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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.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.
A historic photographic record of the Soviet Gulag and its legacy. The Gulag was a network of labor camps and penal colonies run by the Soviet security organizations. While forced labor and internal exile had a long history in Russia, the Gulag evolved into a devastating tool of political suppression and massive industrial production. From the early years of the Revolution to the final years of the USSR, millions labored and perished within this system. Gulag covers the history of the Gulag with incredible essays and firsthand narratives by former prisoners. The text is accompanied by photographs provided by the prisoners, survivor groups and state archives as well as contemporary photographs that show the camps as they look now. Each chapter covers a key camp or work project of the Soviet penal-industrial complex: Solovki, the monastery that was the birthplace of the Gulag system The White Sea Canal Vaigach, the doomed humane camp The Theater in the Gulag Kolyma, the deadly Siberian gold rush Vorkuta, coal mining above the Arctic Circle The Railroad of Death Each chapter has: A concise introductory essay Formerly banned and previously unpublished archival photographs Detailed chronology of the camp Prisoners' accounts of life and death in the camps and colonies Contemporary photographs Accounts of survivors some of whom still live near their former camp or colony. Gulag is a remarkable pictorial history of a harrowing era of the twentieth century.
Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, Barnes shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. He takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. Barnes traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. Death and Redemption reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would reenter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.
"We also hear from guards, commandants, and bureaucrats whose lives were bound together with the inmates in an absurd drama. Regardless of their grade and duties, all agree that those responsible for these "excesses" were above or below them, yet never they themselves. Accountability is thereby diffused through the many strata of the state apparatus, providing legal defenses and "clear" consciences. Yet, as the concluding section of interviews - with the children and wives of the victims - reminds us, accountability is a moral and historical imperative."--BOOK JACKET.
Collects the writings of a diverse group of people who survived imprisonment in the Gulag, recounting their experiences and relationships, and offering insight into the psychological aspects of life in the camps.
The Gulag in East Germany: Soviet Special Camps, 1945-1950 is the real story of what happened to thousands upon thousands of German victims of Stalinism who were incarcerated in special camps called Spezlager in the Soviet zone of occupation and abroad. The Spetzlager were under the direct control of the Soviet central camp administration in the eastern occupation zone of Germany. The Red Army's hold over most of Eastern Europe in 1944-1945 permitted Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet secret security services to project their political power beyond the USSR's traditional borders to construct a socialist society that mirrored their own. In addition to building new camps, the Soviets used former Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen for the detainment of political prisoners where ultimately tens of thousands perished. This book draws upon a vast trove of English- and German-language research to document, in precise and excruciating detail, the Soviet Union's violation of human rights in it administration of these camps. The book is also remarkable in its careful examination of Western Allied internship camps; the practices, goals, and policies of American, French, and British camps are compared with astonishing insights. Published close to the one hundredth anniversary of the tragic and violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, this book represents a critical contribution to the study of the Spezlager and indeed the postwar history of Germany.
A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror In a shocking new study of life and death in Stalin’s Gulag, historian Golfo Alexopoulos suggests that Soviet forced labor camps were driven by brutal exploitation and often administered as death camps. The first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.
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 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 groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps. For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century. "Masterly"-The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year