The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remeber Stalin

by Hochschild, Adam

• ISBN13: 9780618257478
• ISBN10: 0618257470
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-04
• Publisher: Houghton Miff

Summary

Although some twenty million people died during Stalin's reign of terror, only with the advent of glasnost did Russians begin to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.

Author Biography

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. His books have been translated into twelve languages and four of them have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. His last two books have also each won Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international affairs and the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards. In 2005, he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. His articles have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and elsewhere. He was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and has been a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and spent half a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild. They have two sons and two granddaughters.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. iii
Chart: Major Events in 20th-Century Russian and Soviet History	p. ix
Introduction: The Great Silence	p. xiii
Map	p. xxviii
Moscow I
Father and Son	p. 3
The Uses of Memory	p. 16
To See Things As They Are	p. 28
Siberia I
"Why Are We Weeping?"	p. 43
Lunch with the Colonel	p. 60
Souls Living and Dead	p. 74
Moscow II
Believers	p. 95
"The Stalin in Us"	p. 115
Beyond Black and White	p. 128
Paths Not Taken	p. 138
"The Interrogation Has Been Interrupted"	p. 150
Library of Death	p. 171
An Empty Field	p. 186
Siberia II
Secrets of the Riverbank	p. 197
Two Fathers, Two Daughters	p. 206
Shark and Angel	p. 219
The Dark Side of the Moon
Beyond the Pole Star	p. 235
The Inmost Circle	p. 249
The Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts	p. 268
Port of Arrival	p. 278
Bibliography and Acknowledgments	p. 289
Index	p. 297
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