Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Memoir Of A Gulag Actress
Download Memoir Of A Gulag Actress full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Memoir Of A Gulag Actress ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Memoir of a Gulag Actress by : Tamara Petkevich
Download or read book Memoir of a Gulag Actress written by Tamara Petkevich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an abridged translation that retains the grace and passion of the original, Klots and Ufberg present the stunning memoir of a young woman who became an actress in the Gulag. Tamara Petkevich had a relatively privileged childhood in the beautiful, impoverished Petrograd of the Soviet regime's early years, but when her father—a fervent believer in the Communist ideal—was arrested, 17-year-old Tamara was branded a "daughter of the enemy of the people." She kept up a search for her father while struggling to support her mother and two sisters, finish school, and enter university. Shortly before the Russian outbreak of World War II, Petkevich was forced to quit school and, against her better judgment, she married an exiled man whom she had met in the lines at the information bureau of the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Her mother and one sister perished in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and Petkevich was herself arrested. With cinematic detail, Petkevich relates her attempts to defend herself against absurd charges of having a connection to the Leningrad terrorist center, counter-revolutionary propaganda, and anti-Semitism that resulted in a sentence of seven years' hard labor in the Gulag. While Petkevich became a professional actress in her own right years after her release from the Gulag, she learned her craft on the stages of the camps scattered across the northern Komi Republic. The existence of prisoner theaters and troupes of political prisoners such as the one Petkevich joined is a little-known fact of Gulag life. Petkevich's depiction not only provides a unique firsthand account of this world within a world but also testifies to the power of art to literally save lives. As Petkevich moves from one form of hardship to another she retains her desire to live and her ability to love. More than a firsthand record of atrocities committed in Stalinist Russia, Memoir of a Gulag Actress is an invaluable source of information on the daily life and culture of the Soviet Union at the time. Russian literature about the Gulag remains vastly underepresented in the United States, and Petkevich's unforgettable memoir will go a long way toward filling this gap. Supplemented with photographs from the author's personal archive, Petkevich's story will be of great interest to general readers, while providing an important resource for historians, political scientists, and students of Russian culture and history.
Book Synopsis My Journey by : Olga Adamova-Sliozberg
Download or read book My Journey written by Olga Adamova-Sliozberg and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English translation of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg’s mesmerizing My Journey, which was not officially published in Russia until 2002. It is among the best known of Gulag memoirs and was one of the first to become widely available in underground samizdat circulation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn relied heavily upon it when writing Gulag Archipelago, and it remains the best account of the daily life of women in the Soviet prison camps. Arrested along with her husband (who, she would much later learn, was shot the next day) in the great purges of the thirties, Adamova-Sliozberg decided to record her Gulag experiences a year after her arrest, and she “wrote them down in her head” (paper and pencils were not available to prisoners) every night for years. When she returned to Moscow after the war in 1946, she composed the memoir on paper for the first time and then buried it in the garden of the family dacha. After her re-arrest and seven more years of banishment to Kazakhstan, she returned to the dacha to dig up the buried memoir, but could not find it. She sat down and wrote it all over again. In her later years she also added a collection of stories about her family. Concluding on a hopeful note—Adamova-Sliozberg’s record is cleared, she re-marries a fellow former-prisoner, and she is reunited with her children—this story is a stunning account of perseverance in the face of injustice and unimaginable hardship. This vital primary source continues to fascinate anyone interesting in the tumultuous history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis The Child of Gulag by : Yuri Feynberg
Download or read book The Child of Gulag written by Yuri Feynberg and published by Tate Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This story is based on the life of author Yuri Feynberg, who is one of the last surviving children of the Soviet Penal System, known to the world as the GULAG. Although not a prisoner, Yuri spent his childhood behind the barbed wired fence in a remote Siberian hard labor camp, where his mother worked as a medical doctor. As the only child there, he lived among Stalin's political prisoners, hardcore criminals, and security guards. This extraordinary childhood created an unusual personality and an unbendable character, which made it possible for Yuri to excel in the Soviet Special Forces, survive prosecution, and overcome unfathomable personal tragedies without losing his humanity.
Author :Semen Samuilovich Vilenskiĭ Publisher :Indiana University Press ISBN 13 :9780253214768 Total Pages :378 pages Book Rating :4.2/5 (147 download)
Book Synopsis Till My Tale Is Told by : Semen Samuilovich Vilenskiĭ
Download or read book Till My Tale Is Told written by Semen Samuilovich Vilenskiĭ and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-13 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How extraordinary it is that compassion and tenderness may flourish in the cruellest conditions; how stubbornly and bravely people survive them. This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one." —Doris Lessing "The sixteen life stories are riveting. . . . testimony to the complexity of the human spirit[,] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions. . . . Till My Tale Is Told remind[s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history." —The Women's Review of Books Arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and sentencing, transport, labor camps, internal exile, sometimes release, often followed by re-arrest and re-imprisonment and, for those who outlived Stalin, eventual reprieve and rehabilitation these are the outlines of the experiences recorded by 16 courageous Russian women whose moving testimonies, most of them written in secret and at great personal risk, are presented here.
Book Synopsis Dressed for a Dance in the Snow by : Monika Zgustova
Download or read book Dressed for a Dance in the Snow written by Monika Zgustova and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today A poignant and unexpectedly inspirational account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced labor camps, diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of nine survivors. The pain inflicted by the gulags has cast a long and dark shadow over Soviet-era history. Zgustová’s collection of interviews with former female prisoners not only chronicles the hardships of the camps, but also serves as testament to the power of beauty in face of adversity. Where one would expect to find stories of hopelessness and despair, Zgustová has unearthed tales of the love, art, and friendship that persisted in times of tragedy. Across the Soviet Union, prisoners are said to have composed and memorized thousands of verses. Galya Sanova, born in a Siberian gulag, remembers reading from a hand-stitched copy of Little Red Riding Hood. Irina Emelyanova passed poems to the male prisoner she had grown to love. In this way, the arts lent an air of humanity to the women’s brutal realities. These stories, collected in the vein of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning oral histories, turn one of the darkest periods of the Soviet era into a song of human perseverance, in a way that reads as an intimate family history.
Book Synopsis Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back by : Julius Margolin
Download or read book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back written by Julius Margolin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Journey to the Land of the Zek and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared in full before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influencing the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs"--
Book Synopsis Beautiful Twentysomethings by : Marek Hlasko
Download or read book Beautiful Twentysomethings written by Marek Hlasko and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marek Hlasko's literary autobiography is a vivid, first-hand account of the life of a young writer in 1950s Poland and a fascinating portrait of the ultimately short-lived rebel generation. Told in a voice suffused with grit and morbid humor, Hlasko's memoir was a classic of its time. In it he recounts his adventures and misadventures, moving swiftly from one tale to the next. Like many writers of his time, Hlasko also worked in screen writing, and his memoir provides a glimpse into just how markedly the medium of film affected him from his very earliest writing days. The memoir details his relationships with such giants of Polish culture as the filmmaker Roman Polanski and the novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski. Hlasko is the most prominent example of a writer who broke free from the Socialist-Realist formulae that dominated the literary scene in Poland since it fell under the influence of the Soviets. He made his literary debut in 1956 and immediately became a poster boy for Polish Literature. He subsequently worked at some of the most important newspapers and magazines for intellectual life in Warsaw. Hlasko was sent to Paris on an official mission in 1958, but when he published in an émigré Parisian press his novel of life in post-War Poland, he was denied a renewal of his passport. In effect, he was called back to Poland, and when he refused to return he was stripped of his Polish citizenship. He spent the rest of his life working in exile. Marek Hlasko was a rebel whose writing and iconoclastic way of life became an inspiration to those of his generation and after. Here, in the first English translation of his literary memoir, Ross Ufberg deftly renders Hlasko's wry and passionate voice.
Download or read book Cilka's Journey written by Heather Morris and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the multi-million copy bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz comes a new novel based on a riveting true story of love and resilience. Her beauty saved her — and condemned her. Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian prison camp. But did she really have a choice? And where do the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was send to Auschwitz when she was still a child? In Siberia, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she meets a kind female doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing and begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions. Confronting death and terror daily, Cilka discovers a strength she never knew she had. And when she begins to tentatively form bonds and relationships in this harsh, new reality, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love. From child to woman, from woman to healer, Cilka's journey illuminates the resilience of the human spirit—and the will we have to survive.
Book Synopsis A Mountain of Crumbs by : Elena Gorokhova
Download or read book A Mountain of Crumbs written by Elena Gorokhova and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by. Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language—but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive. Through Elena’s captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return.
Download or read book The Gulag written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century. It combined a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime. More than 25 million people passed through the Gulag from its creation in 1930 to its dismantling in the 1950s. By presenting both the everyday experiences of ordinary prisoners and the overall political and economic background of the system, The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction offers a succinct and comprehensive study of the Gulag and its legacy in the former USSR.
Book Synopsis Twenty Years in a Siberian Gulag by : Leonid Petrovich Bolotov
Download or read book Twenty Years in a Siberian Gulag written by Leonid Petrovich Bolotov and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught up in one of the many purges that swept the Soviet Union during the Great Terror, Leonid Petrovich Bolotov (1906-1987) was one of 86 engineers arrested at Leningrad's Red Triangle Rubber Factory and sent to the Gulag as "enemies of the people." He would be the only one to survive and return to his family after enduring two decades in the infamous Kolyma labor camps. Translated into English and published here for the first time, Bolotov's memoir narrates with growing intensity his arrest, imprisonment and interrogation, his "confession" and trial, his exile to hard labor in Arctic Siberia, and his rehabilitation in 1956 following the official end of Stalin's personality cult.
Download or read book The Gulag Doctors written by Dan Healey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin’s Gulag—showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics—about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and “saved” a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin’s forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.
Download or read book Memories written by Teffi and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2018 READ RUSSIA PRIZE AND THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BEST BOOK IN TRANSLATION IN 2017 Considered Teffi’s single greatest work, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia and Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her, many of which have now resurfaced. In 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Teffi, whose stories and journalism had made her a celebrity in Moscow, was invited to read from her work in Ukraine. She accepted the invitation eagerly, though she had every intention of returning home. As it happened, her trip ended four years later in Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life in exile. None of this was foreseeable when she arrived in German-occupied Kiev to discover a hotbed of artistic energy and experimentation. When Kiev fell several months later to Ukrainian nationalists, Teffi fled south to Odessa, then on to the port of Novorossiysk, from which she embarked at last for Constantinople. Danger and death threaten throughout Memories, even as the book displays the brilliant style, keen eye, comic gift, and deep feeling that have made Teffi one of the most beloved of twentieth-century Russian writers.
Book Synopsis The Orphan Master's Son by : Adam Johnson
Download or read book The Orphan Master's Son written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.
Download or read book A World Apart written by Gustav Herling and published by Lowe Press. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A WORLD APART by GUSTAV HERLING. Contents include: PREFACE, k PART I CHAP. PAGE 1 VITEBSK LENINGRAD VOLOGDA 1 2 HUNTING BY NIGHT 20 3 WORK 1 DAY AFTER DAY 32 2 THROWN TO THE WOLVES 45 3 STALINS MURDERER 50 4 DREI KAMERADEN 56 5 THE ICE-BREAKER 65 6 THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS 86 7 RESURRECTION 97 8 THE DAY OF REST 113 PART II 9 HUNGER 131 10 NIGHTFALL 143 11 THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD 152 12 N THE REAR OF THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND 1 A GAME OF CHESS 174 2 HAYMAKING 183 13 MARTYRDOM FOR THE FAITH 190 14 THE MORTUARY 210 15 IN THE URALS, 1942 227 EPILOGUE THE FALL OF PARIS 242 APPENDIX 249 ILLUSTRATIONS THE AUTHORS PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN GRODNO PRISON IN 1940, AND STOLEN BY HIM FROM HIS DOSSIER ON THE DAY OF HIS RELEASE FROM KARGOPOL CAMP frontispiece A PHOTOGRAPH OF ONE OF THE CAMP-SECTIONS OF THE KARGOPOL CAMP, TAKEN ORIGINALLY BY A CAMP GUARD AS A SOUVENIR, AND LATER SOLD BY HIM TO ONE OF THE PRISONERS facing page 24 A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE HANDKERCHIEF MADE AND EMBROI DERED BY Miss Z. facing page 220 IGANOVS POSTCARD facing page 228 AN EXTRACT FROM THE AUTHORS DIARY, KEPT AFTER HIS RELEASE FROM THE CAMP facing page 234. PREFACE by BERTRAND RUSSELL: OF the many books that I have read relating the experiences of victims in Soviet prisons and labour camps, Mr. Gustav Herlings A World Apart is the most impressive and the best written. He possesses in a very rare degree the power of simple and vivid description, and it is quite impossible to question his sincerity at any point. In the years 1940-42 he was first in prison and then in a forced labour camp near Archangel. The bulk of the book relates what he saw and suffered in the camp. The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr. Herlings are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it. Communists and Nazis alike have tragically demonstrated that in a large proportion of mankind the impulse to inflict torture exists, and requires only opportunity to display itself in all its naked horror. But I do not think that these evils can be cured by blind hatred of their perpetrators. This will only lead us to become like them. Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a book as this one, to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realise that it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not say that to understand is to pardon there are things which for my part I find I cannot pardon. But I do say that to understand is absolutely necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented. I hope that Mr...
Book Synopsis Surviving the Gulag by : Ilse Johansen
Download or read book Surviving the Gulag written by Ilse Johansen and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The terrified yell of my comrades makes me stop. I drop the potatoes into the grass and turn around. He has pulled out the pistol and is taking aim. Slowly I come back." Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a resourceful woman who survived five grueling years in Russian prison camps: starved, traumatized, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen's is rarely told—of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War. The candid story of her time as a prisoner, written soon after her release, provides startling insight into the ordeal of a German female prisoner under Soviet rule. Readers of memoir and history, and students of feminism and war studies, will learn more about women's experience of the Soviet gulag through the eyes of Ilse Johansen. Introduction by Michael Seadle. "It is getting colder and colder. At -38C we don't have to work any more." Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a complex woman who survived five horrifying years in Russian prison camps: starved, beaten, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen's is rarely told—of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War. Her candid account of her time as a prisoner, written soon after her release, provides startling insight into the trials of a German female prisoner under Soviet rule. Readers of memoir and history, and students of feminism and war studies, will learn more about women's experience of the Soviet gulag through the eyes of Ilse Johansen.
Book Synopsis Criminal Subculture in the Gulag by : Mark Vincent
Download or read book Criminal Subculture in the Gulag written by Mark Vincent and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite growing academic interest in the Gulag, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete. Criminal Subculture in the Gulag, in its sophisticated analysis of crime, punishment and everyday life in Soviet labour camps, rectifies this. From Gulag journals and song collections to tattoo drawings and dictionaries of slang, Mark Vincent draws on often-overlooked archival material from the Moscow Criminological Bureau to reconstruct a fuller picture of Gulag daily life and society. In thematic chapters, Vincent maps the Gulag 'penal arc' of prisoners across initiation tests, means of communication, the importance of card playing, punishment rituals and the notorious 1948-52 cyka ('bitches') internal prison war between military veterans and vory-v-zakone. Most importantly, this timely examination of crime and punishment in modern Russia also highlights the lines of continuity between the Gulag systems, late Imperial Katorga,and today's Russian mafia. As such, this impressively interdisciplinary volume is important reading for all scholars of 20th-century Russia as well as those interested in international criminality and penology.
