The voices of dozens of innocent victims, silenced during Stalin's Terror and since forgotten, can yet be heard in secret police archives Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev. Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested, executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests, beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners, homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into the enigma of Stalinist terror.

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

This book tells the history of modern Argentina through the lens of political violence and ideology. It focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century. It analyzes the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, antisemitism and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence (1976-1983), its networks of concentration camps and extermination. The destruction of the rule of law and military state terror represent the end road of the twisted historical path of Argentine and Latin American dictatorships. The book emphasizes the genocidal dimensions of the persecution of Argentine Jewish victims, explaining why they were disproportionately victimized by the military dictatorship. The Dirty War was not a real war, Federico Finchelstein argues, but an illegal militarization of state repression. This popularized term needs to be explained in terms of the fascist genealogies that The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War explores. From a historical perspective, the Dirty War did not feature two combatants but rather victims and perpetrators. In fact, the state made "war" against its citizens. This state sanctioned terror had its roots in fascist ideology, tracing a history from the fascist movements of the interwar war years to the concentration camps. Argentine fascism shaped the country's political culture. The Argentine road to fascism was shaped in the 1920s and 1930s and from then on continued to acquire many political and ideological reformulations and personifications, from Peronism (1943-1955) to terrorist right-wing organizations in the 1960s (especially Tacuara and the Triple A) to the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

When Nada Prouty came to the United States as a young woman, she fell in love with the democracy and freedom of her new home.Following a childhood in war-torn Lebanon with an abusive father, and facing the prospect of an arranged marriage, she jumped at the chance to forge her own path in America - a path that led to exciting undercover work in the FBI, then the CIA. But all this changed in the wake of 9/11, at the height of anti-Arab fervor, when federal investigators charged Prouty with passing intelligence to Hezbollah. Though the CIA and federal judge eventually exonerated Prouty of all charges, she was dismissed from the agency and stripped of her citizenship. In Uncompromised, Prouty tells her whole story in a bid to restore her name and reputation in the country that she loves. Beyond a thrilling story of espionage and betrayal, this is a sobering commentary on cultural alienation, the power of fear, and what it means to truly love America.

From a gay man secretly mourning his lover's suicide in Morocco to a young woman denied schooling because of religious discrimination in Iran, Arab Spring Dreams spotlights some of the Middle East's most outspoken young dissidents. The essayists cover a wide range of experiences, including premarital sex, the lack of educational opportunities, teenage marriage, and the fight for political freedom. They also highlight how repressive laws and cultural mores snuff out liberty and stifle growth and consider how previous movements - particularly the American civil rights struggle - might be channeled to effect change in their own countries. Beautifully written and profoundly moving, these stories present a decisive call for change at a crucial point in the evolution of the Middle East.

Gone is the era of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, when news programs fought to gain the trust and respect of a wide spectrum of American viewers. Today, the fastest-growing news programs and media platforms are fighting hard for increasingly narrow segments of the public and playing on old prejudices and deep-rooted fears, coloring the conversation in the blogosphere and the cable news chatter to distract from the true issues at stake. Using the same tactics once used to mobilize political parties and committed voters, they send their fans coded messages and demonize opposing groups, in the process securing valuable audience share and website traffic. Race-baiter is a term born out of this tumultuous climate, coined by the conservative media to describe a person who uses racial tensions to arouse the passion and ire of a particular demographic. Even as the election of the first black president forces us all to reevaluate how we think about race, gender, culture, and class lines, some areas of modern media are working hard to push the same old buttons of conflict and division for new purposes. In Race-Baiter, veteran journalist and media critic Eric Deggans dissects the powerful ways modern media feeds fears, prejudices, and hate, while also tracing the history of the word and its consequences, intended or otherwise.

In this magisterial history of Lebanon, from the end of Ottoman rule to the Hezbollah and Hamas wars of today, acclaimed and fiercely independent Middle East journalist and historian David Hirst charts the interplay between a uniquely complex country and the broader struggles of the modern Middle East. Lebanon is the battleground on which the region's greater states pursue their strategic, political, and ideological conflicts--conflicts that sometimes escalate into full-scale proxy wars. Hirst warns that only serious diplomatic action from the Obama administration can prevent the next such action from engulfing the entire region.

Houshang Asadi's Letters to My Torturer is one of the most harrowing accounts of human suffering to emerge from Iran and is now available for the first time in paperback. Kept in solitary confinement for over two years in an infamous Tehran prison, Asadi suffered inhuman degradations and brutal torture: suspended from the ceiling, beaten, and forced to bark like a dog, Asadi became a spy for the Russians, for the British - for anyone. Narrowly escaping execution as the government unleashed a bloody pogrom against political prisoners, Asadi was hauled before a sham court and sentenced to fifteen years. Here he confronts his torturer, speaking for those who will never be heard, and provides a glimpse into the heart of Iran and the practice of state-sponsored justice.

Two enduring challenges in South African historiography are addressed by this group of committed scholars from SADET. The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4 [1980-1990] firstly addresses the muted voices of largely unpublished black scholars, and secondly, ensures that the voices of the majority of our population are at the centre of the historic narrative. Comprising of 32 chapters, Volume 4 in the series focuses on the 1980s and `further fortifies the intellectual traditions set by the earlier volumes'. Included in the volume are chapters by Bernard Magubane on the apartheid state; Sifiso Ndlovu on the ANC and negotiations; Bhekizizwe Peterson on the arts; Zine Magubane on women's struggles; Gregory Houston on the ANC's underground and armed struggle; Thami ka Plaatjie on the PAC; Mbulelo Mzamane and Brown Maaba on the BCM and AZAPO; Eddy Maloka on the SACP; Christopher Saunders on the above-the-ground struggles conducted by white activists; and Jabulani Sithole on the trade union movement.

On the 'long list' for the inaugural John Button Prize for Australian politics and social policy. This profoundly moving book reveals the untold story of the people who struggled to get asylum seekers out of detention and change government policy. "Lateline" journalist Margot O'Neill, who covered many of these stories while they were happening, paints a compelling and heartbreaking picture through an extraordinary cast of characters. Some, like Petro Georgiou, Julian Burnside and Phillip Ruddock, are very well-known. Others are not famous but simply felt compelled to follow their consciences and act to help desperate people in desperate situations, often to the detriment of their personal well-being.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as ""Japanese America's poet laureate."" But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

George W. Bush calls them an 'alternative set of procedures', vital tools needed 'to protect the American people and our allies'. These 'tools' include forced standing for up to forty hours, sleep deprivation for weeks on end, dousing naked prisoners with ice water in rooms chilled to ten degrees, and strapping prisoners to inclined boards then flooding their mouths with water. These techniques are torture, and they are used by the United States of America. American Torture reveals how torture became standard practice in today's War on Terror. Long before Abu Ghraib became a household name, the US military and CIA used torture with impunity at home and abroad. Billions of dollars were spent during the Cold War studying, refining, then teaching these techniques to American interrogators and to foreign officers charged with keeping Communism at bay. As the Cold War ended, these tortures were legalised using the very laws designed to eradicate their use.

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives. The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratisation, and the relationship between violent behaviour inside and outside the state. They also analyse the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.

This edited collection examines the growing uncertainty about the role and scope of traditional political rights in the 21st Century's increased threat of terrorism. It reflects on the appropriate scope and strength of protection of political rights in a wider global context, and covers issues such as the rise of 'militant democracies' and the effectiveness of the Council of Europe's monitoring mechanisms.

In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A chilling wartime diary of the destruction of the Lithuanian/Polish Jews, recorded by a non-Jew About sixty thousand Jews from Wilno (Vilnius, Jewish Vilna) and surrounding townships in present-day Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in huge pits on the outskirts of Ponary. Over a period of several years, Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in the village of Ponary, was an eyewitness to the murder of these Jews as well as to the murders of thousands of non-Jews on an almost daily basis. He chronicled these events in a diary that he kept at great personal risk. Written as a simple account of what Sakowicz witnessed, the diary is devoid of personal involvement or identification with the victims. It is thus a unique document: testimony from a bystander, an "objective" observer without an emotional or a political agenda, to the extermination of the Jews of the city known as "the Jerusalem of Lithuania." Sakowicz did not survive the war, but much of his diary did. Painstakingly pieced together by Rahel Margolis from scraps of paper hidden in various locations, the diary was published in Polish in 1999. It is here published in English for the first time, extensively annotated by Yitzhak Arad to guide readers through the events at Ponary.

As a member of Salvador Allende's Personal Guards (GAP), Luz Arce worked with leaders of the Socialist Party during the Popular Unity Government from 1971 to1973. In the months following the coup, Arce served as a militant with others from the Left who opposed the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, which controlled the country from 1973 to1990. Along with thousands of others in Chile, Arce was detained and tortured by Chile's military intelligence service, the DINA, in their attempt to eliminate alternative voices and ideologies in the country. Arce's testimonial offers the harrowing story of the abuse she suffered and witnessed as a survivor of detention camps, such as the infamous Villa Grimaldi.
But when faced with threats made to her family, including her young son, and with the possibility that she could be murdered as thousands of others had been, Arce began to collaborate with the Chilean military in their repression of national resistance groups and outlawed political parties. Her testimonial thus also offers a unique perspective from within the repressive structures as she tells of her work as a DINA agent whose identifications even lead to the capture of some of her former friends and companeros.
During Chile's return to democracy in the early 1990s, Arce experienced two fundamental changes in her life that led to the writing of her story. The first was a deep spiritual renewal through her contacts with the Catholic Church whose Vicariate of Solidarity had fought for human rights in the country during the dictatorship. The second was her decision to participate within the legal system to identify and bring to justice those members of the military who wereresponsible for the crimes committed from 1973 to1990. Luz Arce's book invites readers to rethink the definition of testimonial narrative in Latin America through the unique perspective of a survivor-witness-confessor.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives. Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school. There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now cliched experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.

The question of the responsibility inherent in the unrivaled might of the U.S. military is one that continues to take up headlines across the globe. This award-winning group of reporters and scholars, including, among others, David Rieff, Peter Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley and Samantha Power revisit four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing--Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor--in the last half of the twentieth century in order to reconsider the success and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian intervention.Featuring original essays and reporting, "The New Killing Fields" poses vital questions about the future of peacekeeping in the next century. In addition, theoretical essays by Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff frame the issue of intervention in terms of today's post-cold war reality and the future of human rights.

The memoir of a young woman who, in 1951 at the age of 17, was arrested for her involvement with an underground organization demanding alternatives to Stalinist rule and, as a result, spent five years in the Soviet prison system&#46Tumanov belonged to group of young people who believed in freedom and equality, and were willing to stand up for their beliefs.

Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity, was murdered on 17 January 1961.
Democratically elected to lead the Mouvement National Congolais, the party he founded in 1958, Lumumba was at the centre of the country's growing popular defiance of the colonial rule of oppression imposed by Belgium. When, in June 1960, independence was finally won, his unscheduled speech at the official ceremonies in Kinshasa received a standing ovation and made him a hero to millions. Always a threat to those who sought to maintain a covert imperialist hand over the country, however, he became within months the victim of an insidious plot and was arrested and subsequently tortured and executed.
This book unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the assassination since it perpetration. Making use of a huge array of official sources as well as personal testimony from many of those in the Congo at the time, Ludo De Witte reveals a network of complicity ranging from the Belgian government to the CIA. Chilling official memos which detail 'liquidation' and 'threats to national interests' are analysed alongside macabre tales of the destruction of evidence, putting Patrice Lumumba's personal strength and his dignified quest for African unity in stark contrast with one of the murkiest episodes in twentieth-century politics.

"This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital importance, and I think it] should start a debate about modern literature with a rich potential for further development." Michael Scammell

Return from the Archipelago is the first comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives-arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation.Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into the prisoners experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written. A pioneering book on an important subject, Return from the Archipelago is an authoritative resource for scholars in Russian history and literature."

This memoir was written by the Russian scientist and historian of literature, Dmitry Likhachev. It not only covers his life but also includes a supplementary essay, written by him, giving his perception of Russian people - their culture and history. A prolific writer with strong views, Likhachev describes how his ideologies caught the attention of the KGB and, shortly after joining a furtive club of historians, led to his dramatic arrest and confinement within the prison island of Solovky. He recalls his story of imprisonment during the Stalin era and his chance survival during the construction of the pointless Belomorkanal link between the White and Baltic Seas. This book spans from the early twentieth century up to perestroika and glasnost, when Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to give political power to Likhachev.

Roaming the countryside in caravans, earning their living as musicians, peddlers, and fortune-tellers, the Gypsies and their elusive way of life represented an affront to Nazi ideas of social order, hard work, and racial purity. They were branded as "asocials," harassed, and eventually herded into concentration camps where many thousands were killed. But until now the story of their persecution has either been overlooked or distorted.
In The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Guenter Lewy draws upon thousands of documents--many never before used--from German and Austrian archives to provide the most comprehensive and accurate study available of the fate of the Gypsies under the Nazi regime. Lewy traces the escalating vilification of the Gypsies as the Nazis instigated a widespread crackdown on the "work-shy" and "itinerants." But he shows that Nazi policy towards Gypsies was confused and changeable. At first, local officials persecuted gypsies, and those who behaved in gypsy-like fashion, for allegedly anti-social tendencies. Later, with the rise of race obsession, Gypsies were seen as a threat to German racial purity, though Himmler himself wavered, trying to save those he considered "pure Gypsies" descended from Aryan roots in India. Indeed, Lewy contradicts much existing scholarship in showing that, however much the Gypsies were persecuted, there was no general program of extermination analogous to the "final solution" for the Jews.
Exploring in heart-rending detail the fates of individual Gypsies and their families, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies makes an important addition to our understanding both of the history of this mysterious people and of all facets of the Nazi terror.

Terror, in the sense of mass, unjust arrests, characterized the USSR during the late 1930s. But, argues Robert Thurston in this controversial book, Stalin did not intend to terrorize the country and did not need to rule by fear. Memoirs and interviews with Soviet people indicate that many more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it. Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives and other sources, Thurston shows that between 1934 and 1936 police and court practice relaxed significantly. Then a series of events, together with the tense international situation and memories of real enemy activity during the savage Russian Civil War, combined to push leaders and people into a hysterical hunt for perceived "wreckers." After late 1938, however, the police and courts became dramatically milder. Coercion was not the key factor keeping the regime in power. More important was voluntary support, fostered at least in the cities by broad opportunities to criticize conditions and participate in decision making on the local level. The German invasion of 1941 found the populace deeply divided in its judgment of Stalinism, but the country's soldiers generally fought hard in its defense. Using German and Russian sources, the author probes Soviet morale and performance in the early fighting. Thurston's portrait of the era sheds new light on Stalin and the nature of his regime. It presents an unconventional and less condescending view of the Soviet people, depicted not simply as victims but also as actors in the violence, criticisms, and local decisions of the 1930s. Ironically, Stalinism helped prepare the way for the much more active society and for the reforms of fifty years later.