Download or read book The Day Will Pass Away written by Ivan Chistyakov and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare first-person testimony of the hardships of a Soviet labor camp—long suppressed—that will become a cornerstone of understanding the Soviet Union. Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this remarkable diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system. At the back of these exercise books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, "Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941." This is all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp. Who was this lost man? How did he end up in the gulag? Though a guard, he is a type of prisoner, too. We learn that he is a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia. In this diary, Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, he narrates it. He is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane, and broken man. From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record—a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe.
Download or read book The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard written by Ivan Chistyakov and published by . This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the archives of the Memorial International Human Rights Centre in Moscow is an extraordinary diary, a rare first-person testimony of a commander of guards in a Soviet labour camp. Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag in 1935, where he worked at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp for over a year. Life at the Gulag was anathema to Chistyakov, a cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, and an amateur painter and poet. He recorded its horrors with an unmatchable immediacy, documenting a world where petty rivalries put lives at risk, prisoners hacked off their fingers to bet in card games, railway sleepers were burned for firewood and Siberian winds froze the lather on the soap. From his stumbling poetic musings on the bitter landscape to his matter-of-fact grumbles about his stove, from accounts of the conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is unique - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia.
Download or read book The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard written by Ivan Chistyakov and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique piece of testimony from the Soviet Gulag - a prison guard's private diary, written between 1935-36.
Download or read book Gulag Voices written by Anne Applebaum and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Gulag Study written by Michael E. Allen and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Riot Days written by Maria Alyokhina and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2012 Maria Alyokhina and other members of Pussy Riot performed a provocative 'Punk Prayer', taking on the Orthodox church and its support for Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime. They were charged with 'organized hooliganism'. That trial and Alyokhina's subsequent imprisonment became an international cause. For Alyokhina, her two-year sentence launched a struggle against the Russian prison system and an iron-willed refusal to be deprived of her humanity. This book gives voice to Alyokhina's insistence on the right to say no, whether to a prison guard or to the president.
Download or read book Kolyma Diaries written by Jacek Hugo-Bader and published by Portobello Books. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
Download or read book The Long Bridge written by Urszula Muskus and published by Sandstone. This book was released on 2010 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman's account of departure from middle class life in Stalinist Russia, to the gulag. With an uplifting view of the world and human nature born of the author's natural compassion and struggle to survive.
Download or read book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back written by Julius Margolin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Journey to the Land of the Zek and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared in full before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influencing the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs"--
Download or read book American Gulag written by Mark Dow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The freelance writer and poet takes an unprecedented look inside the secret and repressive world of U.S. immigration prisons.
Download or read book For The Motherland For Stalin written by Boris Bogachev and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boris Bogachev's highly readable account of life as a young platoon commander during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 makes for a fascinating read. The son of a Soviet military commissar, Bogachev volunteered to fight as soon as reached the age of seventeen. Life in the Red Army was harsh, with food shortages, inadequate equipment and fear - not only of the well-armed enemy ahead, but also of the trigger-happy political officers behind. Bogachev fought in many campaigns throughout the war, including the 15-month Rzhev salien "meat-grinder" which resulted in huge Soviet losses. On three occasions he was threatened with execution. Three times he was wounded. Determined and resourceful, he managed to obtain papers authorizing him to have his wounds treated in hospital, but instead smuggled himself aboard a train to travel across Russia to visit his family in Kazakhstan before returning to the front. Boris Bogachev, who retired from the Soviet army in 1984 as a much-decorated colonel, tells his story of the hell that was the Eastern Front with freshness and candor. He vividly conveys the wide gap between ideology and reality in Stalin's Russia, the warm camaraderie among those who fought the Nazis and his horror at the inhumanity of war.
Download or read book My Fellow Prisoners written by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times
Download or read book The New Russia written by Mikhail Gorbachev and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After years of rapprochement, the relationship between Russia and the West is more strained now than it has been in the past 25 years. Putin’s motives, his reasons for seeking confrontation with the West, remain for many a mystery. Not for Mikhail Gorbachev. In this new work, Russia’s elder statesman draws on his wealth of knowledge and experience to reveal the development of Putin’s regime and the intentions behind it. He argues that Putin has significantly diminished the achievements of perestroika and is part of an over-centralized system that presents a precarious future for Russia. Faced with this, Gorbachev advocates a radical reform of politics and a new fostering of pluralism and social democracy. Gorbachev’s insightful analysis moves beyond internal politics to address wider problems in the region, including the Ukraine conflict, as well as the global challenges of poverty and climate change. Above all else, he insists that solutions are to be found by returning to the atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation which was so instrumental in ending the Cold War. This book represents the summation of Gorbachev’s thinking on the course that Russia has taken since 1991 and stands as a testament to one of the greatest and most influential statesmen of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial written by Lynne Viola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp written by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention—the biggest since the time of Mao. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the 'reeducation' camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell. These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders. The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.
Download or read book House of Meetings written by Martin Amis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-01-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel set in 1946, starring two brothers and a Jewish girl who fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time). “A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” —The New York Times The brothers' fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.
Download or read book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times). This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.
