Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives

Paul R. Gregory

Sep 2013 · Hoover Institution Press

Ebook

264

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Eligible

About this ebook

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.

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About the author

Paul R. Gregory is the director of the Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes at the Hoover Institution, where he is a research fellow. He is also the Cullen Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. He is the author of Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin; Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives; The Political Economy of Stalinism; Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin; and Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, among other books. His publications based on work in the Hoover Institution Archives have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J. M. Montias Prize for the best article in the Journal of Comparative Economics. He lives in Houston.

Paul R. Gregory is the director of the Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes at the Hoover Institution, where he is a research fellow. He is also the Cullen Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berli...

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