The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin

Synopsis

Stalin's rule over the USSR left 20 million people dead. During the height of the terror, in the late 1930s, one out of every eight Soviet men, women and children were shot or sent to the gulag. How does a nation recover from such fear and carnage, from the pain and guilt of collective amnesia? Adam Hochschild explores how Russians today are facing up to the past, to an avalanche of long-repressed memories. He talks to prison survivors, and former camp guards; to people searching for traces of parents and grandparents; and to the keepers of the KGB archives. He journeys deep into Gulag territory, to the spookiest, eeriest places on earch, where no Westerner has ever visited before and, as he travels across one of the twentieth-century's worst killing grounds, asks profound and pertinent questions regarding the potential victim and the potential executioner inside us all.A perceptive, intelligent book demonstrating that the significance of the Gulag transcends the confines of onr country and one generation. The New York Times Book Review