The Legacies Of Soviet Repression And Displacement

This book explores the ways in which memories of Stalin-era repression and displacement manifest across times and places through diverse forms of materialization. The chapters of the book explore the concrete mobilities of life stories, letters, memoirs, literature, objects, and bodies reflecting Soviet repression and violence across borders of geographical locations, historical periods, and affective landscapes. These spatial, temporal, and psychological shifts are explored further as processes of textual circulation and mediation. By offering novel multi-sited and multi-media analyses of the creative, political, societal, cultural, and intimate implications of remembrance, the collection contributes fresh interdisciplinary perspectives to both the field of memory studies and the study of Soviet repression. The case studies in this collection focus on the personal, autobiographical, and intimate representations, experiences, and practices related to the remembrance of Stalinist repression and displacement as they are mediated through memoirs, fiction, interviews, and versatile commemorative practices. Taken together, the book asks: what happens to memories, life stories, testimonies, and experiences when they travel in time and space and between media and are (re)interpreted and (re)formulated through these transfers? What kinds of memorial forms are gained through processes of mediation? What types of spaces for remembering, telling, and feeling are created, negotiated, and contested through these shifts? What are the boundaries and intersections of intimate, familial, community, national, and transnational memories? By analytically contextualizing the various case studies within broader memory discourses in a range of geographical and political contexts, the book offers rich and multilayered interpretations of the enduring ramifications of communist repression. The collection demonstrates that these multiply moving memories not only reflect Eastern European memory culture but also reach far beyond and have transnational and transgenerational significance. As such, this timely book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the former Soviet Union or memory studies more broadly.

This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various actors participate in the production, dissemination, and contestation of memory discourses. With attention to the characteristics of both vertical and horizontal memory fragmentation, the book addresses the plurality of diverging, and often conflicting, memory discourses that are produced within the public sphere of a given community. It analyzes the juxtaposition, tensions, and interactions between narratives produced beyond or below the central state, often transcending national boundaries. The book is structured according to the type of actors involved in a memory fragmentation process. It explores how states have been trying to produce and impose memory discourses on civil societies, sometimes even against the experiences of their own citizens, and how such efforts as well as backlash from actors below and beyond the state have led to horizontal and vertical memory fragmentation. Furthermore, it considers the attempts by states’ representatives to reassert control of national memory discourses and the subsequent resistances they face. As such, this volume will appeal to sociology and political science scholars interested in memory studies in post-conflict societies.

The break-up of the Soviet Union is a key event of the twentieth century. The 39th IIS congress in Yerevan 2009 focused on causes and consequences of this event and on shifts in the world order that followed in its wake. This volume is an effort to chart these developments in empirical and conceptual terms.

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers "identities"—the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section surveys "sources" to explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section studies "legacies" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving away from grand metaphorical or theoretical models, Rethinking the Gulag instead unearths the complexities and nuances of experience that represent a primary focus in the new wave of Gulag studies.

This book argues that the early twentieth century Soviet Russian occupation and rule of the Central Asian territory that became Kyrgyzstan was made possible by collectivisation and forcible population displacement. The rural transformation brought about by the seizure of private and community owned assets, the ending of pastoralism as a livelihood system, and the corralling of people on to collective and state farms were pivotal strategies of colonisation. Evictions, involuntary resettlement and immigration reconfigured the population and enabled largely non-Kyrgyz rule. As the book describes, the dramatic changes wrought by Sovietisation required force and coercion, which were met with resistance and non-compliance. More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, independent Kyrgyzstan continues to struggle with the legacies of Soviet rule. The book explores how the dismantling of collectivisation and the command economy failed to resist the rise of authoritarian, populist and nationalist politics, combined with economic stagnation and ethnic conflict.

The Soviet era was a time of social and economic upheaval in Russia's history as the Bolsheviks strove to build a socialist utopia based on the theories of Karl Marx. Central to this endeavor was the 25-year dictatorship of Josef Stalin, whose determination to make the Soviet Union a dominant industrial and military power created misery on a grand scale and caused the deaths of millions of people. Stalin arbitrarily invoked the specter of "enemies of the people" to destroy anyone who opposed the new socialist order. Millions of Soviet citizens were executed in continuous purges, and millions more perished in the slave labor camps of the Gulag. This book describes the fate of those citizens who were declared enemies of the people not because of what they had done but because of who they were. Stalin's repression not only destroyed the best and brightest, it prevented the development of a civil society in the Soviet Union which would have promoted economic justice, the rule of law and basic human rights for all.

Using information from the newly opened Soviet archives, Part One of this work examines the incarceration of Russians and the development of the Gulag system of labor camps and labor colonies. Part Two describes the mass exile of Soviet citizens and others to areas of forced settlement.

Population Displacement in Lithuania in the XXth Century: Experiences, Identities and Legacies is an edited volume written by historians from several countries offering a series of ground-breaking case studies on forced migration in Lithuania during and between the two World Wars. Starting with the premise that the mass movement of peoples during and after the Second World War needs to be understood in relation to the population displacement of the First World War, the authors draw on theoretical perspectives ranging from entangled histories, cultural theory and studies of nationalism to trace the ethnic, social and cultural transformation of Lithuanian society caused by the displacement of Lithuanians, Poles, Jews and Germans. Contributors are: Tomas Balkelis, Daiva Dapkutė, Violeta Davoliūtė, Andrea Griffante, Ruth Leiserowitz, Klaus Richter, Vasilijus Safronovas, Vitalija Stravinskienė, Arūnas Streikus and Theodore R. Weeks.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts *Includes a bibliography for further reading One of the most idiosyncratic horrors of Soviet Russia was the Gulag system, an extensive network of forced labor and concentration camps. Part of the rationale behind this system was that it could serve as slave labor in the drive for industrialization, while also serving as a form of punishment. The name Gulag is in fact an acronym, approximating to "Main Administration of Camps" (in Russian: Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei) and operated by the Soviet Union's Ministry of the Interior. The Gulag consisted of internment camps, forced labor camps, psychiatric hospital facilities, and special laboratories, and its prisoners were known as zeks. Such was the closed and secretive nature of the Soviet state that to this day, knowledge of the Gulag system comes mainly from Western studies, firsthand accounts by prisoners such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and some local studies after the fall of communism. The most recognizable version of the Gulag, a term that was never pluralized in Russia itself, existed from the 1930s-1950s, a period in which a huge network of camps and prisons was established across the vast Soviet federation. Prisoners were often used as forced labor, made to do physically arduous and soul-destroying tasks. Some workers helped to build large infrastructure projects, and indeed the system was partly rationalized in terms of economics. By the early 1960s, Gulags were synonymous with various forms of punishments, including house arrest, imprisonment in isolated places, or confinement to a mental hospital where a prisoner would be declared insane or diagnosed with a "political" form of psychosis. In its later years, the Gulags held a particular place in the public's imagination, both within the USSR and in the outside world. They could mean exile, brutal punishment, or simply being banished to Siberia. Though it's often forgotten today, in many respects the Gulags represented a continuation (albeit a more far-reaching version) of the kind of punishment meted out during the Russian Empire under the Romanov dynasty, which was overthrown in 1917. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the system in the context of the broader history of Russia and its empire, even as the system of repression, imprisonment and punishment persisted for decades in the Soviet Union and has been primarily aligned with the rule of one leader: Josef Stalin. As the USSR's leader for almost 30 years and one of history's most notorious tyrants, Stalin was a believer in the economic utility of the Gulags' forced labor. He was so paranoid that he constantly saw potential enemies among his people, particularly his Bolshevik contemporaries. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulags, notably in the 1930s during his "Great Terror" and after the end of the Second World War. For Soviet politicians, the Gulags served as a propaganda disaster, and they were constantly cited by Western leaders. Many nominal supporters of the Soviet Union were forced to reappraise their stance towards the country when reports of Stalin's Gulag became common knowledge, and the prison camps became an international issue during the Cold War, especially as human rights became a foreign policy priority for the West in the 1970s. A number of Soviet dissidents and former or current occupants of the Gulag, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, became cause celebres for campaigners outside the country. The USSR collapsed in December 1991, and it can be argued that the labor camps were not only integral to the very existence of the Soviet Union, but also a damning indictment of the Soviets' failed experiment in communist totalitarianism. The Gulags: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Soviet Labor Camps examines the rise of the labor camps, how they were instutionalized by Soviet leaders, and what life was like for the prisoners.

In this book, the author aims to accomplish two major goals - to provide an analytical, blow-by-blow account of the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership, and to explore the legacy left by the experiment in communism by the Soviet Union.