|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either
the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that
during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and
dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion
into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin
years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled.
Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of
glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In
this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped
potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and
also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is
covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories
to computerized data bases.
The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either
the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that
during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and
dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion
into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin
years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled.
Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of
glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In
this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped
potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and
also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is
covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories
to computerized data bases.
The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and
deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What
lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons
and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic
expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together
inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and
social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary
evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources,
Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various
disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the
collection first considers "identities"—the lived experiences of
contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories
to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section
surveys "sources" to explore the ways new research methods can
revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section
studies "legacies" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including
the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums
built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one
another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading
researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and
cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving
away from grand metaphorical or theoretical
models, Rethinking the Gulag instead unearths the
complexities and nuances of experience that represent a primary
focus in the new wave of Gulag studies.
The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and
deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What
lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons
and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic
expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together
inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and
social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence,
Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the
Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided
into three sections, the collection first considers
"identities"-the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who
have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common
criminals and clerics. The second section surveys "sources" to
explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our
understanding of the system. The third section studies "legacies"
to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs
and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize
it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section
also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer
Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and
literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving away from grand
metaphorical or theoretical models, Rethinking the Gulag instead
unearths the complexities and nuances of experience that represent
a primary focus in the new wave of Gulag studies.
Resistance has become an important and controversial analytical
category for the study of Stalinism. The opening of Soviet archives
allows historians an unprecedented look at the fabric of state and
society in the 1930s. Researchers long spellbound by myths of
Russian fatalism and submission as well as by the very real powers
of the Stalinist state are startled by the dimensions of popular
resistance under Stalin.Narratives of such resistance are
inherently interesting, yet the topic is also significant because
it sheds light on its historical surroundings. Contending with
Stalinism employs the idea of resistance as a tool to explore what
otherwise would remain opaque features of the social, cultural, and
political history of the 1930s. In the process, the authors reveal
a semi-autonomous world residing within and beyond the official
world of Stalinism. Resistance ranged across a spectrum from
violent strikes to the passive resistance that was a virtual way of
life for millions and took many forms, from foot dragging and
negligence to feigned ignorance and false compliance. Contending
with Stalinism also highlights the problematic nature of resistance
as an analytical category and stresses the ambiguous nature of the
phenomenon. The topics addressed include working-class strikes,
peasant rebellions, black-market crimes, official corruption, and
homosexual and ethnic subcultures.
Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin's Great
Terror in Soviet Ukraine. When the Communist Party Central
Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR halted
mass operations in repression in November 1938, large numbers of
mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete were
released. At the same time, hundreds of NKVD operatives who had
carried out the Great Terror were scapegoated and arrested. Drawing
on materials from the largely closed archives of the Soviet
security police, this collection of essays by an international team
of researchers illuminates the previously opaque world of the NKVD
perpetrator. It uncovers the mechanics and logistics of the terror
at the local level by examining the criminal files of a series of
mid-level NKVD operatives from across Ukraine. The result offers
new perspectives on both Stalin's central role in the architecture
of the terror and NKVD perpetrators' agency in implementing one of
the most horrific episodes of twentieth-century mass violence.
Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime
arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and
"anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them
to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience
of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the
lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del
(NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous
policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals,
NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in
those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed
"the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were
prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating
Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication
of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of
torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial
detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution
themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including
verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by
perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and
transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the
curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented,
what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders
from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational
factors to shape the contours of state violence. Based on chilling
and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret
police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the
darkest recesses of Soviet repression - the interrogation room, the
prison cell, and the place of execution - and sheds new light on
those who carried out the Great Terror.
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.
The collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and
1930s forever altered the country's social and economic landscape.
It became the first of a series of bloody landmarks that would come
to define Stalinism. This revelatory book presents--with analysis
and commentary--the most important primary Soviet documents dealing
with the brutal economic and cultural subjugation of the Russian
peasantry. Drawn from previously unavailable and in many cases
unknown archives, these harrowing documents provide the first
unimpeded view of the experience of the peasantry during the years
1927-1930.
The book, the first of four in the series, covers the background of
collectivization, its violent implementation, and the mass peasant
revolt that ensued. For its insights into the horrific fate of the
Russian peasantry and into Stalin's dictatorship, "The War Against
the Peasantry "takes""its place an as unparalleled resource."
In this ground-breaking study Lynne Viola--the first Western
scholar to gain access to the Soviet state archives on
collectivization--brilliantly examines a lost chapter in the
history of the Stalin revolution. Looking in detail at the
backgrounds, motivations, and mentalities of the 25,000ers, Viola
embarks on the first Western investigation of the everyday
activities of Stalin's rank-and-file shock troops, the "leading
cadres" of socialist construction. In the process, Viola sheds new
light on how the state mobilized working-class support for
collectivization and reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the
25,000ers went into the countryside as willing recruits. This
unique social history uses an "on the scene" line of vision to
offer a new understanding of the workings, times, and cadres of
Stalin's revolution.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|