Khrushchev's Cold Summer

By Miriam Dobson,

Book cover of Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Book description

Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Khrushchev's Cold Summer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book took me into the abysses of Soviet society, but in a very different way than the books on terror: Dobson does an incomparable job of describing what it meant for Soviet people to take in millions of Gulag returnees after 1953, and to do so in a society that was far from leaving the ravages of war behind, that itself had barely any housing and enough to eat, that on the one hand was severely traumatized by Stalin's terror, but on the other hand was in large part unwilling to accept the Gulag returnees as innocent victims. They…

From Susanne's list on Pre-Putin’s Soviet Russia.

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