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.

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 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.

Of Victims and Victory

Of Victims and Victory PDF Author: Katherine E. Felt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
This thesis analyzes the modern memory of Joseph Stalin's Great Terror and the Gulag in the Russian national consciousness. This is manifested in numerous arenas, including government policy, media outlets and individual opinions. Two decades have passed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved and information on these events was first made available. In that time, the first generation of post-Communist Russians has come of age. This study analyzes the views of Russian youth on Stalin, the Great Terror and the Gulag through primary research, public opinion polls and media-based competition. These reveal that while the older generation remains polarized in its opinions on Stalin's era, the younger group is generally ambivalent. A new nostalgia for Soviet times has taken root as a reaction to the economic upheaval and political chaos of the first post-Communist decade. In addition, the recent efforts on the part of the Russian government to rehabilitate Stalin and capitalize on the newfound Soviet nostalgia are analyzed in the context of this shift. The future of Russian society is largely determined by the overall attitude about the past amongst Russians, and the recent shifts from near universal condemnation of Stalin to reemerging nostalgia for order and superpower status is indicative of a substantial change in political attitudes in Russian society.

Never Remember

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

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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.

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.

The Unquiet Ghost

The Unquiet Ghost PDF Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547524978
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
An in-depth exploration of the legacy of Joseph Stalin on the former Soviet Union, by the author of King Leopold’s Ghost. Although some twenty million people died during Stalin’s reign of terror, only with the advent of glasnost did Russians begin to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin. A New York Times Notable Book “An important contribution to our awareness of the former Soviet Union’s harrowing past and unsettling present.” —Los Angeles Times “A perceptive, intelligent book demonstrating that the significance of the gulag transcends the confines of one country and one generation.” —The New York Times Book Review “This probing and sensitive book…casts striking new light upon the Russian past and present.” —The Washington Post Book World “The voices [Hochschild] has recorded, the relics he has seen, are haunting—and the raw material of a terrific book.” —David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lenin’s Tomb “No other work has brought home the full horror of this monstrous dictator’s rule than this close-up account.” —Daniel Schorr, former senior news analyst, National Public Radio

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. ����

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.

Surviving the Storms

Surviving the Storms PDF Author: Helen Dmitriew
Publisher: California State University (Fresno)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Surviving the Storms: Memory of Stalin's Tyranny is the story of courage and tenacity. Certainly, it is an account of punishment without crime - the first-person chronicle of life under Stalin in the 1930s and the Nazi invading army in the 1940s. Declared "enemies of the people" during the Stalinist purges, the eleven-year-old Helen Dmitriew and her family were forced from their home in the Smolensk district, stripped of their belongings, and transported in closed railroad cars to Siberia, where the family was separated. Dmitriew and her sick mother eventually found their way back from the Siberian wilderness, hiding in friendly homes or railroad cars, sleeping in dangerous forests, and concealing their "social origins" when interrogated by Soviet authorities. Although life in the general vicinity of Minsk returned to "normal" and Dmitriew earned her teacher's credentials and married, it was still characterized by deprivation, malnutrition, and sickness. She was reunited with her father in Leningrad only briefly, then never to see him (or ultimately any of her family members) again. During the Nazi invasion, when the Soviet armies fled in its path, her first husband was fatally shot by drunken German soldiers during "target practice". The next month she gave birth to her only daughter, whose survival today is hardly short of a miracle. Yet Dmitriew never gave up, never stopped helping other innocent victims of Soviet barbarity and Nazi cruelty, and eventually found herself assigned to a labor farm in Bavaria, which was eventually liberated by the American army. Here she also met her second husband, the survivor of two death sentences at the hands of the Soviet government. Together thisfugitive family successfully escaped the certain death of Soviet "repatriation", a program initially supported by the western allies, and managed to immigrate to Canada, where they began life again. Today Helen Dmitriew is a professor of Russian in Fresno, California, and her daughter is an insurance agent in Los Angeles. At a time when the former Soviet Union faces economic and social uncertainty, Dmitriew's life story of nerve, compassion, and survival is a living testament to Russian character and endurance.

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.