Russia Faces Its Past

Stalin's rule over Russia left some 20 million people dead and, in the 35 years since his death, no one would openly write or talk about his vast self-inflicted genocide. With the advent of glasnost, journalist Hochschild explores how Russians today are healing the wounds from an avalanche of long-repressed memories. Photos.

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. The Unquiet Ghost won the Madeline Dane Ross Award of the Overseas Press Club of America, given to "the best foreign correspondent in any medium showing concern for the human condition." Hochschild's work has also won prizes from the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and the Society of American Travel Writers. An anthology of his shorter pieces, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It, Half the Way Home, and The Unquiet Ghost were all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. His books have been translated into six languages.

Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on Nation- al Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Jour- nalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a guest teacher at other campuses in the U.S. and abroad. In 1997- 98, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Fran- cisco with his wife Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.