Stalin's meteorologist
Subtitle: one man's untold story of love, life, and death
By: Olivier Rolin ; translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
Contributors: Schwartz, Ros, translator
Edition: First Counterpoint hardcover edition.
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 179
ISBN-13: 9781619027817
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Politics and government; Soviet Union. Gidrometeorologicheskiĭ komitet; Solovet︠s︡kiĭ lagerʹ osobogo naznachenii︠a︡; Political prisoners; Meteorologists; History; Soviet Union; Biography; Political persecution
Work titles: Météorologue
Description: "In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Union's meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and taken to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other 'political prisoners' in a camp on an island in the north, under vast skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937--a fact kept from his family for nearly 20 years. Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexei's story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world which Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution. Maintaining that he'd been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him--his stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long. Stalin's Meteorologist is a fascinating work which casts light on the devastating consequences of politically inspired paranoia and the mindlessness and trauma of totalitarianism--relevant revelations for our time"--Provided by publisher.