “Gulag mothers” and their sons–a theme that runs through both narratives, and arguably extends beyond the text itself. Evgeniia lost his first son, Aleksei, in WWII; he perished in Leningrad (today: Saint Petersburg) during the Siege. And the relationship with her second son, the writer Vasilii Aksenov, was not easy. In a recently published collection of letters exchanged between Evgenia Ginzburg and Vasilii, he is described as an enfant terrible–a difficult child, a rebel. Could this rebellious nature reflect a broader dynamic between Gulag mothers and their children?
Here, we find striking parallels between these two life stories. Both Vasili Aksenov and Jurka Heniush were taken from their mothers at a young age. Vasili was five. Jurka, slightly more fortunate, was already twelve. But later, it was as if they switched places. Vasilii was raised by his uncle and his family and had, by comparison, a happier childhood. Jurka, on the other hand, spent his teenage years among what Larysa described as “strange, wicked people.” He could not rejoin his parents, even after their return from the Gulag. He later became addicted to alcohol, so the relations between Larysa and Jurka were also complicated.
Spovedz’, written when Jurka was already in his forties, is pierced with a sense of guilt and anxiety. Heniush saw her son’s suffering–past and present–as the direct result of her decision to resist the Soviet regime and to follow her poetic calling. By contrast, Ginzburg–and perhaps many other Gulag mothers–tended to see both themselves and their children as victims of the system, rather than as agents who had made fateful choices.
“And… maybe the heart of my people is still beating and [it] will burst with protest…”
These two autobiographies were written by, so to speak, ideological rivals. One was penned by a committed communist, the other by a staunch anti-communist. So why compare them?
Evgenia Ginzburg’s Gulag recollections are among the most acclaimed of their kind–exemplary even–though she represented only one thread of a diverse generational experience. Ginzburg was a Jewish communist, a type so vividly portrayed by Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century. Larysa Heniush, by contrast, was “eternally, timelessly, a-temporally” devoted to the Belarusian land and nation. And yet, these two autobiographies–both written by women intellectuals–share much in common. In each case, the Gulag experience became a deeply formative event. It reshaped how their authors remembered and narrated their lives both before and after imprisonment. But also, their experiences as women, wives of the Gulag prisoners, and mothers of children who suffered a long parting from their families and the hostility of their surroundings.
Another reason that drew me to bring these texts together was, perhaps, a desire to understand why one story–Ginzburg’s–is widely remembered and celebrated, while the other – Heniush’s –remained nearly unknown for decades. It is becoming increasingly clear that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the diversity of experiences of dissent and resistance has remained largely overlooked. This has led to a persistent paradox: many individuals who had once supported or even helped construct the Soviet repressive system, but later suffered under it, have been recognized as its most prominent opponents. Meanwhile, many others who consistently rejected the system and never participated in it have been largely forgotten. The chances of national activists to be heard with their stories and concerns, was as it seems, much lower. They were sandwiched between the wary attitude of the West and the direct danger of been accused and persecuted in the Soviet Union.
Heniush’s autobiography was brought to broader public attention largely thanks to the efforts of national activists in the 1990s, mostly male intellectuals. But in this process, it was also partly instrumentalized–as a powerful testimony exposing the criminality of the Soviet regime. While this is certainly true, Spovedz’ is much more than that.
Heniush presents herself as a Belarusian woman poet and leader, as a believer, as a wife and mother–not only to her own son but, in a symbolic sense, to the Belarusian nation. In the Gulag, she was even called Matsi (Mother) by fellow Belarusian prisoners. These roles became the foundation of her survival and resistance. Her memoir, in this light, is also a unique contribution to transnational memory and history.
These practices of survival and resistance take on renewed significance today. As of now (August 2025), there are 175 women political prisoners in Belarus, according to the Human Rights Centre Viasna (Spring). Spovedz’ already foreshadows many of the tropes that have since emerged in the women’s protests: strength, solidarity, siastrynstva (sisterhood), motherhood, self- sacrifice, and a deep moral conviction. As Natalia Paulovich has argued, these have become defining forces of the Revolution with a Womanly Face.
“And…maybe the heart of my people is still beating and [it] will burst with protest against the sadism [violence?] one day?”- wrote Heniush in the late 1970s. Her memory and legacy continue to be suppressed by the current regime in Belarus, yet even if the Belarusian Revolution have not succeeded yet, these hopes in many ways has become a reality.
Tatsiana Astrouskaya – PhD, is a research fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg and teaches Digital History at the University of Giessen. She is the author of the award-winning book: Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses (1968–1988) (Harrassowitz, 2019, further editions 2022, 2025). Her research focuses on the history of cultural and political dissent, memory politics, and digital transformation in the post-socialist space.
The first idea of this essay was presented at the 7th Annual “Belarusian Stuides in the 21st Century” Conference in London, organized by the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum and the University College London. I would like to thank you organizers and participants for the questions and discussion.
Sources:
Aleida Assmann, Chapter 1. The Transformative Power of Memory. Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives, edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015, 23–37;
Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988). Intelligentsia, samizdat and non-conformist discourses, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019;
Tatsiana Astrouskaya, “Łarysa Hienijuš and the History of Belarusian Samvydaŭ” in Łarysa Hienijuš, Spiritus flat ubi vult: Vershy 1945–1947, London: Skaryna Press, 2025, 5–10;
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