Volume 43, Number 15 · October 3, 1996
Whispers from the Abyss
By Michael Ignatieff
The Mandelstam and "Der Nister" Files: An Introduction to Stalin-era Prison and Labor Camp Records
by Peter B. Maggs
M.E. Sharpe, 171 pp., $52.95
Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime
by Vitaly Shentalinsky, translated by John Crowfoot, Introduction by Robert Conquest
Martin Kessler Books/Free Press, 322 pp., $25.00
Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s
edited by Véronique Garros, by Natalia Korenevskaya, by Thomas Lahusen, translated by Carol A. Flath
New Press, 394 pp., $27.50
At the end of the Russian Orthodox service for the dead, the choir and the mourners join together in singing the 'Viechnaya Pamyat.' The words mean 'Eternal Memory,' and the memory in question is God's. Human memory may betray, but God never forgets. In the twentieth century, the closest secular equivalent to God's memory has been the administrative memory of the totalitarian state.
Review, 3568 words
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