Remembering Stalin's Victims

Remembering Stalin's Victims PDF Author: Kathleen E. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801431944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Soviet leaders twice attempted to liberalize Communist rule and both times their initiatives hinged on criticism of Stalin. During the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" and again during Gorbachev's glasnost, antistalinism proved a unique catalyst for democratic mobilization.

Remembering Stalin's Victims

Remembering Stalin's Victims PDF Author: Kathleen E. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801431944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Soviet leaders twice attempted to liberalize Communist rule and both times their initiatives hinged on criticism of Stalin. During the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" and again during Gorbachev's glasnost, antistalinism proved a unique catalyst for democratic mobilization.

Remembering Stalin's Victims

Remembering Stalin's Victims PDF Author: Kathleen E. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717952
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Remembering Stalin's Victims, Kathleen E. Smith examines how government reformers' repudiation of Stalin's repressions both in the 1950s and in the 1980s created new political crises. Drawing on interviews, she tells the stories of citizens and officials in conflict over the past. She also addresses the underlying question of how societies emerging from rep1;essive regimes reconcile themselves to their memories. Soviet leaders twice attempted to liberalize communist rule and both times their initiatives hinged on criticism of Stalin. During the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" and again during Gorbachev's glasnost, anti-Stalinism proved a unique catalyst for democratic mobilization. Under Gorbachev, dissatisfaction with half truths about past atrocities united citizens from all walks of life in the Memorial Society, an independent mass movement that eventually challenged the very notion of reform communism. Smith investigates why citizens risked confrontation with the Communist Party in order to promote recognition of the victims of Stalinism and recompense for their survivors. Efforts to acknowledge the bitter legacy of totalitarian rule, while originally supporting a stable statesociety reform coalition, ultimately provoked "radical" demands for openness about the past, official accountability, and institutional guarantees of human rights, Smith explains. The battle over the Soviet past, she suggests, not only illuminates the dynamic between elite and mass political actors during liberalization, but also reveals the scars that totalitarian rule has left on Russian society and the long-term obstacles to reform it has created.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

The Victims Return

The Victims Return PDF Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857730622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them. This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.

Never Remember

Never Remember PDF Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997722963
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
,"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago. -- Kirkus Reviews A haunting literary and visual journey deep into Russia's past -- and present. The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten?Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin's Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.

Remembering Katyn

Remembering Katyn PDF Author: Alexander Etkind
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566296X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

Women of the Gulag

Women of the Gulag PDF Author: Paul R. Gregory
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
ISBN: 0817915761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov PDF Author: Peter Pringle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416566023
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.

The Hungry Steppe

The Hungry Steppe PDF Author: Sarah Cameron
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.

The Secret Betrayal

The Secret Betrayal PDF Author: Nikolai Tolstoy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Get Book Here

Book Description