The paper will be based on a careful reading of a personal narrative, and should include the following points:
(1) who is the author and what is the author's point of view;
(2) the major themes of the narrative in terms of the historical context of twentieth-century Russia; and
(3) the ways in which the narrative illuminates major themes of Soviet history.
(4) In addition, you should choose a particular theme, event, or episode in the narrative and compare the author's analysis of it with that of several works of historical scholarship. For example, you might take Alexander Werth's Moscow War Diary and compare his discussion of home front morale with the work by Mark Harrison and John Barber, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II; John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad; and the Soviet Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945. You might take Leon Trotsky's My Life account of the October 1917 revolution and compare it with several recent works on the Russian revolution. Or you might take Elena Bonner's (Mothers and Daughters) description of her high school days and compare it with Larry Holmes, The Kremlin and the School House, and other works on Soviet education.
Choose one of the following personal narratives to be the focus of your 12-15 page paper.
The narratives are grouped roughly according to the chronology of the course. No book can be claimed by more than one student: first come, first served. You must see me in person in my office during office hours or at another time to discuss your book choice. I will also schedule "group office hours" after the middle of the term to discuss your work on the paper. The deadline for choosing a book is October 16, 2002. Papers are due December 20, 2002.
I. Revolution and Civil War
Chernov, Victor. The Great Russian Revolution. Trans. and abridged by Philip E. Mosely. New Haven, Conn., 1936. 466 pp.
Chernov was the leader of the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionary Party from 1906 to 1917, and remained active in the socialist opposition to the Bolsheviks until 1921. He was Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government in 1917, a leading socialist insider. The memoir focuses in detail on the ten months of 1917 between the February and October revolutions, from Chernov's vantage point as Provisional Government member and leader of the SR party. Claimed 10/16/02
Denikin, Anton I. The Russian Turmoil: Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political. London, 1922. 344 pp.
Denikin was a tsarist general who became commander-in-chief of the White Army during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921. This memoir recounts his experience in the 1917 revolution, from his vantage point of service in the army general staff. He describes the situation at the front in 1917, the failed July offensive, relations with the Provisional Government, and his role in the Kornilov mutiny of August 1917 that put Denikin briefly in prison and ended hopes for a compromise settlement to the crisis of revolutionary power. Claimed 9/9/02
Dotsenko, Paul. The Struggle for a Democracy in Siberia, 1917-1920: Eyewitness Account of a Contemporary. Stanford, 1983. 178 pp.
An activist member of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Dotsenko was serving a term of Siberian exile when the 1917 revolution erupted. He remained in Siberia, taking part in the SR government in Omsk and later observing the military take-over of Admiral Kolchak and the impact of foreign intervention in the civil war in Siberia.
Kerensky, Alexander. Russia and History's Turning Point. New York, 1965.556 pp.
Kerensky was a civil rights lawyer and moderate socialist in 1917 when he catapulted to fame and notoriety first as Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government and then Prime Minister. He escaped from Russia after the October Revolution in order to rally a non-Bolshevik opposition, then spent the rest of his life writing and reflecting on what went wrong in 1917. His first attempt, The Catastrophe, was published in 1922. This more mature reflection, which dwells on his own biography (he and Lenin were schoolmates as young boys) was published after he had lived many years in the United States. Claimed 10/7/02
Liberman, Simon. Building Lenin's Russia. Chicago, 1945. 229 pp.
Liberman was a Menshevik businessman in the years before the revolution, and although he never joined the Communist party, worked for the new regime during the period of the civil war as a specialist in charge of the timber industry. He provides recollections of many of the leading Bolshevik industrial figures and of his international trade negotiations in 1920 and the early years of NEP. Professing to be a loyal Soviet citizen, he nonetheless left the USSR under political suspicion in 1926.
Mstislavskii, Sergei D. Five Days Which Transformed Russia. Bloomington, Ind., 1988 (1922). Translated by Elizabeth Zelensky. 168 pp.
Mstislavskii, born in 1876, was a scientist and Social Revolutionary who favored radical of the imperial regime and became a champion of peasants' and workers' rights. He served as an officer of the General Staff Academy in Petersburg during WWI, and later stood with the Bolsheviks. This is an account of the events of 1917, as seen and experienced by the author himself.
Shklovsky, Viktor. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922. Translated by Richard Sheldon. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. 304 pp.
Shklovsky was a major Russian writer and proponent of Futurism, who served in the tsarist army and then Red Army between 1914 and 1922. His memoirs detail his experience among front line troops during the 1917 revolution and during the Civil War in Ukraine and in Persia.
Sukhanov, Nikolai. The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record. Trans. and abridged by Joel Carmichael. London, 1955. 699 pp.
The single best personal narrative of the 1917 revolution in Petrograd. Sukhanov was a moderate socialist, a Menshevik, whose analysis of the political events of 1917 and perceptive vignettes of the major revolutionary leaders remains a fundamental source for our understanding of revolutionary politics. Claimed 9/30/02
Trotsky, Leon. My Life. London, 1930. 602 pp.
Leon Trotsky was one of the giants of the revolutionary movement, a brilliant revolutionary strategist, organizer of the October revolution and creator of the Red Army, and the principal rival to Stalin for the leadership of the USSR after the death of Lenin. The memoir covers his life to 1929, when he was expelled from the country by the Communist Party: his education, activism in the underground revolutionary movement, role in the revolution and civil war, his relations with Lenin and his role in the Communist Party opposition up until his exile to Kazakhstan in 1927, and expulsion from the country in 1929. Trotsky remained a vocal opponent of Stalin in exile, until he was killed by a NKVD agent in Mexico in 1940, and even after that, the Trotskyite wing of the communist movement remained an important element of worldwide left politics. Claimed 9/9/02
Wrangel, General Peter. Memoirs. 1924. Claimed 10/14/02
II. 1920s and 1930s
Allilueva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. Translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. New York, 1967. 246 pp.
The daughter of Joseph Stalin who defected to the west in the 1960s, these "letters" relate her memories of family and father as written in Moscow in 1963. Topics include the death of Stalin and his last years; her childhood, grandparents, and family; her mother, Stalin's second wife, daughter of a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, who committed suicide in 1932; Stalin as Dad; school and studies in the 1930s (she moved in the same circles as Elena Bonner, below); the war; her first marriage to the son of one of Stalin's close associates, Zhdanov; and a bit about the years after Stalin's death. Claimed 9/9/02
Andreev-Khomiakov. Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin's Russia. Boulder, Colo., 1997. 195 pp.
Released from a penal colony in 1935, Andreev-Khomiakov's memoir recounts his efforts to find work as a suspicious ex-prisoner, first in the Fish trust and then in the lumber industry. His account describes how workers got by in the 1930s, gives details of daily life, ordinary corruption, party incompetence, and attitudes towards authority on the eve of the great patriotic war.Claimed 9/18/02
Baitalsky, Mikhail. Notebooks for the Grandchildren. Translated and edited by Marilyn Vogt-Downey. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995. 416 pp.
A native of Odessa, Baitalsky became a journalist and supporter of Trotsky as a young man (he was born in 1903). Arrested in 1929, and again in 1935, he was released from the Vorkuta camp in 1941. After the war, he served another camp sentence from 1950 to 1956. These "notebooks" were composed in the same spirit of thaw as were Ginzburg's memoirs, and his testimony was handed over to dissident historian Roy Medvedev, to be used as evidence in Medvedev's indictment of Stalin, Let History Judge.
Bonner, Elena. Mothers and Daughters. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York, 1992. 349 pp.
Bonner was the daughter of high-ranking communist officials. In the 1960s she would become a leading dissident, and together with her husband Andrei Sakharov emerge as the conscience of the Soviet Union during the regimes of Brezhnev and Gorbachev. This memoir of her early life describes her experience as a school girl in the time of the purges of the 1930s, as seen from the point of view of the privileged daughter of the revolutionary elite.
Claimed 9/13/02
Borodin, N.M. One Man in His Time. New York, 1955. 344 pp.
Borodin came from a Don Cossack family, born in 1905, and became a "Soviet man." He received his education under Soviet power and became a biologist, working also as a "consultant" for the GPU (secret police.) By the time of the war, he was a leading official in the Soviet pharmaceutical industry, and was entrusted with visits to England and the U.S. to learn how to manufacture penicillin. He remained quite loyal to the USSR, but doubts began to surface after the war, and he defected to England in 1948. The memoir, however, represents the experiences of one quite loyal to the regime. Claimed 10/9/02
Burrell, George. An American Engineer Looks at Russia. Boston, 1932. 324 pp.
Burrell worked for 18 months as a petroleum engineer in 1931-32, headquartered in Grozny (capital of Chechnya). A critical but supportive observer of the Soviet industrialization effort, he describes many aspects of life and work in the period of the five-year plan.
Ciliga, Anton. The Russian Enigma. London, 1940. 304 pp.
An Italian communist, Ciliga went to the USSR in 1926, where he participated in Communist International politics and witnessed the climax of the opposition movements. He taught for a time at the Communist University, and observed the collectivization campaign and first five-year plan. He was arrested in 1930 and first imprisoned as a spy, then exiled to the Urals.
Fischer, Markoosha. My Lives in Russia. New York, 1944. 269 pp.
A supporter of the Soviet Union, Fischer had left Russia before 1914 because of her opposition to the tsarist regime; she returned in 1922 and lived there from 1927 to 1939 as the wife of the American foreign correspondent Louis Fischer. Her narrative focuses on living in Moscow in the 1930s as a keen observer of events around her, as a member of the literary elite, and as the mother of two boys who grew up and went to school in the USSR of the five-year plans and purges. Claimed 9/23/02
Hindus, Maurice. Broken Earth. New York, 1926. 287 pp.
Hindus was a sympathizer of the socialist revolution who returned to his native village and to Russia several times and reported on what he encountered for readers back in the United States. In this account, he visited his native village at a time when socialism and capitalism were competing for the allegiance of the peasantry, seen in his eyes as combat between the new and the old. He describes his encounters with various village types, the new youth, women, and the new socialist state farms. A conversational tone attempts to capture the flavor of the arguments he heard while visiting his old village.
Hindus, Maurice. Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village. Allahabad, 1945. (Reprint 1988). 372 pp.
A journalist who had left Russia before the revolution and who returned as a sympathizer of the Soviet regime, Hindus revisited his native village in 1929-30, where he describes the collectivization campaign and the reaction of the villagers to it.
Körber, Lili. Life in a Soviet Factory. Translated by Claude W. Sykes. London, 1933. 280 pp.
A German radical and member of the Society of Authors, Körber spent two months as a worker at Leningrad's Putilov factory from July to August 1931, at the height of the first five-year plan. In a novelesque account, she describes work, daily life, culture, politics, bureaucracy, and her encounters with the GPU.
Kopelev, Lev. The Education of a True Believer. Translated by Gary Kern. New York, 1980. 328 pp.
Kopelev became an important dissident in the 1970s until his expulsion to Germany. He was an associate of Solzhenitsyn and his character appears in Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle. Kopelev, a philologist by training, wrote several memoirs. This one describes his youth and upbringing in the 1920s, his schooling, his relationship to the Jewish rituals of his family, his sense of Ukrainian identity, his formative years as an intellectual. He joined the party and aided in the collectivization and grain collection drives of the 1930s before entering Kharkov University in 1933. This memoir ends with the beginnings of the disappearance of his friends to the purges in 1937.
Kopelev, Lev. Ease My Sorrows: A Memoir. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York, 1983.
This volume of Kopelev's memoirs deals with his imprisonment between 1947 and 1953 in a special labor camp that functioned as a closed laboratory for the Soviet military. Here he worked on voice-decoding technology. Among his prisonmates was a mathematician, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who used this prison as the center piece of what I think is his best novel, The First Circle. Kopelev is the model for the character Lev Rubin. Claimed 10/4/02
Kravchenko, Victor. I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official. New York, 1946. 481 pp.
A Soviet official who defected to the United States in 1944 when posted to Washington, this Ukrainian engineer and Communist party official defends his choice by relating his childhood on the banks of the Dnieper, his passion for freedom unleashed by the revolution and civil war, his enthusiasm as a member of the Komsomol and Communist party, his work as an industrial specialist during the five-year plans, his service in the munitions industry during the second world war, and his growing doubts about the legitimacy of the Soviet system.
Larina, Anna. This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow. New York, 1991. 384 pp.
Larina became the young wife of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the leading Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s and by 1930 a veteran oppositionist. The narrative relates their life together as simultaneously members of the Soviet elite in the 1930s and as victims of Stalin's purges, with special attention paid to the process of the terror, Beria, prison, prison camps, and Stalin. Claimed 9/9/02
Lyons, Eugene. Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937. 658 pp.
Lyons was a U.S. journalist, sympathetic to radical causes, who began reporting from the USSR in 1927. His memoir describes his experience with American radicalism from 1919-1927, and covers the major developments in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1933, including the political oppositions, collectivization, industrialization, cultural politics, famine, and includes a notorious interview with Stalin. Lyons was expelled from the country in 1933. Claimed 10/9/02
Makarenko, Anton. The Road to Life. Translated by Stephen Garry. London, 1936. 287 pp.
Makarenko was an educator who sought to rehabilitate young criminals by setting up a corrective colony for them. The account traces the creation and existence of the colony from 1920 to 1923, during the first years of the Soviet Union, a time when famine stalked the land and homeless children flooded the cities and countryside. Most of the narrative concerns the internal workings of the colony, although there are observations on encounters with the outside world.
Mandelshtam, Nadezhda. Hope against Hope. Translated by Max Hayward. New York, 1970. 431 pp.
The widow of the brilliant Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam, this memoir tells the story of his persecution by the NKVD from 1934 until his arrest in 1937. She poignantly describes the life of persecution, interrogation, and uncertainty all the while emphasizing the creative genius of Mandelshtam and his zeal to write poet, and hers to memorize his, in this terrible period. An evocative memoir of survival and loss, this volume was followed by her Hope Abandoned in 1974, which tells the story of Mandelshtam before 1934, and hers after he disappeared into the camps. (Her first name, Nadezhda, means "hope" in Russian.) One of the most beautiful literary memoirs of the period. Claimed 9/9/02
Petrov, Vladimir. Escape from the Future. Bloomington, 1973. 470 pp.
Arrested in 1935 as a young university student in Leningrad, Petrov spent the next years in the gold fields of Kolyma, in the Soviet Far East. He was released during the war and recounts his journey back to European Russia, and then to the U.S., providing a novelist's eye view (and a hostile one) of Soviet society at the end of the war. When he wrote these memoirs, Petrov was a senior Russian historian at George Washington University. Claimed 10/9/02
Robinson, Robert, with Jonathan Slevin. Black on Red: A Black American's 44 Years inside the Soviet Union. Washington, D.C., 1988. 436 pp.
Robinson, a skilled machinist from Detroit, went to the USSR in 1930 to work in the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Assigned to the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, he witnessed the industrialization of the country, the Great Purges, the war, the death of Stalin, and the regime of Khrushchev. With perceptive comments on racism in the USSR, Robinson describes life in a Soviet factory and provides observations on a wide range of the Soviet experience. He left the country in 1974.
Rosenberg, Suzanne. A Soviet Odyssey. New York, 1988. 212 pp.
Daughter of militant Bolshevik parents, Rosenberg followed them to Canadian emigration, and returned with them to the USSR when she was 16 years old, in 1931. She describes life among the intellectuals and artists of Moscow in the 1930s, the coming of war, and the political crackdown after the war, in which first her friends and husband were arrested as part of the campaign against "cosmopolitanism" (which was usually a code word for Jews) and then she herself was arrested. She was released from prison with the death of Stalin in 1953, and left the USSR for Canada in 1986.
Rukeyser, Walter. Working for the Soviets: an American Engineer in Russia. London, 1932. 286 pp.
A mining engineer who travelled to the USSR in August 1929 on a consulting contract with the Soviet asbestos industry, Rukeyser spent about a year in this work, and describes his travels to the Urals, his contacts with the industrial bureaucracy, negotiations between Western firms and Soviet bureaucrats, the GPU, his impressions of workers, and the state of work in the mines.
Smith, Andrew. I Was a Soviet Worker. Supplemented by Maria Smith. New York, 1936. 298 pp.
An American trade union organizer of Slovak background, Smith spent three years as a worker at Moscow's Elektrozavod from 1932 to 1935. He describes many aspects of Soviet life in the early thirties, including factory life and labor, health care, women, children, daily life, and shopping. Many vignettes are added by his wife, Maria Smith, whose illnesses provoked their desire to leave the USSR and return to the United States. Smith describes an extended voyage down the Volga as far as the Caspian city of Astrakhan, as well as his growing disillusionment with the USSR and his attempts to leave.
Weissberg, Alexander. The Accused. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. New York, 1951. 518 pp.
One of the first memoirs of the purge and prison system to be published. Weissberg was an Austrian scientist who moved to the USSR in 1931. Arrested in 1937, he uses his prison experience to reflect on the past events in the USSR, condemning the Soviet system. He was deported to Germany in 1940 after 3 years in prison. Claimed 10/9/02
Witkin, Zara. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: the Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934. Edited with an introduction by Michael Gelb. Berkeley, 1991. 363 pp.
Witkin went to the Soviet Union in 1932 when he was 31 years old, an ardent believer in the Soviet project of refashioning humankind. He moved among the expatriate circles of Moscow, and counted among his friends Eugene Lyons; he also began a love affair with a Soviet actress, whom the editor, Gelb, interviewed in Moscow in 1989 (see the introduction). As an engineer, Witkin was assigned to the factory-building trust and describes his work and conflicts with the industrialization process, including many nasty encounters with the OGPU. He describes an excursion to the Caucasus and his difficulties in leaving the USSR in 1934.
Yakir, Pyotr. A Childhood in Prison. Ed. Robert Conquest. London, 1972. 155 pp.
The son of a Red Army general who was purged in the 1930s, Yakir grew up to become an important individual in the dissident movement, facing his own show trial for seditious behavior in 1973. In this memoir of his childhood and youth, he recounts his banishment to a children’s colony of disgraced persons.
III. War and Era of Post-Stalin Reform
Berezhkov, Valentin. History in the Making: Memoirs of World War II Diplomacy. Moscow, 1983. 493 pp.
Berezhkov was a young engineer who was tapped to serve as Stalin's interpreter during World War II, and he accompanied Stalin to the major allied conferences. He also served as interpreter in 1940 in Berlin, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Note the date of publication of this memoir: 1983, by Progress Publishers in Moscow: in other words, it appeared at the height of the era of stagnation with the official imprimatur of the Soviet government.
Burlatsky, Fedor. Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring. Translated by Daphne Skillen. London, 1991. 286 pp.
A political adviser to Khrushchev from 1960 to 1965, Burlatsky's narrative describes his association with some of the Soviet leaders including Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov. He discusses the period of the post-Stalin thaw, the 20th Party Congress and the anti-Stalin efforts, international relations with Yugoslavia and Albania, the Cuban missile crisis, summit meetings, the fall of Khrushchev and the rise of Brezhnev. Burlatsky was especially close to inner circles from 1960 to 1965, and he carefully describes Kremlin politics in this period. Claimed 10/2/02
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. Translated by Michael B. Petrovich. New York, 1962. 211 pp.
As a young representative of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Djilas made three trips to Moscow between 1944 and 1948, and his memoir charts the deteriorating relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia. Along the way, he encounters the Soviet elite, including Stalin, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Zhukov, and describes them and their policies. Later, Djilas would write an important account of the bureaucratization of communism, The New Class.
Claimed 9/9/02
Ehrenburg, Ilya. The War, 1941-1945. Cleveland, 1964. 198 pp.
Ehrenburg was a major Soviet novelist and journalist who covered Western Europe before 1941, and served as a war correspondent from 1941-1945. This portion of his 6-volume memoir reports on the home front in 1941, conversations with soldiers, and his reporting for the army newspaper Red Star. As a war correspondent, Ehrenburg was based in Moscow, and traveled from time to time to the various fronts, including the western front as the Red Army began to drive the Germans out of their country after 1943. Claimed 10/4/02
Ehrenburg, Ilya. Post-War Years, 1945-1954. Translated by Tatiana Shebunina. Cleveland, 1967. 349 pp.
Ehrenburg was a major Soviet novelist and journalist who covered Western Europe before 1941, and served as a war correspondent from 1941-1945. He became a leading activist in the World Peace Council after 1945. This portion of his 6-volume memoir observes events in eastern Europe, the Nuremburg trial, the US, China, the Jewish Anti-fascist committee, as well as reflects on life at home in this period, the death of Stalin, and the craft of memoir writing.
Ginzburg, Eugenia. Within the Whirlwind. Trans. Ian Boland. New York, 1981. 423 pp.
This is the sequel to Journey into the Whirlwind. Ginzburg recounts her life after having survived the Gulag, thanks to her assignment in the camp hospital, where she meets her second husband, a camp physician. Sentenced to permanent exile in the city of Magadan in the Soviet Far East, this book describes the next 15 years of her life, her adoption of a daughter and return to her profession as a teacher, and it continues the optimistic theme of faith that Stalin’s wrongs will eventually be put right.
Gorbatov, Aleksandr V. Years Off My Life: The Memoirs of a General of the Soviet Army, A.V. Gorbatov . New York, 1965. 222 pp.
A veteran of the army from 1912, Gorbatov describes his early years, and his experiences in the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and peacetime army. He was arrested in 1937 in the general purge, served time in the Kolyma gold fields, but was released in 1940 and reinstated, serving with distinction as a general in the Red Army's offensive toward Berlin.
Gromyko, Andrei. Memories. Translated by Harold Shukman. Foreword by Henry Kissinger. New York, 1989. 414 pp.
Gromyko served as Khrushchev's foreign minister and was a key figure in the diplomatic struggles of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. His memoir reflects on his life as a young communist in the revolution, his student days in the 1930s, his service in the diplomatic corps in Washington during World War II, and his many engagements as a diplomat in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and engaging with U.S. foreign policy.
Claimed 9/10/02
Grossman, Vassili. The Years of War (1941-1945). Moscow, 1946. Translated by Elizabeth Donnelly and Rose Prokofiev. 451 pp.
Grossman served as a war correspondent throughout the war, and his dispatches were reworked and collected in this publication that celebrated the war effort of commanders and troops on the front-lines. He stayed with the troops through the retreat of 1941, and witnessed the defense of Stalingrad in 1942-43, then moving with the advancing Soviet Army to the west in 1944-45. He would later recast his war experiences in a powerful novel, Life and Fate, that earned the ire of the Soviet censors in the 1970s. This personal narrative itself is very novelesque in its style.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston, 1970. Translated by Strobe Talbott. 639 pp.
Was it a hoax? The purported memoirs of the deposed Soviet leader, dictated, taped, and smuggled to the west by KGB operatives, and transcribed there by Strobe Talbott, a Time magazine journalist (now President Clinton's adviser on Russia). These juicy tidbits covered his early career and party work, including his role in the great terror, the war, Stalin's last years, the 20th party congress at which he began the process of destalinization, and Khrushchev's encounters with the outside world, the first Soviet leader to travel abroad: Korea, Tito, Suez, Berlin, China, Castro. Claimed 10/11/02
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Translated by Strobe Talbott. Boston, 1974. 602 pp.
More Khrushchev tapes, released after the former leader's death in 1971. Now verified by voice-print tests of the tapes deposited at Columbia University, this volume discusses Khrushchev's firing of Marshall Zhukov, scientists, the intelligentsia, domestic policies (housing and the Virgin Lands), eastern Europe, China, travels in the developing world, his encounters with Eisenhower, the U-2 incident, Kennedy, Berlin, and Cuba.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes. Translated by Jerrold L. Schechter. Boston, 1990. 219 pp.
Still more Khrushchev, the bits that were too hot to publish in the 1970s. NOT TO BE USED AS A PERSONAL NARRATIVE, but available to supplement a reading of either of the two earlier Khrushchev memoirs. Covers the terror and 20th Party Congress, the war, relations with west and east, Cuba and Berlin, and the intellientsia.
Maisky, Ivan. Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: the War, 1939-43. New York, 1968. 408 pp.
Maisky served as the Soviet ambassador to Britain from 1933 to 1943. In this memoir, he recounts the phony war, Battle of Britain, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and the diplomatic struggle for a second front. He was recalled to Moscow in 1943, where the memoir ends.
Zhukov, Georgy. The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. New York, 1971. 692 pp.
Zhukov emerged as the leader of the Red Army and architect of its victory over the Germans in World War II. This memoir, highly censored, describes his childhood and youth, his experience in World War I and the civil war as a soldier, the peacetime army up to 1939, and his wartime experiences, ending with the capture of Berlin in 1945.
IV. From Dissidence to Perestroika to the Fall of the USSR
Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, and Paul Goldberg. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. Pittsburgh, 1990. 339 pp.
An insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement, the intellectuals who helped to challenge the Soviet regime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods with their single-minded drive to support human rights. Alexeyeva details the social portrait of the dissidents, their "kitchen culture," typing samizdat publications, evading the KGB and falling victim to them. Claimed 9/30/02
Amalrik, Andrei. Involuntary Journey to Siberia. Translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward. New York, 1970. 297 pp.
Amalrik was an early leader of the dissident movement, and recounts in this memoir his experiences from 1965 of KGB surveillance, interrogation, arrest, and exile to a Siberian village. His accounts of life on a collective farm are among the most chilling in the literature. He was allowed to return to Moscow in 1966, and later was permitted to emigrate to western Europe. (He was killed in an automobile crash in Spain in 1980 on the way to a human rights conference.) Claimed 10/7/02
Amalrik, Andrei. Notes of a Revolutionary. Translated by Guy Daniels. New York, 1982. 343 pp.
This second installment of Amalrik's reflections takes his story from his return to Moscow in 1966, describing the underground cultural world of dissident Moscow, his repeated encounters with KGB harassment and surveillance, another arrest, trial and exile in 1970, and continuing battles with the KGB until he was exiled from the country in 1976.
Bukovsky, Vladimir. To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. Translated by Michael Scammell. New York, 1979. 438 pp.
A leading Soviet dissident who spent much of his adult life in prison, Bukovsky was released from prison in exchange for Chilean political prisoners in 1976, at the age of 34. His perceptive memoir describes his childhood and growing up in the late Khrushchev thaw, and his increasing involvement in marginally acceptable activities such as a club for nonconformist artists and youth festivals. He ran into trouble with the KGB beginning in 1961, was expelled from the university and Young Communist League, arrested in 1963, and released in 1965 as a mental patient. He joined the protests against the repression of writers in 1966, and found himself in and out of jail and psychiatric hospitals from then until his exchange in 1976.
Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents. New York, 1995. 672 pp.
Dobrynin served as the Soviet ambassador to the US from 1962 until 1986, and his memoir describes his experience dealing with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Claimed 9/23/02
Gorbachev, Mikhail. Memoirs. New York, 1996. 769 pp.
The last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union tells his story. The last 600 pages concern his activities as General Secretary from 1985 to 1991. Claimed 10/16/02
Grigorenko, Petro. Memoirs. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York, 1982. 462 pp.
Grigorenko was a Ukrainian military man, joining the Red Army in 1932 and serving first in the far east and then distinguishing himself in World War II. The bulk of his memoir concerns his growing disillusionment with the Communist Party, his criticism of the party in 1961, arrest in 1964, and involvement in the human rights movement after his release in 1966.
Kaminskaya, Dina. Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defense Attorney. Translated by . New York, 1982. 364 pp.
A look at the Soviet judicial system as well as the inside story of an attorney who helped defend dissidents, beginning with Vladimir Bukovsky in 1967. The memoir describes her law school education in the 1930s, the system of justice, and encounters with many of the leading moments in the history of the Soviet opposition. She was expelled from the bar in 1971. Claimed 9/9/02
Khanga, Yelena, with Susan Jacoby. Soul to Soul: A Black Russian-American Family 1865-1992. New York, 1992. 319 pp.
Daughter of an African-American communist woman who came to the USSR with her parents in the 1930s, and an African politican, Khanga's memoir traces her complicated family history (her grandparents included Russian Jews and African-American planters in the south) and the story of growing up in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, a Soviet teenager at the height of the Cold War. She studied journalism at Moscow State University and became a working journalist in the period of glasnost. Claimed 9/11/02
Ligachev, Egor. Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev. New York, 1993. 369 pp.
The number 2 man in the Kremlin during Gorbachev's regime, Ligachev was known as a communist die-hard and old-fashioned Soviet man. His memoir covers his arrival as a Kremlin insider in 1983, his encounters with top-ranking communists, Gorbachev's regime and the crises faced by Gorbachev's "misguided" policies.
Orlov, Yuri. Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York, 1991. 348 pp.
One of the leaders of the human rights movement and Helsinki Watch group in the 1960s through 1980s, Orlov describes his upbringing in rural Russia, his experiences in the war as a factory worker and then officer (he turned 18 in 1942). After the war, he was tapped for the prestigious physics institute, but soon ran afoul of authorities for "ideological impurity." He suffered eighteen years of exile to Armenia, returning to Moscow in 1972 to plunge into the human rights movement. He was sentenced several times to prison and labor camps, and finally left the USSR in 1989.
Pankin, Boris. The Last Hundred Days of the Soviet Union. London, 1996. Translated by Alexei Pankin. 282 pp.
Pankin was appointed Gorbachev's foreign minister in mid-1991, and his memoir recounts his attempts to maintain an activist foreign policy in the months between the August 1991 coup that nearly toppled Gorbachev, and the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, that removed Gorbachev's country out from under him. Among the activities Pankin recounts are human rights negotiations, Middle East issues, and arms control. Claimed 10/14/02
Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. Translated by Richard Lourie. New York, 1990. 773 pp.
Physicist and developer of the hydrogen bomb in the Soviet Union, Sakharov was also a great humanist and became the leading figure in the human rights movement from the 1960s until his death in 1991. His memoir recounts his childhood and youth, his wartime experience and involvement in the nuclear physics group, his encounters with Khrushchev, the turning point of 1968, and his increasing participation in the human rights movement and Helsinki Watch groups. During the last years of the Brezhnev regime, he and his wife Elena Bonner were exiled to the closed city of Gorky so that they could not communicate with western journalists. They were permitted to return to Gorbachev to Moscow, and Sakharov continued his activism as an elected member of the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Claimed 10/9/02
Shevardnadze, Eduard. The Future Belongs to Freedom. Translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. New York, 1991. 237 pp.
Shevardnadze served as Gorbachev's foreign minister in developing the policy of
"New Thinking." He resigned from Gorbachev's inner circle in 1991 after warning of an impending coup d'etat against the perestroika policy, and returned to his native Georgia, where he was eventually elected president. The memoir traces his life and political career, focusing on his relationship with Gorbachev, the policy of New Thinking, arms negotiations, Chernobyl, and the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Claimed 10/14/02
Young, Cathy (Ekaterina Jung). Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood. New York, 1989.
The daughter of successful Moscow professionals, Young left the USSR when her parents emigrated to the US in 1980; she was seventeen. The memoir, written after she graduated from Rutgers University in 1988, looks at growing up in socialist Moscow, school, gender attitudes, sex and the Soviet teenager, and describes how she became a "closet dissident," reading forbidden books and learning to think freely. Claimed 9/9/02
Zyuganov, Gennady. My Russia: The Political Autobiography of Gennady Zyuganov. Ed. Vadim Medish. Armonk, N.Y., 1997. 198 pp.
The political manifesto as well as autobiography of the leader of the post-communist Communist Party, architect of the brown-red coalitions that seriously challenged the electoral supremacy of Boris Yeltsin’s reformers during the 1990s. This is a document of a true party believer written during a period of competition for political ideas. Claimed 10/10/02
