Synopses & Reviews
This groundbreaking book offers a comprehensive documentary history of children whose parents were identified as enemies of the Soviet regime from its inception through Joseph Stalin's death. When parents were arrested, executed, or sent to the Gulag, their children also suffered. Millions of children, labeled "socially dangerous," lost parents, homes, and siblings. Co-edited by Cathy A. Frierson, a senior American scholar, and Semyon S. Vilensky, Gulag survivor and compiler of the Russian documents, the book offers documentary and personal perspectives.and#160;
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The editors present top-secret documents in translation from the Russian state archives, memoirs, and interviews with child survivors. The editors' narrative reveals how such prolonged child victimization could occur, who knew about it, and who tried to intervene on the childrenand#8217;s behalf. The editors show how the emotions from childhood trauma persist into the twenty-first century, passing from victims to their children and grandchildren. Interviews with child survivors also display their resilient ability to fashion productive lives despite family destruction and stigma.
Review
“A pioneering study.”Walter Laqueur, editor of
The Holocaust Encyclopedia --Andrew Kahn - Times Literary Supplement
Review
and#8220;An essential addition to the budding scholarship on children in the former Soviet Union and to the growing literature on repression and the Gulag under Stalin.and#8221;and#8212;Lynne Viola, University of Toronto
Review
"A significant and sickening book, whichand#8230; show[s] the stark contrasts between official policies toward Soviet children and their actual experiences."--Anne Applebaum,
The New RepublicReview
and#8220;A pioneering study.and#8221;and#8212;Walter Laqueur, editor of
The Holocaust EncyclopediaReview
"With its rich and interpretive narrative, wide array of sources, and moving photographs, the Frierson and Vilensky volume offers an excellent resource for scholars and students, an essential starting place for research on children's experiences of revolution, civil war, famine, and repression."and#8212;Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Russian Review
Review
"This is a brave, well-written, and scholarly excavation of an important and contested episode in the history of Russian thought that highlights and begins to challenge some of the distortions of the intervening Soviet and post-socialist ideology and historiography."and#8212;Dominic Martin, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Synopsis
It is widely assumed that the and#8220;nonclassicaland#8221; nature of the Russian empire and its equally and#8220;nonclassicaland#8221; modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States.
Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire,
Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism.
Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.
About the Author
Cathy A. Frierson has held the Class of 1941 and Arthur K. Whitcomb Research Professorships at the University of New Hampshire and is the author or editor of a number of books about Russia. Semyon S. Vilensky was a Gulag prisoner and journalist who serves as chair of the Moscow literary-historical society and#147;The Returnand#8221; and on the Russian Federation's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. He is also the editor of Till My Tale Is Told, a collection of memoirs by women prisoners in the Gulag.