One of Stalin's most heinous acts was the ruthless repression of
millions of peasants in the early 1930s, an act that established
the very foundations of the gulag. Solzhenitsyn barely touched upon
this brutal episode in his magisterial Gulag Archipelago and
subsequent writers passed over the subject in silence. Now, with
the opening of Soviet archives, an entirely new dimension of
Stalin's brutality has been uncovered. The Unknown Gulag is the
first book in English to explore this untold story.
Historian Lynne Viola reveals how, in one of the most egregious
episodes of Soviet repression, Stalin drove two million peasants
into internal exile, to work as forced laborers. The book shows how
entire families were callously thrown out of their homes, banished
from their villages, and sent to the icy hinterlands of the Soviet
Union, where in the course of a decade, almost a half million would
die as a result of disease, starvation, or exhaustion. Drawing on
pioneering research in the previously closed archives of the
central and provincial Communist Party, the Soviet state, and the
secret police, Viola documents the history of this tragic episode.
She delves into what long remained an entirely hidden world within
the gulag, throwing new light on Stalin's consolidation of power,
the rise of the secret police as a state within the state, and the
complex workings of the Soviet system. But first and foremost, she
movingly captures the day-to-day life of Stalin's first victims,
telling the stories of the peasant families who experienced one of
the twentieth century's most horrific instances of mass repression.
A compelling story of human suffering and survival in Stalin's
Soviet Union, here is a new chapter in the history of the gulag,
virtually hidden from sight until now.
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