Stalin’s Purges & Forgotten Women’s Histories by Ekaterina Drozdovica is an exclusive Spotlight feature celebrating Women’s History Month.
Working at BookBlast® as social media coordinator, a key feature of my role is supporting the promotion of the monthly Translation Book Club alongside Georgia de Chamberet. As a bilingual reader in Russian and English, I’m a passionate advocate for literature in translation. I believe that reading across cultures is an act of peace-making, helping us to see our shared humanity.
For Women’s History Month, I pitched to Georgia two Russian books I’ve read in both languages: Sofia Petrovna, a novella by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Aline Werth; and Into the Whirlwind, a memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg, translated by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari. Both titles evoke women’s lives under Stalin’s Great Terror. They are published by Persephone Books, an independent publisher and bookshop known for its elegant reprints of overlooked or forgotten 20th-century women writers.
Stalin may seem like a relic of another era, but political strongmen are on the rise. In 2024, over two-thirds of the world’s population lived under authoritarian rule. Yet much of the conversation focuses on the men in power, not on how these regimes shape the private lives of ordinary people. These two stories reveal the psychological toll of government control, propaganda and oppression.
Liminal spaces and not knowing
Sofia Petrovna is the only known work about Stalin’s purges written not in hindsight, but as and when the purges were being executed. Lydia Chukovskaya, editor and literary critic, wrote her novella in secret over the winter of 1939–1940, with little hope that the manuscript would survive. Her prose is economical and precise, “in the spirit of socialist realism”.
Sofia Petrovna is a widowed, middle-aged typist working in a publishing house. Though largely uninterested in politics, she admires her only son Kolya, a devoted Communist, and passively agrees with his views. As friends and colleagues begin to disappear in a wave of arrests, Sofia Petrovna is initially shocked. To resolve her mental discomfort, inner conflict, contradictory thoughts, the tug-of-war in her head, that uneasy feeling that something is not quite right, she accepts the fantastical, fabricated accusations.
Everything changes when Kolya is arrested. Sofia Petrovna believes that it’s all a mistake and he’ll be released. She joins the exhausted women queuing day and night outside prisons, shuttled between institutions in search of any trace of their disappeared loved ones. Her mental collapse mirrors the breakdown of logic around her. One striking image is of a woman with blue lips, whose husband has just been arrested – a figure who later reappears in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem.
The novella stands out as a narrative by a different type of witness – one who is neither imprisoned nor interrogated. Unlike the detailed descriptions of Ivan Denisovich’s labour camp described by Solzhenitsyn, the tragedy of Sofia Petrovna is set in the liminal spaces its author knew firsthand: queues, waiting rooms, anonymous offices, and the agony of not knowing. Chukovskaya’s husband, astrophysicist Matvei Bronstein, was arrested and executed in 1937. The state officially notified her of his death only twenty years later.
Similar themes appear in the Oscar-nominated 2024 drama I Am Still Here which follows the arrest of Rubens Paiva during the 1964 Brazilian coup. His wife, Eunice, searches for answers about her husband’s disappearance – which, unlike Sofia Petrovna’s case, leads to her own brief arrest and torture. Both narratives illustrate how political repression harms more than just its direct victims – its impact reverberates through families and society at large.
An historian in the gulag
Unlike Sofia Petrovna, Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind is a story told from inside prison. Ginzburg was an assistant professor of communist history, a journalist, and a committed party member. During the purges of 1937, she was arrested under false accusations, and sent to Siberia, which she miraculously survived. Ginzburg started writing her memoir after rehabilitation in 1955, and it was the first non-fiction narrative about gulag written by a woman.
The book is split into two parts: her arrest, interrogation, and confinement; and her deportation and the first three years in a Siberian labour camp. Like Chukovskaya, Ginzburg writes in realist and economical prose. Beyond describing the horrors, she brings a nuanced historian’s insight into the mass paranoia and societal blindness of the purges.
As Ginzburg moves from prison to prison, she meets a growing cast of characters–party officials, academics, old revolutionaries, religious believers, Volga Tatars (a distinct ethnic group from Crimean Tatars, although of the same Turkic origin), Poles, and even German actress Carola Neher (named by Ginzburg as Carola Heintschke).
Ginzburg links past, present, and future, to place these mass arrests in a wider historical context. For example, through the character Lyama who is warm and caring, we learn about the repression of Chinese Eastern Railway workers.
Although Into the Whirlwind portrays suffering more directly, the memoir feels more hopeful than Sofia Petrovna. Perhaps because of its intimate portrayal of human connection and solidarity between prisoners against the brutality of state repression.
The memoir remains influential among contemporary Russian women writers. In autofictional Wound, Oksana Vasyakina recalls buying it for her mother to read on her deathbed. An extraordinary read, Wound chronicles a trip the narrator takes across Russia to their home in Siberia to bury her mother’s ashes, becoming an exploration of woundedness passed on through time across the generations.
Warnings from the Past
Chukovskaya and Ginzburg tried to publish their works along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during Khrushchev’s thaw, but were rejected on ideological grounds. Compared to the peasant protagonist Ivan Denisovich, their stories centred too much on women city-dwellers and the Soviet intelligentsia.
Neither work was officially published in Russia until 1988, during Gorbachev’s perestroika – a reform movement that some argue helped bring about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. For decades, they circulated by means of samizdat, a clandestine form of self-publishing, and were smuggled to the West (more about this in Yasha Klots’ Tamizdat). Chukovskaya lived to see her novella published; Ginzburg died a decade before her memoir appeared in print.
Beyond reviving forgotten women’s history, these stories show how fear, denial, and groupthink underpin and maintain authoritarian regimes. Both books challenge readers to consider the following: in a world clouded by disinformation and collective denial, can we preserve our capacity for critical thought, or do we just retreat into the comfort of willful blindness?
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