Former Soviet Republics & Siberia Books

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.)

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best book I have read in years! A real eye-opener. 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

For any who have any nostalgia for the Soviet Union, this book should put it to rest. This book is hard to categorize; it is more than one man's opinion, but less than an objective history. It is, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, "an experiment in literary investigation": a combination memoir and dissertation on the evils of Communism and its inevitable product, the forced labor camp. Some have criticized Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Communist/pro-Western polemicist, but that is not an accurate description. He is a realist, showing not only the faults of Communists, but also those of the West and Western leaders. This should be required reading for European and world history classes. Volume 1 (of 3) describes the arrest and interrogation procedures, as well as life in the Gulag.

Aleksandr is The Great 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is vintage Solzhenitsyn; his brilliant mind shines forth splendidly. A book that is difficult to put down, places one inside his mind to see what he describes, so much from having spent hours memorizing while in the camps so he could later give us a glimpse of the horror that millions upon millions of human beings endured.

Editorial Review:

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society

The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews

Patrick Desbois

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"These are things that one cannot forget." 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

In "The Holocaust by Bullets," Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, embarks on a sacred mission with the help of many others who are also deeply committed to the ideals of truth and justice. His goal is to uncover the facts concerning the slaughter of roughly 1.5 million Jews in the former Soviet Union by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them. Among the murdered were many young women and children, as well as the elderly. The Jews were usually transported by cart to an area within or just outside the villages where they lived and then made to undress before they were shot and thrown into pits.

Desbois and his team traveled to such towns as Rawa-Ruska, Lisinitchi, Busk, Khvativ, and Ternivka to videotape the testimony of often reluctant witnesses who, even after more than six decades, still remember every detail of the massacres that they observed. Their testimony, along with microfilmed documents stored in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is bringing renewed attention to "an ocean of extermination" that reached across the Ukraine.

Desbois had heard stories about the Second World War from his relatives, and he was especially riveted by the anecdotes of his grandfather, Claudius, who was imprisoned by the Germans in 1942. Claudius proclaimed that no matter how much he suffered, "it was worse for the others!" Patrick later found out that "the others" were the Jews who were methodically exterminated in villages and towns in full view of their non-Jewish friends and neighbors.

This book is a nightmarish look at man's inhumanity to man. One by one, those who remain speak about what they saw: Jews being hauled away, forced to undress and remove their valuables, shot in the back of their heads, thrown into a ditch, and either burned or covered with lime or sand. Often, the ground moved for days afterwards, since many of the victims were buried alive. Sadly, there is usually no memorial to mark where most of these atrocities occurred, since the Germans attempted to eradicate any sign of the genocide that they had perpetrated. Desbois's team used metal detectors to find cartridges left behind by the Germans to pinpoint killing sites. This information, along with the statements of local villagers and data from historical records, has led to the discovery of many heretofore unidentified locations where Jews were exterminated.

Adding to the impact of this powerful narrative are color photographs of the killing fields and of the people whose memories fill these pages. Father Desbois is to be commended for his compassion and determination in undertaking an arduous, painstaking, and emotionally traumatic task. He has confronted terrible horrors that must have shaken his belief in man's essential goodness, but he has persisted--not only to create "awareness of the barbarity and wrong of what occurred, but also [to] prevent future genocides."

Editorial Review:

In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location of many mass gravesites with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust. Compiling new archival material and many eye-witness accounts, Desbois has put together the first definitive account of one of history's bloodiest chapters.

Published with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II

Andrew Nagorski

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Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The battle for Moscow was the biggest battle of World War II -- the biggest battle of all time. And yet it is far less known than Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides -- those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded -- were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. But the Soviet capital narrowly survived, and for the first time the German Blitzkrieg ended in failure. This shattered Hitler's dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union and radically changed the course of the war.

The full story of this epic battle has never been told because it undermines the sanitized Soviet accounts of the war, which portray Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. Stalin's blunders, incompetence and brutality made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow. This triggered panic in the city -- with looting, strikes and outbreaks of previously unimaginable violence. About half the city's population fled. But Hitler's blunders would soon loom even larger: sending his troops to attack the Soviet Union without winter uniforms, insisting on an immediate German reign of terror and refusing to heed his generals' pleas that he allow them to attack Moscow as quickly as possible. In the end, Hitler's mistakes trumped Stalin's mistakes.

Drawing on recently declassified documents from Soviet archives, including files of the dreaded NKVD; on accounts of survivors and of children of top Soviet military and government officials; and on reports of Western diplomats and correspondents, The Greatest Battle finally illuminates the full story of a clash between two systems based on sheer terror and relentless slaughter.

Even as Moscow's fate hung in the balance, the United States and Britain were discovering how wily a partner Stalin would turn out to be in the fight against Hitler -- and how eager he was to push his demands for a postwar empire in Eastern Europe. In addition to chronicling the bloodshed, Andrew Nagorski takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and then between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.

This is a remarkable addition to the history of World War II.

Gulag: A History

Anne Applebaum

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Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A missed opportunity 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book has its pluses and minuses. Sadly, this means that because there are other histories out there I would probably recommend to those who are interested in the GULag system one of those books. The one interesting thing this book does is give both a general history of the GULag system and intermix it with personal accounts which bring the experiences to life. That being said, personally, my problem with the book is that the author is either a sloppy researcher or is twisting information to suit her own needs.

To begin with, the information in the book is interesting, no doubt about it. A history of the GULag system, how it developed, who was behind some of the major activities that involved forced labor, orders, camp commandants, etc. Then there's life in the camps, also small chapters on arrests, interrogations, transport to camps, etc. All have information mainly from memoirs and recollections that have been published in English and Russian either by themselves or as part of an anthology. All of this is good and gives the reader an interesting view of the GULag.

The problem comes from the fact that indeed, instead of taking an objective view of the GULag system the author has a need to compare it to the Nazi system. Making comparisons here and there which really do not help but in fact muddle the issue. She will time and again go out of her way in the narrative to show how these camps differed from Nazi concentration camps. Also interesting to note is the fact that what happened to the majority of people, throughout practically the entire process, was based less so on state policy than on various variables one would encounter along the way; simply put, do you confess to your crimes? Have others confessed to you doing what you're accused of? Is there enough evidence against you? During what year were you arrested? Which camp were you sent to? How were you sent (via railroad, car, etc)? Who was the camp commandant at that point? Who were the guards? Was there a large criminal element? Were there many political prisoners? Were you in a solitary cell or a holding cell with dozens of people? And so on and so forth, any and all had the power to make your experiences in the camps that much better or worse.

Now, my biggest problem with the book is the fact that before I started it I had read an anthology about women who were in the GULag camps. The anthology included various extracts from their memoirs. At two points in Applebaum's book I ran across first a question on behalf of one of these authors which should have been rather a statement and eventually found an incorrect paraphrasing which was used in the wrong context from the same anthology. To go over every endnote would take too much time so I am simply pointing out that something here isn't right. These changes are not simple and alter the entire meaning of what is being said which is why I feel a need to mention it. Since this book was fresh in my mind I easily recalled these instances and went back to check them finding out that indeed something was wrong when Applebaum transfered them to her own work. Another mistake made is when talking about General Vlasov she comments that his army was made up of Red Army deserts who supported Hitler. This is not true, these men were not deserters but rather POWs who choose to join Vlasov for a variety of reasons. Some did in fact hate Communism and the Soviet system while plenty of others simply wanted to be fed and survive for as long as possible. This is, again, simply word of caution.

In the end I think there are better works out there about the GULag, but this wouldn't be a horrible starting point.

Editorial Review:

The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Defiance: The Bielski Partisans

Nechama Tec

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II.
Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis.
Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus

Charles King

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Caucasus mountains rise at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. A land of astonishing natural beauty and a dizzying array of ancient cultures, the Caucasus for most of the twentieth century lay inside the Soviet Union, before movements of national liberation created newly independent countries and sparked the devastating war in Chechnya.
Combining riveting storytelling with insightful analysis, The Ghost of Freedom is the first general history of the modern Caucasus, stretching from the beginning of Russian imperial expansion up to the rise of new countries after the Soviet Union's collapse. In evocative and accessible prose, Charles King reveals how tsars, highlanders, revolutionaries, and adventurers have contributed to the fascinating history of this borderland, providing an indispensable guide to the complicated histories, politics, and cultures of this intriguing frontier. Based on new research in multiple languages, the book shows how the struggle for freedom in the mountains, hills, and plains of the Caucasus has been a perennial theme over the last two hundred years--a struggle which has led to liberation as well as to new forms of captivity. The book sheds valuable light on the origins of modern disputes, including the ongoing war in Chechnya, conflicts in Georgia and Azerbaijan, and debates over oil from the Caspian Sea and its impact on world markets.
Ranging from the salons of Russian writers to the circus sideshows of America, from the offices of European diplomats to the villages of Muslim mountaineers, The Ghost of Freedom paints a rich portrait of one of the world's most turbulent and least understood regions.

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust

Miron Dolot

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Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

the holocaust that Hollywood will never acknowledge 5 out of 5 stars.
29 of 33 people found this review helpful.

When Hitler was asked about the possible negative consequences of the "final solution" in gassing all the remaining Jews in the world, he is reported to have responded by asking the question of "Who remembers the Armenians" who were killed by the "young Turks" at the end of the Ottoman Empire. While the numbers are in dispute, the reality is that over a million were killed outright or died of hunger during the campaign to exterminate the Armenians. But the real hidden holocaust took place over a decade later, when the Communist jackals running the "Evil Empire" in Moscow set about to eliminate the Ukrainians by systematic starvation, in far greater numbers than Hitler was able to accomplish with his ovens in concentration camps all over Europe.
Whoever Miron Dolot is, since he wrote this under a pseudonym for some reason, he lived a horror for many years that is incomprehensible for normal human beings. His description of the day-to-day struggle to exist under a system so evil that it boggles the imagination was very eloquent. Dolot talks about the neighbors who starved to death, families who engaged in cannibalism in order to survive, mothers committing suicide after the last of their children had died from malnutrition, frozen bodies stacked like firewood, roads littered with the remains of those who died trying to find a kernel of corn to ingest, and many other horrors that bring tears to your eyes. The Soviets did everything they could do to kill their opposition, including killing dogs and cats to keep them from becoming the last remaining food source for farmers who had no other option to stay alive. Even birds were shot from the trees to keep them from the starving peasants. But it was not limited to the Ukrainians; just ask the relatives of the millions of Chechens, Ingushetian's, and others who wanted independence and were rewarded with death in Soviet concentration camps called Gulags. Most of this story deals with a small Ukrainian village, but it is a microcosm of what happened in the Communist utopia under Stalin. Some of the stories from those who returned to the village after the horrors of being transported in cattle cars and escaped from the gulags are no different than the pictures of the same form of transport shown in many Holocaust movies.
But this story is far better than many of the holocaust films we have seen from Hollywood that concentrated on the one committed by Hitler. And why have we not seen this book on film to put all of the holocausts committed in the last century in context? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that McCarthyism still exists in its original form, when the communists controlled Hollywood in the 30's and apologists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who carries the label of "Stalin's Apologist" won a Pulitzer prize for his misreporting from Moscow about how great Stalin was. Ken Billingsley and his masterful book "Hollywood Party" shows that the real "blacklist" existed when loyal Americans veered from Moscow's party line, and explains Ronald Reagan's contempt for the communists who controlled his union until he won election to rid the union of these lice.
This is a great book. Hopefully someone like Mel Gibson will convert this to film for those who do not read, but are mislead by the Hollywood elite who condemn the USA and would have lasted two minutes under the Stalinist regime they glorify.

Editorial Review:

An eyewitness account of the forced collectivization of Russian agriculture in 1929-1931 and the ensuing famine in the Ukraine, brought about by Stalin's command.

In Siberia

Colin Thubron

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Siberia explores a region of astonishments, where "white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers." Colin Thubron's latest chronicle also delivers its subject from rumor into reality. An expanse larger than the entire United States, Siberia is undoubtedly a country of contrasts, which elicits from the author both awe and melancholy. Here on one hand is a northern wilderness "shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams," and on the other a "black detritus of factories and ruins." No less memorable than the landscape are the people that Thubron encounters. He gathers their stories like rough jewels, showing us a self-proclaimed descendant of Rasputin, an isolated Jewish community, and a parade of "indestructible babushkas."

Woven among the often bitter and eroding memories of a Siberian past is a sense of new freedom. After all, this is the first time in Russia's history when foreigners can travel freely throughout the region--and its inhabitants can comment openly about their government without fear of reprisal. Thubron coaxes an institute official at the Akademgorodok Praesidium to speak his mind:

His face was heavy with anger. "We have one overriding problem here. Money. We receive no money for new equipment, hardly enough for our salaries. There are people who haven't been paid for six months." Then his anger overflowed. He was barking like a drill sergeant. "This year we requested funds for six or seven different programmes! And not one has been accepted by the government! Not one!"

Thubron's portrait is as elegant as it is evocative. But just as notably, his journey to the east manages to break the long and destructive Siberian silence. --Byron Ricks

Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Editorial Review:

As a young guardsman, Grigory Potemkin caught the eye of Catherine the Great with a theatrical act of gallantry during the coup that placed her on the throne. Over the next thirty years he would become her lover, co-ruler, and husband in a secret marriage that left room for both to satisfy their sexual appetites. Potemkin proved to be one of the most brilliant statesmen of the eighteenth century, helping Catherine expand the Russian empire and deftly manipulating allies and adversaries from Constantinople to London.

This acclaimed biography vividly re-creates Potemkin’s outsized character and accomplishments and restores him to his rightful place as a colossus of the eighteenth century. It chronicles the tempestuous relationship between Potemkin and Catherine, a remarkable love affair between two strong personalities that helped shape the course of history. As he brings these characters to life, Montefiore also tells the story of the creation of the Russian empire. This is biography as it is meant to be: both intimate and panoramic, and bursting with life.

Tent Life in Siberia: An Incredible Account of Siberian Adventure, Travel, and Survival

George Kennan

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Amazing story 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This book is the fascinating travel journal of George Kennan(1845-1924) who was employed by the Russo-American Telegraph company to explore Eastern Siberia in 1865. Leaving from San Francisco in July 1865 Mr. Kennan and three other men set out for Petropavlovski in Kamchatka. From there they began a march to the northwest, meeting the Sea of Okhotsk and then detouring West for a while until heading north, exploring Eastern Siberia as far as the Berings strait, to Anadyrsk. They navigated rivers, saw the Aurua Borealis in February 1867. In the end the exploration did not lead to the laying of telegraph cable, but nevertheless this account should rank with Twain's `Innocents Abroad' as one of the great pieces of American travel literature of the 19th century.

Kennan has a dry sarcastic whit, like Twain, and he writes on many things, from wildlife to flaura, to the people and the country. Most amazing is to consider the great distances covered by such few people. There are many interesting stories and insights into the hard life of Russians in the far east. There are also descriptions of the many native peoples, including Koraks, Kamchatdals, Chookchees, Yookaghirs, Chooances, Yakoots and Gakouts, to the depth of describing rituals, marriages and the languages.

The greatest, almost unforgivable, oversight in this book, one that is almost crippling, is lack of even one map in an account that begs to have many maps given that it is both a travel narrative and one that mentions many obscure places and tribes that no longer exist in the same form today. The reader is left to imagine the position of the Samanka or Penzhina rivers, the villages of Genul, Okoota or Anadyrsk, or the most obscure villages in north Siberia, such as Geezhega or Shestakova.

A great piece of history.

Seth J. Frantzman

Editorial Review:

In the 1860s, the Russo-American Telegraph Company set out to telegraphically connect the United States and Europe using lines running through the Bering Straits and Siberia. The failed expedition marked one of the first explorations of the vast Siberian wilderness, and George Kennan’s tale of a seemingly endless land filled with wildlife and nomadic tribes is as entertaining today as it was 140 years ago. With biting humor and poignant insight, Kennan details his years fighting to survive a doomed mission. He depicts the quiet loneliness of the desolate landscape, the eerie glow of the sun at midnight, and the refusal to give in to one of the harshest places man has ever tried to conquer. His book is a testament to our planet’s beauty and danger, as well as to the tireless will of the human spirit.