Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (Palgrave Studies in Oral History) - Softcover

Gheith, J. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0230610633 ISBN 13: 9780230610637

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Synopsis

In this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors become accessible to English-speaking audiences for the first time through oral histories, rather than written memoirs. It brings together interviews with men and women, members of the working class and intelligentsia, people who live in the major cities and those from the "provinces," and from an array of corrective hard labor camps and prisons across the former Soviet Union. Its aims are threefold: 1) to give a sense of the range of the Gulag experience and its consequences for Russian society; 2) to make the Gulag relevant to English-speaking readers by offering comparisons to historical catastrophes they are likely to know more about, such as the Holocaust; and 3) to discuss issues of oral history and memory in the cultural context of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

About this title

About the Author:

JEHANNE M. GHEITH Associate Professor and Chair of the Slavic and Eurasian Studies Department at Duke University, USA.

KATHERINE R. JOLLUCK Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, USA.

Review:

"Here the history of the Gulag is reflected in individual fates, the lives of the witnesses show clearly that the legacy of Stalinism is not overcome even decades after the dictator's death." - Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"Scholars and students of Soviet history will appreciate the efforts of Gheith, Jolluck, and their team of knowledgeable interviewers to mine the memories often eroded by the passage of time of elderly survivors of Soviet repression. Composed of an introduction and 16 chapters, each containing an interview with a survivor preceded by several pages of historical context and analysis, Gulag Voices is a useful addition to a literature that has hitherto been dominated by the voices of intellectuals and academics. Recommended." - CHOICE

"This is an engrossing book that lets the reader hear raw voices from the Gulag. It is at once fascinating, revealing, and sobering. Highly recommended." - Hiroaki Kuromiya, Professor of History, Indiana University at Bloomington"Gulag Voices is an extremely valuable, stimulating, and well-conceived work of oral history . . . The benefit of this work is that it allows readers direct access to the transcripts of the interviews and gives voice to a range of survivors who might never have thought to write about their experiences." - Miriam Dobson, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UK

"Gheith and Jolluck's collection of riveting oral histories of returnees who could finally break their silence offers powerful testimony to the enduring legacy of state-sponsored repression. These personal, often heart-wrenching narratives educate us about life and death in and after the Gulag; they are an homage to survivors and those who did not survive." - Nanci Adler, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam

"Eminent scholars Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck provide commentary and supplementary information that is at once sympathetic, respectful, and rigorously analytical. The result is a unique volume that explores not only the horrors of the Gulag experience, though that comes through in often frightful detail, but also the long term effects of survivors' attempts to remember the experience, make sense of the radical disconnect between official ideology and real life, and heal ruptured lives." - Steven A. Barnes, Associate Professor of History, George Mason University

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0230610633
• ISBN 13: 9780230610637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 275