Victims of Soviet Terror

Victims of Soviet Terror PDF Author: Nanci Adler
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Records how the Memorial Movement grew from a "suspect" organisation to a powerful human rights movement that collects and disseminates information about Stalinism's crimes. Using documents, interviews and news accounts, Adler examines the group's historical and political functions.

Victims of Soviet Terror

Victims of Soviet Terror PDF Author: Nanci Adler
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Records how the Memorial Movement grew from a "suspect" organisation to a powerful human rights movement that collects and disseminates information about Stalinism's crimes. Using documents, interviews and news accounts, Adler examines the group's historical and political functions.

The Victims Return

The Victims Return PDF Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857730622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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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.

Left to the Wolves

Left to the Wolves PDF Author: Barry McLoughlin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Between the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 and Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet secret police sentenced over 4 million persons on political grounds. Over 800,000 were shot and millions died in the slave camps of the Gulag system. At the height of the mass-repression - the Great Terror of 1937/38 - foreigners were in great jeopardy. Knowing that a major war was coming, Iosif Stalin and his cohorts decided to rid Soviet society of all perceived or potential 'enemies'. Among the putative 'Fifth Columnists' were non-Russian ethnic minorities, political refugees from fascism and foreign-born Communists. At least three of these countless victims were of Irish nationality. This book describes their social background, how and why they entered the semi-clandestine world of Communism and the reasons for their residence in the USSR. Patrick Breslin was a graduate of the International Lenin School who turned to journalism and translating. Brian Goold-Verschoyle's visits to Moscow were periodic until his masters in the Soviet espionage service sent him to the Spanish cockpit in 1937. Finally, Se���¡n McAteer was given political refugee status in the new Russia in 1923 after his flight from Scotland Yard. He used his language skills to proselytize sailors for the world revolution or to teach students the rudiments of English in exotic Odessa. Each man in turn knew by time of arrest that the secret police NKVD rarely released or acquitted anybody; and the fabricated charges they were faced with increased their sense of isolation and hopelessness. This realisation was all the more bitter considering the faith they had placed in the Soviet experiment. ����

Stalin's Genocides

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

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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.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial PDF Author: Lynne Viola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190674164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Great Terror (1937-38) in the Soviet Union occupies a central role in the history of twentieth-century mass violence. During a sixteen-month period, the Stalin regime arrested over 1.5 million people, mostly on trumped-up charges of "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity, of whom about half were summarily executed and the rest were sent to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims, we know almost nothing about the perpetrators. One explanation for this lacuna is that there were no public trials-no equivalent of the postwar prosecution of Nazi war criminals-of Soviet perpetrators. Yet there were secret trials of NKVD (secret police) officials, the subject of this new book by eminent Soviet historian Lynne Viola. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand secret police officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts for violations of Soviet criminal procedure. They were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murders during pre-trial detention of "suspects."0.

Silence was Salvation

Silence was Salvation PDF Author: Cathy A. Frierson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Roughly ten million children were victims of political repression in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, scientists, physicians, and political leaders considered by the regime to be dangerous to the political order. Ten grown victims, who as children suffered banishment, starvation, disease, anti-Semitism, and trauma resulting from their parents' condemnation and arrest, now freely share their stories. The result is a powerful and moving oral history that will profoundly deepen the reader's understanding of life in the U.S.S.R. under the despotic reign of Joseph Stalin.

Ordinary Citizens

Ordinary Citizens PDF Author: David King
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photographs
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"The book consists of 166 photographs taken from the interrogation files of the secret police in Moscow of those arrested on falsified charges, found guilty and shot during Stalin's reign of terror from the late 1920s until his death in 1953 - engineers, artists, factory workers, teachers, housewives, heroes of the Soviet Union, even secret policemen themselves. Each photograph is accompanied by the basic details of that person's life and the charges brought against them." - abstract from Francis Boutle Publishers website.

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

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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 Terror of 1937-1938

Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938 PDF Author: Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin
Publisher: Mehring Books
ISBN: 1893638049
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic. Through a meticulous examination of original sources, including archival documents only made available for research in the 1990s, Professor Vadim Rogovin argues that the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Far from Trotsky being a politically isolated figure, as both Stalinist and anti-communist historians have claimed, there was substantial sympathy for his criticism of the Stalin regime in the ranks and even in the leadership of the CPSU, and support for his demands for inner-party democracy, greater social equality and an international orientation to the Bolshevik goal of world revolution. It was this political fact, as Rogovin demonstrates, that accounts for the purge reaching so deeply into the party apparatus, the military, the Komsomol youth movement, and the broader layers of the population. Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts. He documents the reaction of different social layers to the purges, including workers, peasants, non-party intellectuals and the CPSU rank-and-file. This book includes rarely published photographs of the prison camps, documenting the lives of those labeled by Stalin;enemies of the people. Chronologically, this volume takes up where its predecessor, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror , left off, with the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee that followed the purging of the Soviet military command and the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. It analyzes such critical events as the Bukharin-Rykov trial, last of the infamous show trials; the massacre of Trotskyists in the Vorkuta slave-labor camp; and the assassination by Stalinist agents of Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and other oppositionists outside the Soviet Union. It concludes with an examination of how the purges transformed the CPSU and Soviet society as a whole.

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 PDF Author: Robert W. Thurston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300074420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.