Bitter Waters

by Andreev-Khomiakov,Gennady M.

• ISBN13: 9780813323749
• ISBN10: 0813323746
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

One dusty summer day in 1935, a young writer named Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Siberian labor camp where he had spent the last eight years of his life. His total assets amounted to 25 rubles, a loaf of bread, five dried herrings, and the papers identifying him as a convicted "enemy of the people." From this hard-pressed beginning, Andreev-Khomiakov would eventually work his way into a series of jobs that would allow him to travel and see more of ordinary life and work in the Soviet Union of the 1930s than most of his fellow Soviet citizens would ever have dreamed possible. Capitalizing on this rare opportunity,Bitter Watersis Andreev-Khomiakov's eyewitness account of those tumultuous years, a time when titanic forces were shaping the course of Russian history.Later to become a successful writer and editor in the Russian emigre community in the 1950s and 1960s, Andreev-Khomiakov brilliantly uses this memoir to explore many aspects of Stalinist society. Forced collectivization, Five Year Plans, purges, and the questionable achievements of "shock worker brigades" are only part of this story. Andreev-Khomiakov exposes the Soviet economy as little more than a web of corruption, a system that largely functioned through bribery, barter, and brute forceand that fell into temporary chaos when the German army suddenly invaded in 1941.Bitter Watersmay be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society during the tumultuous 1930s. From remote provincial centers and rural areas, to the best and worst of Moscow and Leningrad, Andreev-Khomiakov's series of deftly drawn sketches of people, places, and events provide a unique window on the hard daily lives of the people who built Stalin's Soviet Union.

Author Biography

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov was imprisoned as a teenager in Soviet Russia in 1926 and released in 1935. During World War II, he was a German prisoner of war and did not return to the Soviet Union at war's end. He later served as coeditor of the Novyi Zhurnal (New Journal) and chief editor of Mosty (Bridges). Ann E. Healy is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the author of Russian Autocracy in Crisis: 1905-1907. She is currently writing a book about the Jewish issue in U.S.-Russian relations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	ix
A Second Birth	1	(26)
Leaving the Netherworld	1	(3)
First Steps	4	(4)
Freedom	8	(2)
Restless Neposedov	10	(3)
More Tricks of Fate	13	(5)
A Fateful Summons	18	(4)
Neposedov's Misadventures	22	(5)
Squeezing Credits from Trees	27	(12)
The Socialist Intrusion	27	(3)
The Rationalization of Lumbering	30	(3)
An Unsystematic System	33	(4)
Timber Graveyards	37	(2)
Wrenches in the Words	39	(18)
Not Far from Moscow	41	(3)
The Captains Confer	44	(3)
Launching the Offensive	47	(3)
The Secret of Our Success	50	(2)
Celebration in the Factory	52	(5)
Private Initiative, Socialist Reward	57	(24)
Neposedov's Toy	57	(1)
Not Everything in Technology Has Its Place	58	(3)
A Night's Lodging	61	(4)
Where There Is a Will, There Is a Way	65	(4)
All-Union Grease	69	(4)
Big and Little Schemers	73	(8)
The Art of Socialist Accounting	81	(24)
Riding the Peaks and Through	81	(4)
People Cannot Be Trusted	85	(4)
Against the Rules	89	(3)
Tricks of Bookkeeping	92	(4)
Stalin's Mistake	96	(3)
Humanity in Bedlam	99	(6)
Sabotaged by Success	105	(22)
New Misfortunes	105	(3)
Useless Agonizing	108	(3)
Frama on the Vilyuika	111	(7)
An Expensive Proposal	118	(4)
Old Acquiantances	122	(5)
Strom Clouds Gather	127	(26)
Anticommunists Building Communism	130	(4)
The Communist Yoke	134	(4)
Engineers of Chattel	138	(4)
At an Impasse	142	(4)
More Predators	146	(7)
The Invasion	153	(32)
What Awaits Us?	157	(3)
In the West and the East	160	(3)
The Breakdown of Order	163	(3)
In Every Direction	166	(5)
What Do the Germans Want?!	171	(6)
At Their Posts	177	(5)
Farewell to Moscow	182	(3)
Biographical Sketch: Gennady Andrew-Khomiakov	185	(4)
Notes	189	(6)
About the Book	195