1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910790510303321

Autore

Gregory Paul R

Titolo

Women of the Gulag [[electronic resource] ] : portraits of five remarkable lives / / Paul R. Gregory

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, Calif., : Hoover Institution Press, 2013

ISBN

0-8179-1576-1

0-8179-1578-8

Descrizione fisica

xiii, 246 p. : ill., maps, ports

Collana

Hoover Institution Press publication ; ; no. 631

Disciplina

365/.45092520947

Soggetti

Women political prisoners - Soviet Union

Political persecution - Soviet Union

Internment camps - Soviet Union

Prisons - Soviet Union

Forced labor - Soviet Union

Soviet Union History 1925-1953

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Terror's human face -- Stalin : struggles and successes -- Agnessa : elite NKVD wife -- Maria : portrait of the new Soviet family -- Evgenia : luxury with a beast -- Adile : princess bride of Abkhazia -- Fekla : child of the kulaks -- Stalin : the storm descends -- Agnessa : crashing a funeral -- Stalin : launching the great terror -- Agnessa : the purge spreads far and wide -- Maria : a narrow escape -- Evgenia : socialist realist -- Adile : the master will not abandon us -- Fekla : becoming a Bolshevik -- Stalin : the master needs a scapegoat -- Agnessa : new year's eve with the Master -- Maria : wife of a traitor to the motherland -- Evgenia : losing everything -- Adile : return and arrest -- Fekla : face of the future -- Aftermath.

Sommario/riassunto

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.