Yale University Press
Annals of Communism Series
In these powerful and moving life histories, the now aged offspring of peasants, workers, scientists, physicians, and political leaders recall the childhood traumas brought about by the arrest of their parents. They speak openly about coping with starvation, disease, forced labor, and anti-Semitism, and about living in exile in remote Soviet villages as children of “enemies of the people.” Finally, they discuss how their opinion of the Soviet government was influenced by their experiences and how it has evolved over time. The result is a unique oral history, illustrated with photographs and maps of each child’s multiple displacements, that will profoundly deepen the reader’s understanding of life in the U.S.S.R. under the rule of Joseph Stalin.
This book presents the first comprehensive collection in English of peasant writings during the early years of the Bolshevik regime. Drawn entirely from Russian archival sources, it presents more than 150 previously unpublished letters addressed to newspapers, government officials, and Communist Party leaders. The letters and accompanying commentary result in a unique history of the Soviet peasantry's engagement and struggle with a powerful state, enabling readers to hear the voice of a social class that throughout history has too often been rendered voiceless.
Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.
This book explores Soviet prosecution records to tell the hidden story of ordinary citizens who were arrested for expressing discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years.
Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story. Gulag Voices now fills in the other half.
The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances—many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value—collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them.
A vital addition to the literature of this era,annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the Soviet Union, Gulag Voices will inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself.
Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937–1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.
The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions about Stalin’s involvement in the assassination.
Based on documents newly available from Russian archives, The Soviet World of American Communism conclusively demonstrates the continuous and intimate ties between the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Moscow. In a meticulous investigation of the personal, organizational, and financial links between the CPUSA and Soviet Communists, the authors find that Moscow maintained extensive control of the CPUSA, even of the American rank and file. The widely accepted view that the CPUSA was essentially an idealistic organization devoted to the pursuit of social justice must be radically revised, say the authors. Although individuals within the organization may not have been aware of Moscow’s influence, the leaders of the organization most definitely were.
The authors explain and annotate ninety-five documents, reproduced here in their entirety or in large part, and they quote from hundreds of others to reveal the actual workings of the American Communist party. They show that:
the USSR covertly provided a large part of the CPUSA budget from the early 1920s to the end of the 1980s;
Moscow issued orders, which the CPUSA obeyed, on issues ranging from what political decisions the American party should make to who should serve in the party leadership;
the CPUSA endorsed Stalin’s purges and the persecution of Americans living in Russia.
The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.
Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver—now subsumed under “Katyn”—present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian–Polish relations up to the present.
The album’s editors select characteristic drawings by such prominent leaders as Nikolai Bukharin, who depicts himself as piggy foxy,” Valery Mezhlauk, and Stalin himself, whose trademark blue pencil appears on several of the drawings. A number of sketches of unknown authorship are also included. The editors identify the political issues, events, and discussions that inspired the drawings, and they provide biographical information about the people who drew and were drawn. The book opens a rare window on Stalin’s inner circle, allowing us access to the powerful men who, despite living in a humorless epoch, developed a special humor of their own.
During the years between 1933 and his death in 1949, Dimitrov kept a diary that described his tumultuous career and revealed much about the inner working of the international Communist organizations, the opinions and actions of the Soviet leadership, and the Soviet Union’s role in shaping the postwar Eastern Europe. This important document, edited and introduced by renowned historian Ivo Banac, is now available for the first time in English. It is an essential source for information about international Communism, Stalin and Soviet policy, and the origins of the Cold War.
From dossiers on the liquidated Soviet elite to police reports of peasant unrest to private letters from victims and purgers to secret transcripts of Central Committee meetings, the nearly two hundred documents presented here confirm Stalin’s role as executor of the terror. Yet the top party elite, or nomenklatura, were also key to the unfolding of a terror that proceeded with fits and starts, moves and countermoves, and steps toward and away from the abyss. From 1932 to early 1937 Stalin and the nomenklatura agreed on the need to destroy all dissidents, to stage show trials, to carry out mass arrests, purges, and shootings, and to prevent any resistance to these cleansings.” Eventually deep insecurities that magnified any opposition and iron discipline within the party led the nomenklatura to support Stalin in purging their own colleagues, and in 1937 and 1938 they serially voted one another into prison.
In both principle and practice, the Comintern was an international organization, with a staff that consisted primarily of Communist émigrés who had fled dictatorial regimes in Europe and Asia. It was, however, headquartered in Moscow and controlled by Soviet leaders. This book examines the rise of suspicions and xenophobia among Soviet and Comintern leaders and cadres for whom many foreigners were no longer the heroes of the class struggle but rather possible enemy agents. Some Comintern members internalized and acted on Stalin’s theories about the infiltration of foreign spies into Soviet society, supplying the Soviet police with information that led to the exile or execution of imigris. Thousands of other imigris also became victims of the purges. Together the text and documents of this book convey graphically the essential roles played by the Comintern, providing a unique perspective on the era of Stalinist repression and terror.
The book, the first of four in the series, covers the background of collectivization, its violent implementation, and the mass peasant revolt that ensued. For its insights into the horrific fate of the Russian peasantry and into Stalin’s dictatorship, The War Against the Peasantry takes its place an as unparalleled resource.
What was life like for ordinary Russian citizens in the 1930s? How did they feel about socialism and the acts committed in its name? This unique book provides English-speaking readers with the responses of those who experienced firsthand the events of the middle-Stalinist period. The book contains 157 documents—mostly letters to authorities from Soviet citizens, but also reports compiled by the secret police and Communist Party functionaries, internal government and party memoranda, and correspondence among party officials. Selected from recently opened Soviet archives, these previously unknown documents illuminate in new ways both the complex social roots of Stalinism and the texture of daily life during a highly traumatic decade of Soviet history.
Accompanied by introductory and linking commentary, the documents are organized around such themes as the impact of terror on the citizenry, the childhood experience, the countryside after collectivization, and the role of cadres that were directed to “decide everything.” In their own words, peasants and workers, intellectuals and the uneducated, adults and children, men and women, Russians and people from other national groups tell their stories. Their writings reveal how individual lives influenced—and were affected by—the larger events of Soviet history.
The documents presented range from letters by Americans wishing to do international covert work for the Soviet Union to top secret memos between the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, the Comintern, and the CPUSA. They confirm that
--the Soviet Union heavily subsidized the CPUSA and that some prominent Americans laundered money for the Comintern;
--the CPUSA maintained a covert espionage apparatus in the United States with direct ties to Soviet intelligence;
--the testimony of former Communists concerning underground Communist activity in the United States can be substantiated;
--American Communists working in government agencies stole documents and passed them to the CPUSA, which sent them on to Moscow;
--the CPUSA played a role in atomic espionage;
and much more.
An engrossing narrative places the documents in their historical context and explains key figures, organizations, and events. Together the narrative and documents provide a revealing picture of American communism and convey the contradictory passions that drew so many Americans into the Communist movement and eventually tore that movement apart.
The unique and revealing collection of lettersall previously classified top secretprovides a dramatic account of the mainsprings of Soviet policy while Stalin was consolidating his position as personal dictator. The correspondence records his positions on major internal and foreign affairs decisions and reveals his opinions about fellow members of the Politburo and other senior figures. Written during the years of agricultural collectivization, forced industrialization, famine, repression, and Soviet rearmament in the face of threats from Germany and Japan, these letters constitute an unsurpassed historical resource for all students of the Stalin regime and Soviet history.