Ghost Of The Gulag

Set in a fictional post WW2 Russia, an Amur Tiger lives alone in a forgotten prison camp. One eye was destroyed by the whip, the other branded and scarred with a sickle and hammer. Though blind, the Tiger learns how to see with the aid of his friend, a raven. The Tiger is unwittingly drawn into a larger conflict over the control of the Taiga (the great northern forest of Russia). The Tribe of the Wolf and the Clan of the Boar both vie for control and the Tiger becomes the tipping point and must choose the fate of the Taiga.

An in-depth exploration of the legacy of Joseph Stalin on the former Soviet Union, by the author of King Leopold’s Ghost. 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. A New York Times Notable Book “An important contribution to our awareness of the former Soviet Union’s harrowing past and unsettling present.” —Los Angeles Times “A perceptive, intelligent book demonstrating that the significance of the gulag transcends the confines of one country and one generation.” —The New York Times Book Review “This probing and sensitive book…casts striking new light upon the Russian past and present.” —The Washington Post Book World “The voices [Hochschild] has recorded, the relics he has seen, are haunting—and the raw material of a terrific book.” —David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lenin’s Tomb “No other work has brought home the full horror of this monstrous dictator’s rule than this close-up account.” —Daniel Schorr, former senior news analyst, National Public Radio

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology. Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She has carried out fieldwork for a decade in Siberia on childhood, youth, religion, reindeer herding and hunting and coedited Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books 2012).

This book offers a critical analysis of the complex relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways sexual, ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against, violence. Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine and in cyberspace, it gives an insight into the world of hate speech and fantasies of torture and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of ghostly hauntings from the past and anxieties about the present and future. The author raises questions about the responsibilities of national homemaking, the complicity of queerness within violent regimes of colonialism and war, and the ambivalence of immigrant belonging at the intersection of marginality and privilege. Drawing from scholarship on migration, diaspora and race studies, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and studies on cyberculture, the book traces the interplay between the different forms of violence - physical and verbal, social and psychic, material and discursive - and offers novel insights into the analysis of nationalism, on-line sociality and queer migranthood.

“Gripping and important . . . an extremely impressive book.” —Noel Malcolm, Telegraph (London) A remarkable piece of forgotten history- the never-before-told story of Americans lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives, only to meet tragic ends In 1934, a photograph was taken of a baseball team. These two rows of young men look like any group of American ballplayers, except perhaps for the Russian lettering on their jerseys. The players have left their homeland and the Great Depression in search of a better life in Stalinist Russia, but instead they will meet tragic and, until now, forgotten fates. Within four years, most of them will be arrested alongside untold numbers of other Americans. Some will be executed. Others will be sent to "corrective labor" camps where they will be worked to death. This book is the story of lives-the forsaken who died and those who survived. Based on groundbreaking research, The Forsaken is the story of Americans whose dreams were shattered and lives lost in Stalinist Russia.

Until glasnost, nobody in the USSR could speak or write about the genocide which occured under Stalin's regime. In this book the author speaks to many people coming to terms with repressed memories as a result of the mass abuse of human rights.

This volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Jameson, Hamacher, Negri and Montag amongst others.