Any good books in English, preferably but not necessarily fiction – that give a picture of life in the soviet under the regime of Stalin? Like books that help connect with what happened in Gulags? I am not looking for a text book – but something that is either fiction or a personal account ….
by DelayedChildhood
6 Comments
If you’re interested in the Gulag system, you might want to try *The Gulag Archipelago* by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Note: some controversy about this book and debate by historians.
Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Alekzandr Solzhenitsyn is probably the most popular name for what you’re looking for. As u/autophobe2e mentioned, the Gulag Archipelago is quite popular, as is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
You may want to also look into Vasily Grossman. A lot of his works (The People Immortal, Stalingrad, Life and Fate) are more about living in Stalinist Russia during WWII, but some of his books were banned because of how critical they were of the Soviet government.
His book “Everything Flows” may be more of what you’re looking for as it has some reflections on the Gulag system.
Child 44 by Rob Smith is a fictional work depicting life in Stalinist Russia. This was also made into a movie starring Tom Hardy.
The works of Mikhail Bulgakov are also worth checking out, particularly the Master and the Margherita and Heart of a Dog. Both are works of fiction that were highly controversial at the time due to their harsh critiques of communism.
You may also be interested in the Aquariums of Pyongyang, which is a real life account of internment in a North Korean gulag.
If you like poetry at all you might enjoy *Anna of All the Russias* by Elaine Feinstein – it’s about the remarkable and tragic life of poet Anna Akhmatova, who lived through profound changes in Russian/Soviet society, had close friends and a child who were sent to the gulags.
Her poetry is amazing even in translation and reflects the changes in her life and circumstances over her lifetime.
See Anne Applebaum’s books – *Gulag: a history,* more recently *Gulag Voices: an anthology*, also *Red Famine*.
Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, short stories by someone who spend 17 years in the Gulag, published posthumously.
Children of the Arbat, Fear and Dust and Ashes is a trilogy that spans 1935 until the end of world war 2 and follows a young komsomol member caught in the rising paranoia of Stalins purges.