Yale University Press
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Key Metrics
- Oleg Khlevniuk
- Yale University Press
- Paperback
- 9780300205039
- 9.21 X 6.14 X 0.98 inches
- 1.49 pounds
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
What a long, extraordinary process digging into the deepest secrets of the Gulag has been. Now, here is its history, fully, factually, and humanly effected for the present day by Oleg Khlevniuk.- Robert Conquest, from the forward
The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy.
Khlevniuk argues persuasively that the Stalinist penal camps created in the 1930s were essentially different from previous camps. He shows that political motivations and paranoia about potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than the economic incentive of slave labor did. And he offers powerful evidence that the Great Terror was planned centrally and targeted against particular categories of the population. Khlevniuk makes a signal contribution to Soviet history with this exceptionally informed and balanced view of the Gulag.
Author Bio
Oleg V. Khlevniuk is a leading research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences and senior research fellow at the State Archive of the Russian Federation.
His previous Yale books include The History of the Gulag, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, and several collections of Stalin's correspondence.
Khlevniuk was awarded the Alexander Nove Prize (with Yoram Gorlizki) by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies 2004 for the book Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953.
In 2016, Pushkin House UK recognized his Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator as "the best Russian book in English translation" for that year
Source: HSE University and Yale University Press and Wikipedia
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