When Peter Alagagian had to face his persecutors because he loved God and served Him as a priest, even where godless atheism held sway, he became a martyr for a faith. In this way he has a special message for the world today. But when, after 23 years of Soviet tyranny and prisons, he lived to devote himself as a witness to the Church of Silence, and a witness for us of the love of God, we can well speak of an event of extraordinary importance in our time of compromise.
This remarkable work traces the history of Soviet Catholicism from its rich life in 1914 through its tentative fate in the first sixty years of the USSR. Rev. Zugger tells of the faithful men and women shackled by dictatorship, doomed to deportation, and abandoned by their own church in the west. Soviet Russia was an empire born of atheism with religion viewed as a threat to the state’s notion of individualism. By 1932, dictator Joseph Stalin firmly declared that religion would be extinct in the USSR within five years. In this compelling volume, Zugger details the Soviet campaign against Catholicism among many ethnic groups and worshippers whose devotion would not be shaken. He shows how they kept faith alive in prison camps, in remote villages, in monastery prisons, and in the secrecy of their homes, where the light of faith continued to burn brightly while churches crumbled or became dance halls and office buildings. This is the first book in English to recount the fate of Catholic Russia and the church in the various lands conquered by Soviet rule. It is at once a memorial to those who perished, a tribute to those who survived, and a testament to the enduring power of faith.
A historic photographic record of the Soviet Gulag and its legacy. The Gulag was a network of labor camps and penal colonies run by the Soviet security organizations. While forced labor and internal exile had a long history in Russia, the Gulag evolved into a devastating tool of political suppression and massive industrial production. From the early years of the Revolution to the final years of the USSR, millions labored and perished within this system. Gulag covers the history of the Gulag with incredible essays and firsthand narratives by former prisoners. The text is accompanied by photographs provided by the prisoners, survivor groups and state archives as well as contemporary photographs that show the camps as they look now. Each chapter covers a key camp or work project of the Soviet penal-industrial complex: Solovki, the monastery that was the birthplace of the Gulag system The White Sea Canal Vaigach, the doomed humane camp The Theater in the Gulag Kolyma, the deadly Siberian gold rush Vorkuta, coal mining above the Arctic Circle The Railroad of Death Each chapter has: A concise introductory essay Formerly banned and previously unpublished archival photographs Detailed chronology of the camp Prisoners' accounts of life and death in the camps and colonies Contemporary photographs Accounts of survivors some of whom still live near their former camp or colony. Gulag is a remarkable pictorial history of a harrowing era of the twentieth century.
Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.
This is the story of a father, as seen through the prism of a daughter’s memories of him. The personal story is offset against a greater political context and the destructive impact of nationalism on individuals and their families. It is a tale of survival, resilience and humanity. The book covers the time that the father, Dragan, spent in a World War II concentration camp set up by the separatist Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi-supported puppet state run by Croatian ultra-nationalists. The camp and the atrocities perpetrated there are still highly contentious issues in contemporary Croatia, Serbia and especially in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The absence of reconciliation over the events in the camp was one of the contributing factors in the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the subsequent Balkan wars and the continued instability of the region today. The memoir contains the manuscript left by Dragan, in conversation with his daughter Sibel, the author. It is indeed, a deeply personal learning experience about a part of her father that she never knew.
Caught Between Nazis and Soviets, Stanislaw Kulik was a man who dodged death. After the Russian occupation of Poland, Stanislaw Kulik, aged 15, was deported to the Soviet gulags and put to work. If you didn’t work, you didn't eat. While many died, Stanislaw managed to survive. Following the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was given an opportunity to join the Polish army being formed somewhere in the Soviet Union, but nobody knew where. After months traveling on his own through central Asia, through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Stanislaw finally reached Iraq, where he worked in a camp which processed Polish refugees. Too young to join, the Army faked his age and eventually he was then taken by ship to Great Britain via India, where he joined with the Polish Parachute Brigade. After qualifying as a paratrooper in Scotland, he dropped at Arnhem, in Operation Market Garden, where he found himself trapped behind enemy lines. Thanks to the Dutch underground he avoided capture by the Nazis. This thrilling memoir is an inspiring story of a triumph of resilience and courage against great odds.
For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times). This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.
A shocking insight into the brutalities faced by ordinary soldiers and the atrocities committed in the name of survival. Dispassionately we stared at the bloody scene. It had become an everyday sight. The 27th Penal Regiment care nothing for Hitler's war. They fight only to stay alive. But then they uncover the Soviet Army's biggest secret. A Russian commissar has hidden 30 million dollars of gold somewhere behind enemy lines. In a madcap scheme, Porta brokers a deal with the commissar: free passage for the Russians in return for a share of the gold. To find it, Sven and his comrades must be prepared to lie, steal and go behind the lines of the deadly Russian army...
