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“A Mind Purified by Suffering:” Evgenia Ginzburg's'Whirlwind'Memoirs represents the first book on one of Russia's most important classics of Gulag literature. Ginzburg's memoirs of her eighteen-year ordeal through Stalinist concentration camps, Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, place her in the company of Russian writers, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. The contributors address Ginzburg's Gulag experience through various vantage points, covering such topics as: memory, trauma, motherhood, love, survival strategies, and metafictional structures. The volume also provides a history of prison camp writings, capped with her biography, analysis of her correspondence with her son, Vasily Aksenov, and an interview with him.

The most heinous Soviet crimes – the Red Terror, brutal collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, Stalin's Great Terror, mass deportations, and other atrocities – were treated in the West as a controversial topic. With the Cold War dichotomy of Western democracy versus Soviet communism deeply imprinted in our minds, we are not always aware that these crimes were very often questioned, dismissed, denied, sometimes rationalized, and even outright glorified in the Western world. Facing a choice of whom to believe –the survivors or Soviet propaganda– many Western opinion leaders chose in favor of Soviet propaganda. Even those who did not believe it behaved sometimes as if they did. Blissful Blindness explores Western reactions (and lack thereof) to Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik revolution to the collapse of Soviet communism in order to understand ideological, political, economic, cultural, personal, and other motivations behind this puzzling phenomenon of willful ignorance. But the significance of Dariusz Tolczyk's book reaches beyond its direct historical focus. Written for audiences not limited to scholars and specialists, this book not only opens one's eyes to rarely examined aspects of the twentieth century but also helps one see how astonishingly relevant this topic is in our contemporary world.

A profoundly moving and historical record—letters sent by sixteen fathers imprisoned in the Gulag camps to their children during the 1930s–1950s.“They will live as human beings and die as human beings; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.” —Vasily Grossman, Life and FateBetween the 1930s and 1950s, millions of people were sent to the Gulag in the Soviet Union. My Father's Letters tells the stories of sixteen men—mostly members of the intelligentsia, and loyal Soviet subjects—who were imprisoned in the Gulag camps, through the letters they sent back to their wives and children. Here are letters illustrated by fathers keen to educate their children in science and natural history; the tragic missives of a former military man convinced that the terrible mistake of his arrest will be rectified; the “letter” stitched on a bedsheet with a fishbone and smuggled out of a maximum security camp. My Father's Letters is an immediate source of life in prison during Stalin's Great Terror. Almost none of the men writing these letters survived.“My Father's Letters is well presented and deeply moving. The translation is fluent and all the necessary background information is clearly provided. Some passages conjure up the life of an individual family—and of an entire culture—with heart-breaking vividness.” —Robert Chandler “Astoundingly, these stories are not miserable. Yes, the men mention their inadequate shelter, clothing and food, but the overwhelming impact is the expression of their love for their families... My Father's Letters is beautifully produced.” —Vin Arthey, Scotsman

Jacques Rossi is one of Stalin's most well-known victims. Author of The Gulag Handbook, a fascinating encyclopedia of the Soviet forced labor camps, Rossi spent twenty years in interrogation, prison, and Gulag detention. Born to a prominent Polish father and French mother, the young Jacques became attracted to communism as a blueprint for radical social reform. He spent years in the communist underground in interwar Europe, agitating for the revolution, but he was arrested during Stalin's Great Purges in 1937. This book represents a conversation between Jacques Rossi and Michèle Sarde, professor emerita at Georgetown University, and weaves together personal reflections and historical analysis. Rossi's remarkable life (1909–2004) spanned the twentieth century and sheds important light on the tumultuous history of Europe – the appeal of communism in the interwar period and beyond, the mentality of party members, the effects of mass repression, everyday life in Stalin's Gulag, and the problem of rights for former prisoners during the Khrushchev era. As he abandoned his internationalist communist beliefs, Rossi increasingly identified as French, embracing the name his fellow prisoners gave him in the Gulag,'Jacques the Frenchman.'Rossi's reflections on his own political beliefs, his frustrations with those who could not accept the truth of his brutal experiences in the Soviet Union, and his life as a witness to one of the twentieth century's worst crimes offer a fascinating history of Stalinism and its legacies.

Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women's resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

A Hidden World, first published in 1963, recounts the nine years spent by Hungarian Raphael Rupert in the prison camps of Soviet Russia—the Gulag. At the time of his arrest in 1947, Rupert was working from the British Embassy in Budapest. His trial, based on a presumed confession of acting as a spy, ended in his sentence to Camp 10 for 25 years of ‘forced labor.'A Hidden World describes the daily life and endless brutalities endured in the camps...the numbing winter cold, the mindless drudgery in the factories, the harsh treatment by guards and prison gangs, the lack of food and medical care. Finally, after nine years, Rupert was released and able to emigrate to Great Britain, eventually settling in Ireland.

A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil. In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker's analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer's experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

In Fragmented Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life—from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi's original illustrations and written in a sharp and dry tone, Rossi's vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, Rossi never considered himself a victim. Instead, in the manner of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Buber-Neumann, he sought to share and transmute his experience within the living hell of the Gulag. In so doing, he gives voice to the inmates whose lives were shattered by one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes of the twentieth century. An impassioned reminder to always question one's beliefs, to have the courage to give up one's illusions at the risk of one's life, Fragmented Lives lays bare, with acute observations and biting wit, the falsity of the Soviet utopia that transformed Rossi's home into a “huge Potemkin village, a farcical sham dissimulating oceans of mud and blood.”

Even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day.The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present.Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were''liberated''into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.

“The terrified yell of my comrades makes me stop. I drop the potatoes into the grass and turn around. He has pulled out the pistol and is taking aim. Slowly I come back.” Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a resourceful woman who survived five grueling years in Russian prison camps: starved, traumatized, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen's is rarely told—of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War. The candid story of her time as a prisoner, written soon after her release, provides startling insight into the ordeal of a German female prisoner under Soviet rule. Readers of memoir and history, and students of feminism and war studies, will learn more about women's experience of the Soviet gulag through the eyes of Ilse Johansen.

After decades of being concealed and downplayed, the Soviet Gulag system is gradually gaining attention. The opening of archives following the fall of the Soviet Union, new editions of testimonial literature, and new media representations have fostered an increased interest in research into the subject. Moreover, popular culture itself has embraced the Gulag. Thus, old and new representations in cultural media, as well as in academic research, all compete in narrating and interpreting the history of the Gulag. Which of these stories from and about the Gulag form our current understanding of the Soviet forced labor camps? And where can we situate them within the dichotomous field of facticity and fictitiousness? By bringing together international researchers from historical sciences, literary and cultural studies, film studies, and musicology to analyze the validity and significance of existing Gulag narratives and discuss their impact on the public's perception, the volume contributes to a more thorough understanding of this complex subject.

Gustaw Herling's A World Apart is one of the most important books about Soviet camps and communist ideology in the Stalinist period. First published in English in 1951 and translated into many languages, it was relatively unknown till Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s. However, the narrative of the author's experience in the Jertsevo gulag was highly appreciated by Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Jorge Semprun and others. In this first monograph on Herling's fascinating life, Bolecki discusses hitherto unknown documents from the writer's archive in Naples. His insight into the subject and poetics of Herling's book and the account of its remarkable reception offer readers an intriguing profile of one of the most compelling witnesses of the 20th century.

During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin's Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin's Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin's rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.

Uitg. in samenw. met Centrum voor Holocaust- en Genocidestudies.

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New YorkerThe Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims-this man, that woman, that child-we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the “welcome” that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. And Solzhenitsyn's genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

This engrossing collection of prison memoirs by Russian women is the first to portray the direct experiences of the wide range of women who were incarcerated in Soviet prisons and camps. Comprising the stories of women from all classes and backgrounds, this book covers the entire span of the Gulag's existence from the 1920s to the 1980s, including the little-known periods of political repression of the 1960s and 1980s. These memoirs and letters provide a rich portrait of how women led everyday life in prison and in the camps, of the strategies of accommodation and resistance they employed, and the challenges they faced when they reentered Soviet society. Although readers will hear the voices of women who were in excruciating physical and emotional pain, they will also find remarkable testimonies to the agency and resilience of women who struggled against incredible odds. Written by women from all stations in life and from drastically different backgrounds, these stories reconstruct not only the world of the Gulag but also its meaning for society at large. The documents excerpted here point to areas of Soviet history and culture that have yet to be fully investigated as they illuminate women's experiences of friendship, work, hope, inspiration, loss, and terror. All the works selected for the collection are united by their authors'sense of group and individual identity. To varying degrees, all of them associate their experiences with events and people beyond their personal experiences and immediate surroundings, thus expanding the traditional perspective of women's writing. These riveting stories, never before published in English or Russian, will appeal to scholars and students of Soviet history and literature, as well as general readers interested in women's history.