Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
Forbidden History
By Joshua Rubenstein, Mark Kuchment
Renounce Fear: Memoirs of a Historian (Otreshis ot Straha)
by Aleksandr Nekrich
Overseas Publications Interchange (London), 414 pp., $13.50
When Aleksandr Nekrich arrived in the West in 1976, he was known as one of the most distinguished Soviet historians, a respected Party member whose career had some years before been destroyed by the authorities. He was expelled from the Party in 1967, after his first book, June 22, 1941, showed that the USSR had been unprepared for the Nazi invasion largely because of Stalin's errors.[*] Nekrich remained in the Soviet Union during the late Sixties and early Seventies, writing his memoirs and quietly working on a second book, The Punished Peoples, on an even more dangerous topic: Stalin's brutal deportation of some one million people from the Caucasus and Crimea during the Second World War. Forbidden to teach and greatly restricted in his research, he continued to study official documents and the unpublished work of other scholars who had investigated the deportations that Soviet authorities are still reluctant to acknowledge took place. The opening passage of his memoir, not yet published in English, conveys something of his mood during this period between his expulsion from the Party and his decision to emigrate to the West:
Review, 2743 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |