The Experiences of Female Ethnic Prisoners in Soviet Camps between Collective Memory and Historiographical Debate

The article addresses the problems of studying the history of totalitarianism in the USSR in the context of collective memory and working with oral sources. The study examines women's experiences and the reasons for their silencing through the lens of historiographical analysis, shedding light on the serious fragmentation of historiography about the USSR concerning ethnic cleansing, due to the reasons for the classification of archives and ideological evaluations. Basically, the research focuses on the collective memory of Russian Germans of the deportations of 1941, the repressions of the 1930s, and life in concentration camps in the 1940s and 1950s. The main historical sources used were interviews with victims of ethnic cleansing in the USSR, principally collected during field research in Russia in 2018-2020.