In the Shadow of Revolution
From ?migr? memoirs to officially sanctioned autobiographies, from oral histories to archival documents, these accounts of Russian women's lives before WWII survey remarkable tales of celebration, adjustment, resistance and survival. Fitzpatrick (Everyday Stalinism) and Slezkine (Arctic Mirrors) present ordinary women's testimonies of personal highs and lows amid momentous public events: the 1917 Revolution, the horrors of civil war, early construction of Soviet society and the chaos of political purges. The 43 narratives are divided into three parts: 1917-1920, the '20s and the '30s. In Part I, Anna Andzhievskaia, who as a 19-year-old resort worker married a Bolshevik activist, recounts her revolutionary activities, the loss of her baby during the civil war and the execution of her husband by the Whites; P.E. Melgunova-Stepanova--an activist, teacher and anti-Bolshevik--details the evening in 1920 when the secret police arrested her husband and searched their apartment. In Part II, Paraskeva Ivanova's 1926 letter declares she is leaving the Communist Party because party men have sexually exploited her in the name of creating "new forms of everyday life" to replace "bourgeois morality." Part III includes Pasha Angelina's praise of the Soviet Union for permitting her, born in 1912 to poor peasants, to become the first woman tractor driver and, eventually, a deputy in the Supreme Soviet. Fitzpatrick's introduction provides social and historical context, and Slezkine's offers literary analysis. Many of these excerpts beg for the fuller story, yet they still give depth and human dimension to a place and period too often shrouded in polemics and ideology. (June)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.