A memória e o legado do Gulag: The Unquiet Ghost By Adam Hochschild - Book

A memória e o legado do Gulag:

The Unquiet Ghost

By Adam Hochschild

From the celebrated author of King Leopold’s Ghost: This New York Times Notable Book examines the legacy of Joseph Stalin through interviews with gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, human rights activists, and more. 

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.

From Publishers Weekly

Hochschild spent the first half of 1991 in the former Soviet Union interviewing gulag survivors, former camp guards and members of the secret police, writers, artists, human rights activists, neo-Stalinists and ordinary citizens about their opinions of Stalin. This haunting and powerful report reveals that the dictator's legacy persists in widespread denial, amnesia, numbness and pervasive fear among people whose lives were scarred by mass arrests, killings and Stalin's spy network. Hochschild ( The Mirror at Midnight ) traveled to Kolyma, site of the deadliest camps; he interviewed Valentin Berezhkov, who was Stalin's English-language interpreter and privy to the regime's inner circle; he visited Moscow's KGB archives and was given files of American victims of the gulag. Comparing Stalin's purges to the witch craze of early medieval Europe, Hochschild attributes this "self-inflicted genocide" partly to Russians' age-old habits of scapegoating and passive obedience. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to New York Times Magazine .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

ADAM HOCHSCHILD is the author of ten books. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars. His Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award. He lives in Berkeley, California.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Guerra Civil na Espanha (1936-39): Adam Hochschild (book excerpt, Delanceyplace)

Today's selection -- from Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild.
In 1936, Spain was still a new and fragile democracy when Francisco Franco led a military uprising of "Nationalists" against the government's "Republican" army, inaugurating the brutal, three-year Spanish Civil War. The government was the left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists were supported by a number of conservative groups, including monarchists such as the religious conservative (Catholic) Carlists, and the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups. An estimated 500,000 people died in the war, including thousands upon thousands of civilians from murder, torture, and starvation. It is believed that the government of General Francisco Franco executed 100,000 Republican prisoners after the war, and another 35,000 Republicans died in concentration camps in the years that followed the war. The war was the chilling inspiration for such works as Picasso's painting Guernica and Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"[In 1938, Spain] is in flames. For nearly two years, the fractious but democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic has been defending itself against a military uprising led by Francisco Franco and backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Franco, who has given himself the title of Generalissimo, has a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler on his desk and has spoken of Germany as 'a model which we will always keep before us.'

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

"The skies above the Ebro this dawn are dark with warplanes, state-of-the-art fighters and bombers, flown by German pilots, that the Fuhrer has sent the Generalissimo. On the ground, tanks and soldiers from Italy, some of the nearly 80,000 troops the dictator Benito Mussolini will loan Franco, have helped launch the greatest offensive of the war. A powerful drive from the western two thirds of the country, which Franco controls, its goal is to reach the Mediterranean, splitting the remaining territory of the Spanish Republic in two.

"Franco's prolonged battle for power is the fiercest conflict in Eu­rope since the First World War, marked by a vindictive savagery not seen even then. His forces have bombed cities into rubble, tortured political opponents, murdered people for belonging to labor unions, machine-gunned hospital wards full of wounded, branded Republi­can women on their breasts with the emblem of his movement, and carried out death sentences with the garrote, a medieval iron collar used to strangle its victim.

"Battered by the new offensive, the Republic's soldiers are retreat­ing chaotically, streaming eastward before Franco's troops, tanks, and bombers. In some places, his rapidly advancing units have leapfrogged ahead. The Republican forces include thousands of volunteers from other countries, many of them Americans. Some have already been killed. Franco has just announced that any foreign volunteers taken prisoner will be shot."

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Copyright 2016 by Adam Hochschild
Pages xiii-xiv

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