The Unquiet Ghost : Russians Remember Stalin
- Book Review,
by Adam Hochschild
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Hochschild (Half the Way Home), records the long-suppresed memories of Russians still healing from the wounds of Stalin's rule. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Hochschild's search for survivors of Stalin's Terror results in a moving historical horror story. He spent half of 1991 in the disintegrating USSR, listening to former prisoners, guards, executioners, and families describe mass murder, imprisonments, interrupted lives, and hopes destroyed. Russian-speaking journalist Hochschild, a founder of Mother Jones , was among the first Americans to enter KGB archives, where he received records of executed Americans. He visited gulag sites and chapters of Memorial, an organization documenting the Terror. He traveled to Kolyma, the frozen final destination for many and a name that resonates among Russians with the power of Auschwitz. Hochschild's questions are disturbing and timeless: Why did the Revolution devour itself? What makes someone an executioner? Hochschild's people, as well as his honesty and passion, make this unforgettable book essential for everyone concerned about history and human rights. Strongly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/93.- Donna L. Cole, Leeds P.L., Ala.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
New York Times Book Review, Paul Goldberg
"The characters and the dramatic situations Mr. Hochschild encounters are nothing short of magnificent."
Los Angeles Times Book Review, 4/3/94
"The author of The Unquiet Ghost combines the strengths of a practiced investigative reporter with those of a philosopher-historian with a sensitive moral compass and the spirit of an enlightened 18th-century gentleman. . . . The Unquiet Ghost makes an important contribution to our post-glasnost awareness of the former Soviet Union's harrowing past--and of its unsettled present. Belonging to a literary genre which has flourished for centuries, that of "The Voyage to Russia" by a Western observer, it is an illuminating excursion led by a highly qualified guide."
Washington Post Book World, W. Bruce Lincoln, 4/10/94
"As the Russians started to come to grips with the trauma that had numbed three generations, words poured forth in newspapers and magazine stories, public meetings, exhibitions, documentary films, plays and novels, each adding to the awakening of memories that many still found painful to confront. For the first time, it became possible to ask about the injury and the guilt, to inquire into the inner feelings of those who had lived on both sides of the barbed wire that had once encircled the hundreds of islands that made up the gulag archipelago. At the beginning of 1991, Adam Hochschild hurried to Moscow to bring this collective memory into focus. The result of his effort is this probing and sensitive book, which casts striking new light upon the Russian past and present."
From Booklist
The decaying gulag isn't everyone's idea of a four-star itinerary, but Hochschild braved the discomfort to take a tour in 1991. Fluent in Russian, he made his way to dreadful places like Kolyma, the Auschwitz of the labor-camp system, but his real interest, and the value of this narrative, was in talking to people, both jailers and victims, who lived through the horrors. Nobody was exempt from an instant dispatch into hell, as his interview with Stalin's translator shows, but for some, those days weren't all bad. In the steppe town of Karaganda, Hochschild was entertained by a former camp commandant, who proudly showed pictures of himself speaking to an audience of convicts. He spoke with the daughter of a secret-police officer responsible for mass executions, a woman anguished by that knowledge but who, like millions at the time, figured the dead really were enemies of the people. The why of such supinity, and of complicity, is what pulls this acute observer across the vast archipelago. Hochschild attempts to convey some answers, but ultimately his contribution is to seek out witnesses of Stalinism and preserve their ruthlessly realistic testimony. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
Although 20 million people died during Stalin's two-decade reign of terror, Russians have only recently, with the advent of glasnost, begun to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, journalist and memoirist Hochschild (Half the Way Home, 1986; The Mirror at Midnight, 1990) spent six months in Russia talking to prison camp survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others: the result is a riveting and eloquent evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin. Hochschild compares Russia to an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse who has spent years denying ``the elephant in the living room.'' Many of Hochschild's subjects open up to him with the intensity of patients confessing long-repressed secrets to a therapist. In the Siberian town of Kolpashevo, Galina Nikiforova, the daughter of a school principal who was taken away one night in 1937 and executed, reveals her certainty that her father was among those buried in a secret mass grave ripped open by the flooding river Ob in 1979 and immediately destroyed by the KGB. Galina can forgive her country anything but its refusal to grant its dead a decent burial. Meanwhile, Galina's neighbor and childhood friend, Inna Sukhanova, daughter of the chief of Kolpashevo's secret police, struggles with her love for her father--a former doctor who spoke four languages--and the anguish she bears for his having ordered the execution of thousands, including Galina's father, for ``nothing.'' Vladimir Glebov, a philosophy teacher in his 60s and son of Party boss Lev Kamenev, who was shot in 1936, spent his childhood wandering through Siberian orphanages and was sentenced, in 1949, to ten years in the gulag for preferring Emily Dickinson to Mayakovsky--experiences that, miraculously, have not dulled his sense of humor or his passion for anti-Stalin jokes. As sensitive, subtle, and moving as Chekhov: journalism raised to the level of art. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Book News, Inc.
Russian-speaking writer Hochschild moved his family to the former Soviet Union for the first half of 1991, in order to research the horror of Stalin's reign and to interview survivors. Among his motivations and themes--how societies, like individuals, must come to terms with a painful past, and how the impulses for good and evil lie closely together, e.g. the utopian wish and the wish for total power, and the impulses of the executioner and the victim. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Lingua Franca, Tina Rosenberg, August 1996
"I admire Hochschild greatly for his use of personal narratives to understand the human response to terror. The question of why many Russians continue to revere Stalin--even some who suffered greatly during his regime--is one whose importance permeates Russia's current political crisis and indeed will endure long beyond it."
The New Statesman, London, 9/8/95
"Hochschild's skills as an interviewer and the honesty of his own questioning make for a thoroughly compelling and original book."
Book Description
Although some twenty million people died during Stalin"s reign of terror, only with the advent of glasnost did Russians begin to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
