Inside The Stalin Archives Cl

by Brent,Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780977743339
• ISBN10: 0977743330
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-17
• Publisher: C Z PUBL

Summary

To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives , Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport? Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press, and he is the coauthor of Stalin's Last Crime, and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion, the Observer, and teaches at Bard College.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Connections
Descent: January 1992	p. 18
Mariana	p. 26
Into the Archive	p. 36
Mariana, Continued	p. 58
The Little Man	p. 61
Mariana, Continued	p. 77
Day Two in the Archive: The Only American	p. 80
Pikhoia	p. 99
Farewell	p. 117
Searching
In the Labyrinth	p. 122
Turmoil, Misdirection, Fear	p. 154
"Farewell, Dead Men"	p. 171
The Secret Death of Isaac Babel	p. 176
Raoul Wallenberg	p. 201
Erofeev's Widow	p. 205
Vsyo Normalno	p. 209
Vergil	p. 226
Yezhov's Office	p. 235
The Personal Archive of Josef Stalin	p. 248
Stalin	p. 267
Stalin's Hand	p. 288
Notes	p. 326
Acknowledgments	p. 333
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