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"Concentration camps Soviet Union History 20th century."
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Stalin's Gulag at war : forced labour, mass death, and Soviet victory in the Second World War
Stalin's Gulag at Warplaces the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. The author explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war.
eBook
Babushka's journey : the dark road to Stalin's wartime camps
\"This is the story of a grandmother, and what happened to her and to Eastern Europe in World War II. Following the tracks of his grandmother Cilly, or 'Babushka', into her vanished homeland of East Prussia and to the labor camps of the Soviet Union, Marcel Krueger has interwoven contemporary landscape and family history into an poignant and evocative travel memoir. It is the record of his grandmother's journey from the snow-covered battlefields of East Prussia in January 1945 to the Soviet labor camps in the Urals, where she spent 5 years before returning to Germany. Chasing the sights, sounds and voices of past and present along this route, the author describes two different journeys that follow the same path\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Keeping Faith with the Party
How is it that some prisoners of the Soviet gulag-many of them falsely convicted-emerged from the camps maintaining their loyalty to the party that was responsible for their internment? In camp, they had struggled to survive. Afterward they struggled to reintegrate with society, reunite with their loved ones, and sometimes renew Party ties. Based on oral histories, archives, and unpublished memoirs, Keeping Faith with the Party chronicles the stories of returnees who professed enduring belief in the CPSU and the Communist project. Nanci Adler's probing investigation brings a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism and of how individuals survive within repressive regimes while the repressive regimes also survive within them.
eBook
Stalin's Gulag at war : forced labour, mass death, and Soviet victory in the Second World War
\"Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. Far from Moscow, Western Siberia was a key area for evacuated factories and for production in support of the war effort. Wilson T. Bell explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices such as black markets, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war. The region's camps were never prioritized, and faced a constant struggle to mobilize for the war. Prisoners in these camps, however, engaged in such activities as sewing Red Army uniforms, manufacturing artillery shells, and constructing and working in major defense factories. The myriad responses of prisoners and personnel to the war reveal the Gulag as a complex system, but one that was closely tied to the local, regional, and national war effort, to the point where prisoners and non-prisoners frequently interacted. At non-priority camps, moreover, the area's many forced labour camps and colonies saw catastrophic death rates, often far exceeding official Gulag averages. Ultimately, prisoners played a tangible role in Soviet victory, but the cost was incredibly high, both in terms of the health and lives of the prisoners themselves, and in terms of Stalin's commitment to total, often violent, mobilization to achieve the goals of the Soviet state.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Suppressed terror
At the end of World War II, the Soviet secret police installed ten special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, later to become the German Democratic Republik. Between 1945 and 1950, roughly 154,000 Germans were held incommunicado in these camps. Whether those accused of being Nazis, spies, or terrorists were indeed guilty as charged, they were indiscriminately imprisoned as security threats and denied due process of the law. One third of the captives did not survive. To this day, most Germans have no knowledge of this postwar Stalinist persecution, even though it exemplifies in a unique way the entangled history of Germans as perpetrators and victims. How can one write the history of victims in a “society of perpetrators?” This is only one of the questions Displaced Terror: History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany raises in exploring issues in memory culture in contemporary Germany. The study begins with a detailed description of the camp system against the backdrop of Stalinist security policies in a territory undergoing a transition from war zone to occupation zone to Cold War hot spot. The interpretation of the camps as an instrument of pacification rather than of denacification does not ignore the fact that, while actual perpetrators were a minority, the majority of the special camp inmates had at least been supporters of Nazi rule and were now imprisoned under life-threatening conditions together with victims and opponents of the defeated regime. Based on their detention memoirs, the second part of the book offers a closer look at life and death in the camps, focusing on the prisoners' self-organization and the frictions within these coerced communities. The memoirs also play an important role in the third and last part of the study. Read as attempts to establish public acknowledgment of violence suffered by Germans, they mirror German memory culture since the end of World War II.
eBook
Illness and inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag
A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror In a shocking new study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag, historian Golfo Alexopoulos suggests that Soviet forced labor camps were driven by brutal exploitation and often administered as death camps. The first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.
Book
Gulag Memories
Though the institution of the Gulag was nominally closed over half a decade ago, it lives on as an often hotly contested site of memory in the post-socialist era. This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance—the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma—to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.
eBook
Medical Research in Stalin's Gulag
Recently declassified Gulag archives reveal for the first time that the Stalinist leadership established medical research laboratories in the camps. The present work offers an initial reading of the medical research conducted by and on prisoners in Stalin's Gulag. Although Gulag science did not apparently possess the lethal character of Nazi medicine, neither was this work entirely benign. I argue that the highly constrained environment of the Stalinist camps distorted medical science. Scientists were forced to produce work agreeable to their Gulag administrators. Thus they remained silent regarding the context of mass starvation and forced labor, and often perpetuated Gulag myths concerning the nature of diseases and the threat of deceptive patients. Rather than aggressive treatment to save lives, they often engaged in clinical observations of dead or dying patients. At the same time, a few courageous scientists challenged the Gulag system in their research, in both subtle and overt ways.
Journal Article
Stalin's Gulag at War
Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of
the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the
Second World War. The author explores a diverse array of issues,
including mass death, informal practices, and the responses of
prisoners and personnel to the war.
eBook