The Russian Mind Since Stalin S Death

I have been working on this book since leaving Russia in April of 1972. It was my wish to write this book in English, and there were what seemed to me to be serious reasons for doing so. In recent years there has appeared a wealth of literature, in Russian, about Russia. As a rule, this literature has been published outside the USSR by authors who still live in the Soviet Union or who have only recently left it. A fair amount of important literature is being translated into English, but I believe it will be read main ly by specialists in Russian studies, or by those who have a great interest in the subject already. The majority of Russian authors write, of course, for the Russian reader or for an imagined Western public. It is my feeling that Russian authors have serious difficulties in understanding the men tality of Westerners, and that there still exists a gap between the visions of Russians and non-Russians. I have made my humble attempt to bridge ~his gap and I will be happy if I am even partly successful. The Russian world is indeed fascinating. Many people who visit Russia for a few days or weeks find it a country full of historical charm, fantastic architecture and infinite mystery. For many inside the country, especial ly for those in conflict with the Soviet authorities.

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

An extensive, anecdotal exploration of the Russian mind and character portrays salient behavior traits and attitudes and examines characteristic social and cultural phenomena.

The author presents her personal memories and her research into her family's history, including the mysterious circumstances surrounding the fate of her grandfather, Leonid Khrushchev, as well as the legacy of her great grandfather, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them. This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.

Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.