You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
During the Soviet era, millions of Soviets - Socialist Revolutionaries, peasants, ordinary citizens, Bolshevik party activists and university students - were denounced, arrested, and imprisoned on fabricated charges of conducting 'anti-state' activities. Till My Tale Is Told recounts the testimonies of women whose family lives and careers were brutally disrupted by the nightmare of false accusation, torture, humiliation, hunger, and unspeakable deprivation. The women in this book were fortunate: unlike several million others, they survived. Published in Moscow in 1989, the narratives collected in this volume were written illegally and for many years hidden away from public view. Although in 1956 political prisoners began to be officially rehabilitated and declared innocent, their writings were repressed as 'slandering the Soviet system'. Although most of the authors were arrested in the Great Purges of the 1930s, the selections span the entire history of the Gulag Archipelago from the 1920s to the late 1940s, adding another sixteen distinctive voices to the accounts published in the west by Yevgenia Ginsburg and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world
A rich and varied cultural and social history of an overlooked but ever-present phenomenon, and an impassioned plea for proper care today.
A comprehensive documentary history of children whose parents were identified as enemies of the Soviet regime, from its inception through Joesph Stalin's death. With top-secret documents in translation from the Russian state archives, memoirs, and interviews with child survivors
None
During the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, from 1941 to 1945, as many as 24 million of its citizens died. 14 million were children ages fourteen or younger. And for those who survived, the suffering was far from over. The prewar Stalinist vision of a “happy childhood” nurtured by a paternal, loving state had given way, out of necessity. What replaced it—the dictate that children be prepared to sacrifice everything, including childhood itself—created a generation all too familiar with deprivation, violence, and death. The experience of these children, and the role of the state in shaping their narrative, are the subject of this book, which fills in a critical but neglected chapt...
None
A time of great hardship, the Second World War became a consequential episode in the history of Soviet childhood policies. The growing social problem of juvenile homelessness and delinquency alerted the government to the need for a comprehensive child protection programme. Nevertheless, by prioritizing public order over welfare, the Stalinist state created conditions that only exacerbated the situation, transforming an existing problem into a nation-wide crisis. In this comprehensive account based on exhaustive archival research, Olga Kucherenko investigates the plight of more than a million street children and the state's role in the reinforcement of their ranks. By looking at wartime dislocation, Soviet child welfare policies, juvenile justice and the shadow world both within and without the Gulag, Soviet Street Children and the Second World War challenges several of the most pervasive myths about the Soviet Union at war. It is, therefore, as much an investigation of children on the margins of Soviet society as it is a study of the impact of war and state policies on society itself.
None