Russian Nights Autocracy and Testimony: Life in Russia during the Soviet Period as Told by Those Who Lived it

Book excerpt: The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin’s and Stalin’s reigns of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and survivors have been reluctant to speak about them for fear of retribution. This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of testimonies, gathered between 2001 and 2005 of actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1917-1956. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-Party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG. Russian Nights offers a wide and detailed perspective of what we call “the Russian Century”: Lenin’s takeover, the all-powerful Party, the GULAG, and the Second World War.