Iată rezumatul în engleză a cărţii lui Lynne Viola pe acest subiect:
Book Summary
In the
early 1930s, Joseph Stalin sent close to two million peasants into internal
exile. Entire families were brutally thrown out of their homes, banished from
their villages, and transported to the icy hinterlands of the Soviet Union.
Once there, they were forced to work as slave laborers for the Soviet
industrial effort, living in “special settlements” that they would build from
scratch. In the course of the decade, almost a half million people would die as
a result of disease, starvation, and exhaustion. This was the first act of
Stalinist terror and remained one of the largest episodes of mass repression in
the Soviet Union. It established the foundation of the Gulag, Stalin’s vast
network of prisons, labor camps, colonies, and special settlements.
The story
of the peasant exiles remained long hidden deep in the most classified of
Soviet archives. Unlike the intellectuals who were caught up in Stalin’s terror
and lived to tell about it, peasant survivors maintained their silence until
the reform era of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1991, living in fear and telling no one their stories. They
retained the stigma of “kulak”—the Communist Party’s label for the rural
capitalists it had sought to “liquidate as a class” under Stalin.
Based on
pioneering research in previously closed central and provincial Communist
Party, Soviet state, and secret police archives, Lynne Viola documents for the
first time the history of this tragic episode in Soviet history. She delves
deeply into the secret world of what long remained an entirely hidden dimension
of the Gulag, throwing new light on Stalin’s consolidation of power, the rise
of the secret police as a state within the state, and the complex workings of
the Soviet system. First and foremost, however, this book documents the
day-to-day existence of Stalin’s first victims, telling the stories of the
peasant families who experienced one of the Twentieth Century’s most horrific
exercises in mass repression.
Iată şi un fragment din înregistrarea video a prezentării prof. Lynne Viola:
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