Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This unique volume examines how and to what extent former victims of Stalinist terror from across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were received, reintegrated and rehabilitated following the mass releases from prisons and labour camps which came in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's reforms in the subsequent decade.
Synopsis
After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors, most notably Nikita Khrushchev, initiated a series of reforms which had an enormous impact on the future direction not only of the Soviet Union, but of the communist states of Eastern Europe. Among other things, de-Stalinisation meant the release and repatriation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners from labour camps, penal settlements and jails across the region, many of them victims of the terror, purges and mass repression carried out during the Stalinist period. This volume focuses on the impact of the releases on Eastern European regimes and societies, and questions the extent to which the returnees were fully rehabilitated in the judicial, political, socio-economic or moral sense. The countries covered include the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as four individual Soviet Republics: Ukraine, Moldavia, Latvia and Belarus.