Gulag voices : oral histories of Soviet incarceration and exile /

Scholars and students of Soviet history will appreciate the efforts of Gheith (Duke), Jolluck (Stanford), 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 (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov) and academics (Anne Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk, and most recently, Stephen Cohen). Yet in this collection, most of the people telling their sad stories of repression and survival are not former political dissidents, but members of national groups (ethnic Germans, Tatars, and Poles) that, having come under Stalin's suspicion, suffered deportation and years of exile in remote parts of the USSR. Some of the interview subjects were children of the repressed; only one was a kulak. The compelling aspect of their interviews is less the direct (and somewhat familiar) experience of incarceration and exile, than their widely varying attitudes toward Soviet power and recollections of how their experiences continued to shape their lives for decades after their release. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. K. C. O'Connor Gonzaga University