Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8
result(s) for
"Political prisoners Russia (Federation) Biography."
Sort by:
The dissident : Alexey Navalny : profile of a political prisoner
\"A news-driven biography of Vladimir Putin's nemesis Alexey Navalny--lawyer, blogger, anti-corruption crusader, protest organizer, political opposition leader, mayoral and presidential candidate, campaign strategist, provocateur, poisoning victim, dissident, and now, prisoner of conscience and anti-war crusader. THE DISSIDENT is the story of how one fearless man, offended by the dishonesty and criminality of the Russian political system, mounted a relentless opposition movement and became President Vladimir Putin's most formidable rival--so despised that the Russian leader makes a point of never uttering Navalny's name. There's an old saying that Russia without corruption isn't Russia. Alexey Navalny refuses to accept this proposition. His stubborn insistence that Russians can defy the stereotype and create an entirely different country made him such a threat to Putin that the Kremlin wanted him exiled--or dead--and now seems intent on keeping him locked in a prison colony for decades.\"--Publisher.
Book
Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia : encounters with Polish literary exiles
These eyewitness accounts, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, introduce the reader to Dostoevsky's unfortunates from the Dead House--condemned to share with him Russia's carceral system of confinement, interrogations, denunciations, and hostile spaces--whose psychoses become the writer's obsession in his celebrated crime novels.
eBook
The gods left first
At the time of Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast expanse of a vanquished Asian empire. Half civilian and half military, they faced the prospect of returning somehow to a Japan that lay prostrate, its cities destroyed, after years of warfare and Allied bombing campaigns. Among them were more than 600,000 soldiers of Japan’s army in Manchuria, who had surrendered to the Red Army only to be transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. Held for between two and four years, and some far longer, amid forced labor and reeducation campaigns, they waited for return, never knowing when or if it would come. Drawing on a wide range of memoirs, art, poetry, and contemporary records, The Gods Left First reconstructs their experience of captivity, return, and encounter with a postwar Japan that now seemed as alien as it had once been familiar. In a broader sense, this study is a meditation on the meaning of survival for Japan’s continental repatriates, showing that their memories of involvement in Japan’s imperial project were both a burden and the basis for a new way of life.
eBook
Gulag voices : oral histories of Soviet incarceration and exile
\"In this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors will 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\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Dostoevsky's democracy
Dostoevsky's Democracy offers a major reinterpretation of the life and work of the great Russian writer by closely reexamining the crucial transitional period between the early works of the 1840s and the important novels of the 1860s. Sentenced to death in 1849 for utopian socialist political activity, the 28-year-old Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution and then exiled to Siberia for a decade, including four years in a forced labor camp, where he experienced a crisis of belief. It has been influentially argued that the result of this crisis was a conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and reactionary politics. But Dostoevsky's Democracy challenges this view through a close investigation of Dostoevsky's Siberian decade and its most important work, the autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1861). Nancy Ruttenburg argues that Dostoevsky's crisis was set off by his encounter with common Russians in the labor camp, an experience that led to an intense artistic meditation on what he would call Russian \"democratism.\" By tracing the effects of this crisis, Dostoevsky's Democracy presents a new understanding of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and political development and his role in shaping Russian modernity itself, especially in relation to the preeminent political event of his time, peasant emancipation.
eBook
Yeltsin's Uncertain Legacy
Colton is a political scientist, analytically inclined, which means that the story of Yeltsin's life-from dirt-poor son of political prisoners who had been rehabilitated to university student to good Communist apparatchik to, well, either a revolutionary or a politically astute operator-never coheres into a single narrative. DECREES AND DISARRAY While the main point of Yeltsin is to paint a picture of the former Russian president as the right man at the right time in history, the book also attempts to rebut arguments against assessments of Yeltsin as a lion of democracy, arguments that hinge on the manner in which Yeltsin governed and the way in which he and his advisers dismantled the Soviet economy.
Book Review
DECLASSIFIED
Ten years ago, on a blustery March morning, the author found himself in front of Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison, the dreaded home of the KGB, where thousands of political prisoners were jailed, interrogated, and tortured. He had come to find the file of his father, a man he did not know -- a man who, when he was arrested in the hellish days of Joseph Stalin's purges, was not even half the age he is now. The dark central stairwell in the Lubyanka annex where he was directed was barely illuminated; a sole light bulb hung above the second-floor landing that housed the reading room. It's a memory of a time and a politics long ago. Yet when he looks at his picture, he's so young that he can't help but feel oddly protective -- if he were his own son. It pains him that he died, of starvation and cold, unremarked, only to be buried in the wastelands of the Russian Tundra. Adapted from the source document.
Magazine Article