Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century RussiaRussia has endured more bloodshed than any other European country in the twentieth century. Yet, while countries such as Germany have learned the value of confronting the darker side of their own pasts, Russia has never faced the reality of its troubled history in a meaningful and collective way. In this provocative and highly original book, Catherine Merridale asks Russians difficult questions about how their country's volatile past has affected their everyday lives, their aspirations, their dreams, and their nightmares. Based on extensive research including rare imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, memoirs, letters, newspapers, literature, psychiatric studies, and texts, as well as interviews with doctors, priests, social workers, policemen, survivors, gravediggers, and funeral directors, Night of Stone seeks answers to the questions: What is the true impact of violence in the Soviet century? How successfully have the Russians psychologically rewritten their own histories? What rituals have survived the Soviet regime, and what do they tell us of the Russian mentality? Reminiscent of the highly successful The Hour of Our Death, Night of Stone is an emotionally wrenching, eloquent work that will appeal to all readers of Russian and European history as well as anyone interested in the processes of memory. |
From inside the book
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... hungry , exhausted , often cold , crowded together in airless carriages or on the decks of river boats . They were ... hunger and exhaustion caused the most deaths in these years , but the fighting , too , was murderous . There was not ...
... hunger . Some people still confuse it with the hunger of 1917 , of 1919 , or 1924 . They do not make the same mistake with 1929. The campaign of mass col- lectivization changed every aspect of their lives . Its purpose was to turn the ...
... hungry , " wrote another . " There aren't even any potatoes , and people are going to the fields to work without food . ” 49 Stepan Ustimovich was three in 1947 , but he remembers what the hunger meant . “ At first we went without bread ...
Contents
An Introduction I | 1 |
Another Light | 21 |
A Culture of Death | 47 |
Copyright | |
13 other sections not shown