On Wednesday, October 25, the Yale Department of History hosted Anna Müller, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who delivered a talk on her recent book written from inside the women’s Stalinist prison cell If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland. The talk was moderated by Marci Shore, an associate professor of intellectual history at Yale.
In her introductory remarks, Dr. Shore emphasized the unique significance of this project that had been a long time in developing. The heroines of Dr. Müller’s book are political prisoners with diverse backgrounds and unique personal stories. Some were confined for their active participation in the underground political organizations, and some due to the mere fact of being a mother, a daughter, or a lover of the alleged enemies of the state. One way or another, having found themselves in gruesome conditions of Stalinist prisons, these women had to go on with their lives. This book places the reader inside the prison cell and traces the lives of these women, looking at what happens to them, “what kinds of techniques or strategies they maintained and what kinds of relationships they developed” throughout the years of confinement and after the release.
Professor Shore pointed out that having spent a great deal of her intellectual life researching on what happens to people in captivity Dr. Müller came to this project attentive to the way in which gender is created and recreated. “One of the reasons why this project became such a fascinating thing to watch was that it was extraordinary to look at the dynamics of gender,” emphasized Professor Shore, adding that, “It is almost a test case of how far the biological irreducibility goes.” She also pointed out that the new Soviet historiography that came out in the 1990s played a great role in the development of the project for it involved going back to Hannah Arendt’s idea of subjectivity and looking at what totalitarianism does to subjectivity — whether an individual subject can be destroyed before the actual physical person is killed. Moreover, it involved reading Arendt through Foucault’s concept of power as being discursive, “that all relationships are power relationships, and that where there is power there is always resistance.” This, in turn, means ‘that power is not only repressive but can also be creative.’ As Professor Shore noted, despite the fact that the conditions inside Stalinist prisons are about the most repressive conditions imaginable, the case studies in the book show how these women explored the cracks in the totalitarian system in a creative way.
Sharing the experience of writing this micro history of life in a prison cell, Dr. Müller explained: “I was trying to look at different activities that these women engaged in trying to sustain life and create some semblance of normalcy in prison cell.” To recreate a picture of the lives of these women prisoners from the moment of their arrest to their eventual release Dr. Muller has gone through a tremendous number of personal letters, cell spy reports, and written interrogation statements. However, she admits that the oral interviews became the driving force behind this project; the ultimate structure of the book was for the most part shaped by the stories that these interviewed women chose to tell. These stories were also an essential tool utilized to recreate their identities. These women used their senses to learn to cope with the environment of the prison cell. “Their bodies were very instrumental in the process of learning this new life in the new environment,” said Dr. Müller.
As one of the main aspects of the book, Dr. Müller emphatically refutes the common, unsubstantiated claim that upon entering the prison cell most people loose their complex social identities that they had prior to imprisonment and replace them with an identity of a compliant prisoner. During the course of working on this project, she discovered that in practice, upon entering the prison cell people actually recreate a number of relationships with the people they meet in confinement — “with the women cellmates, as well as with the men in the adjacent cells.” The rare and vague contacts with the families through letters were also very important for reconstruction of identities.
As a matter of fact, Dr. Müller emphasized that these women had never been called political prisoners, but they had used this term to define their identity, which, in turn, helped them define their relationships with the people they came in contact with: the judges, the prison guards, the interviewers and others. Another important and perhaps surprising for the audience element that Dr. Müller highlighted was the fact that despite the gruesome conditions and hardships these women had to endure throughout the years in confinement, in their storytelling they extended beyond narratives of martyrdom and heroism.
When during the second part of the discussion the audience raised a question about the heroines’ search for truth within the prison cell environment, Dr. Müller explained that these women were looking for their version of truth so that they could make sense of what is happening to them and recreate conditions that would resemble the settings of normal life, the life in freedom. This is the illustration of the use of Foucault’s concept of power as embodied and enacted, mentioned earlier by Dr. Shore. This ability to explore the space for creativity in the hostile environment helped these women not only to endure harsh conditions and the interrogations, but also prepare them for the life outside the prison cell.
The event was sponsored by the Freshman Seminar Program, the History Department, and the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.
Written by Kamila Orlova, a graduate student in the European and Russian Studies program