(P/B) THE GULAG SURVIVOR

Παρουσίαση

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, Gulag victims initiated questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day. "The Gulag Survivor", now available in paperback, 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. It is an essential companion to the classic work of Aleksandr 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 their existence evolved from the 1950s to the present. It is an essential work in modern Russian history and is mandatory reading for historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists. (From the publisher)

"This pathbreaking volume reminds us that there were also Gulag survivors, victims of Stalinism. Adler lays out a broad agenda: she endeavors to document Gulag survivors as psychological, sociological, and political problems for the former Soviet Union and Russia today. This thoroughly footnoted work is recommended." (Choice)
"Adler makes good use of psychoanalytic theory and survivor literature in her attempt to understand the returnees' experience... [It] is a notable book on a very important topic. It joins Catherine Merridale's... "Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia" as a tribute to those who suffered in the Soviet concentration camps." (Lynne Viola, Slavic Review)

Περιεχόμενα

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Defining the Parameters
2. The First Return: Between Liberation and Liberalization, 1947-1953
3. The System's Adaptation to Repression, 1953-1955
4. The Impact of Repression on Readaptation
5. The Politics of Readaptation and Resocialization Procedures: Policy and Practice before and after the XX Party Congress
6. The Effect of Repression and Readaptation on Both the Returnees and the Political System
7. The Victims Strike Again: The Reemergence of Returnees in the Eighties and Nineties
8. Bibliography
9. Index