Women in Soviet Prisons FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Celmina, a Latvian who now lives in the West, spent the years from 1962 to 1966 in a Soviet prison camp for having foreign magazines in her possession, despite the fact that she was a translator. Her story of those years contains much that is, unfortunately, familiarthe cold, the dreariness, the monotonybut it also offers new insights into the Russian penal system. The people tend to accept the capricious and savage nature of punishment; they are accustomed to arrests for no real crime and (in the Stalinist era) sentences without trial of 25 years' imprisonment, a maximum since reduced to 15. The saddest prisoners are the orphans, who seem doomed to the gulags for the rest of their lives. The regime is particularly harsh on the very religious, especially Jehovah's Witnesses. Celmina tells of the female prisoners she met, from peasants to intellectuals, including a former mistress of Boris Pasternak. She has also provided drawings every bit as stark as her text. January
Library Journal
Celmina served from 1962 to 1966 in a Soviet labor camp for intent to disseminate anti-Soviet material, a sentence based upon her possession of foreign magazines. Later expelled from the USSR, she has now brought the personal tale of her prison experience to the Western reader. The episodes and people she describes vividly depict the life of a woman prisoner during that period and reveal much of the system and the prison subculture. As a Latvian, she holds some contempt generally for the Russians, but her account of hardship is almost understated. While enlightening for the general reader, the book is not a broad study, as the title might suggest. Nevertheless, it is a valuable addition to the literature. Rena Fowler, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette
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