Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.

Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

"Kis’s book adds to the growing body of literature on the questions of gender and women’s experiences in the Gulag forced labour camps…Shows how in the face of hard labour, hunger, poor living conditions, rape, sexual violence and loss, prisoners have maintained hope, and how their survival became their way of defiance of the Soviet state…A valuable contribution to the field." - Women's History Review

"A particular strength of Kis’s study is that it presents the multiplicity of Ukrainian women’s voices and occasionally draws on the perspectives of Polish, German, Russian, and Russian speaking Jewish female Gulag survivors…Survival as Victory makes a significant contribution to the emerging scholarship on women’s Gulag experience and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers." - Canadian Slavonic Papers