UPCOMING EVENTS
OPEN TO PUBLIC: The Carsey-Wolf Center Virtual Presentation, University of Santa Barbara
The Gulag was created in the early 1930s as political prisoners and victims of Stalin's collectivization were shipped to remote camps and special settlements. Working at subsistence, they were expected to produce "surpluses: for the "building of socialism." The Soviet Gulag, regrettably copied by other totalitarian regimes, was introduced to Western audiences by Alexander Solzhenytsin and has become a mainstay in university studies of Russian history. The focus of this mini-course is interviews with six women survivors, all of whom have passed away since their interviews.
Virtual Discussion/ “Women of the Gulag”:
A virtual Q&A with Marianna Yarovskaya and Paul Gregory
Director/producer Marianna Yarovskaya and author/producer Paul Gregory will join Alexandra Noi (History, UCSB) for a virtual discussion of this fascinating documentary. Two days before the event, registered participants will receive a screening link to view the film.
 
This virtual event will take place via Zoom. The event is free but prior registration is required. Registration will close one hour before the event. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Time/ Location: 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM (PDT), Zoom


*Open to public

**Virtual event

DVD and Blu-ray or streaming rights are now available for order by university libraries and history, women's studies and Slavic programs 

They can be ordered with or without Paul Gregory’s Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives. We understand that such orders are usually placed by libraries based upon faculty recommendations.

Go to www.womenofthegulag.com to order (under “shop” upper right)
 
VD An Online course from Marianna Yarovskaya and Paul Gregory


Our mini-course on the Soviet Gulag covers one of the darkest moments of human history. The course has been developed for on-line instruction. The curriculum consists of student viewing of our Oscar shortlisted film, Women of the Gulag, and reading selective chapters of the scholarly book of the same name on which it was based. The course will be capstoned  by a lecture and Q&A session with the film director, Marianna Yarovskaya. Arrangements can also be made to include book author, Paul Gregory.


*The mini-course is compatible with university courses on Russian history, film, literature, and area studies.

ASEEES Conference
Women of the Gulag
Fri, November 6, 8:00 to 10:00pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 16
Session Submission Type: Film
Brief Description
Women of the Gulag is a 2018 US documentary film directed by Marianna Yarovskaya and based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory (2013). Best Documentary Short shortlist nominee, 2018 Academy Awards. A collection of unique and candid interviews with women who survived the Stalin's repression of the 1930s. The film was shot for five years, the team found its six heroines in the most diverse and remote corners of the former Soviet Union – in Ural, Far East, Sukhumi, and Moscow Oblast. Today, these women are deeply over eighty, but they continue to live and for each of them it was very important to tell their own story.


Time/Location:: Zoom, 8:00 to 10:00pm EST

Screening / In Conversations: WOMEN OF THE GULAG

Conversation with Marianna Yarovskaya and Paul Gregory
WGTV (Working Group on Cinema and Television)
Session Participants:Introduced by: Paul R. Gregory (Hoover Institution) 
Questions and Answers Moderated by: Lydia Hart Roberts (UCLA) l

Virtual Event




*For registered participants only

**Virtual event

THE INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL REMEMBRANCE PRESENTS WOMEN OF THE GULAG FILM AT "THE KATYN MASSACRE" CONFERENCE
Echoes of Katyn

Poland, Warsaw
The Institute of National Remembrance
"The Katyń Massacre” conference 
23rd of October
Echoes of Katyn International Film/ Festival on Totalitarianisms
Screening / In Conversations: WOMEN OF THE GULAG

Date: Tuesday, October 23, 2020
Time/ Location: 9pm Warsaw Time, Zoom


*For registered participants only

**Virtual event
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
RUSSIAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Women of the Gulag: Film Screening & Discussion with Director Marianna Yarovskaya and Producer-Author Paul Gregory. The film will be introduced by Yarovskaya and Gregory and a discussion will follow.

Date: Wednesday, October 28
Time/ Location: 7:00pm to 8:30pm (Eastern Time, US and Canada), Zoom


Meeting ID: 946 9117 459

*For registered participants only

**Virtual event
A virtual Q&A with Marianna Yarovskaya and Paul Gregory
(Director/Producer of Women of the Gulag)
Marianna Yarovskaya is s Russian-American documentary filmmaker who is the director and producer of the 2018 Academy Award short- listed documentary film Women of the Gulag. Her first film, Undesirables won a Student Academy Award in 2001. Since then, she has worked for dozens of programs for Discovery Channel, National Geographic, History Channel, Greenpeace, Animal Planet as producer, executive producer, and senior editor. She has credits on over 80 documentary films and TV programs, including research credits on two Academy Award-winning and one Academy nominated film. Producers Guild of America (PGA) member.
(Author of Women of the Gulag: Five Remarkable Lives, Producer of Women of the Gulag)
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution/Stanford. Author of Women of the Gulag (Hoover), Terror by Quota (Yale), and editor of the 8 volume History of Stalin’s Gulag (Rosspen). He has worked in the Hoover archives for over 15 years. His archival research has formed the basis for more than eight books. Gregory is also a professor emeritus from the University of Houston.
PRESS

Vladimir Bukovsky on Women of the Gulag
 
Vladimir Bukovsky (1942-2019) - regime opponent, presidential candidate, dissident. In December 1976 he was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán.
 
         The film Women of the Gulag is an important document of the era.
The USSR was a huge zone of human suffering.
           Inside that zone there was also a hell that contained its powerless slaves—the GULAG.
           But within that hell, there was an even more terrible hell.
           Varlam Shalamov, the great writer who lived through the GULAG hell, said the women in the camps were slaves of the slaves.
           Their experience was so horrific that eyewitnesses were afraid to describe it in detail.
           I could not understand how you can make a film about “what a person should not know, should not see, and if he has, he is better off dead,” as Shalamov wrote.
           Marianna Yarovskaya has managed to do it. Her heroines, who survived the GULAG, say almost nothing about their suffering. But I could hear their desperate screams during their silences.
           To go through such suffering without going mad is a spiritual feat.
           To make such a film is a moral feat.
           I would compare the appearance of Women of the Gulag with the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
           The Gulag Archipelago was awarded the Nobel Prize.
           I am glad that there is the opportunity to award an Oscar to Women of the Gulag.
 
translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
“Women of the Gulag is not just a fine historical documentary but a searing film of rare testimony by female survivors of Stalinist inhumanity. A film made just in time.”
Robert Service, Professor of History, emeritus, Oxford
Владимир Буковский призвал Киноакадемию вручить Оскар фильму «Женщины Гулага» (2018)
Фильм «Женщины Гулага»– важный документ эпохи.
СССР был огромной зоной страдания людей.
Внутри этой бесчеловечной зоны был еще и ад, где содержались бесправные рабы этой зоны - ГУЛАГ.
 Но и в этом аду был еще более страшный ад.
 Как однажды сказал Варлам Шаламов, женщины в зонах были рабами рабов.
 Это такая страшная нечеловеческая тема, о которой боялись подробно писать даже свидетели преступлений против этих несчастных.
 Я не понимал, как  можно сделать фильм о том, «чего человек не должен знать, не должен видеть, а если видел - лучше ему умереть», как написал Варлам Шаламов.
 Марианне Яровской это удалось. Её героини, прошедшие ГУЛАГ, почти ничего не говорят о своих страданиях. Я услышал их отчаянные вопли во время их молчания.
 Пережить такие страдания и не сойти с ума – духовный подвиг.
 Снять такой фильм – нравственный подвиг.
 Я бы сравнил появления фильма «Женщины Гулага» с выходом «Архипелага Гулага» Солженицына.
 «Архипелаг Гулаг» человечество оценило Нобелевской премией.
 Я рад, что у человечества появилась возможность оценить фильм «Женщины Гулага» Оскаром.
PAST EVENTS AND AWARDS
Best Director in the Documentary Short Category
Hong Kong International Documentary Film Festival - 2019 Critics' Choice Award

October 16th-22nd 2019


EIDF 2019, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
AUDIENCE AWARD - Best Film
17-15 August 2019
The 16th EBS International Documentary Festival

Grand Festival Award

Special Screening
Hosted by Kennan Institute
BEST DOCUMENTARY - REGINA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, CANADA
BEST DOCUMENTARY - CHANGING FACE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
BEST DOCUMENTARY - DALMATIA FILM FESTIVAL, CROATIA
BEST DOCUMENTARY - REYKJAVIK FILM FESTIVAL, ICELAND



Women of the Gulag, a documentary film based on Hoover Fellow Paul Gregory’s Hoover Institution Press book of the same title, has been named Best Short Documentary at the 2019 Reykjavík Film Festival.