It is my goal to demonstrate, based on newly collected personal testimonies and previously unavailable documents, that the Soviet deportations were a predominantly female and highly gender-specific experience. Because of the distorted gendered perception of the deporta tions, next to nothing has been written on the particular experience of German women in deportation and exile. Eric Schmaltz noted that 'on the whole, the topic of Russian-German women's experiences under communism beckons enterprising historians interested in cultural and gender studies'. Separated from their fathers, husbands and sons, German women survived a tragedy unlike any other in the Soviet Union of the 1940s and 1950s. Their experiences had many points in common with the experiences of Russian and other women who also suffered from abnormally strenuous labour conditions and malnutrition, and from the heavy, predominantly male casualties of the Great Patriotic War and resulting gender imbalances. 'German' experiences also had many points in common with women of various nationalities who underwent deportation immediately before, during and after the war. But the experiences of German women were unique for their very 'Germanness', for the unique status these people had in tsarist Russia and for the stigma they had to bear as 'damned fascists' during and after the Great Patriotic War. © 2005 University of Glasgow.

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World Eurasia gender issue historical perspective Eastern Hemisphere forced migration Russian Federation