Memoir of a Gulag actress
By: Tamara Petkevich ; translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg ; foreword by Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: DeKalb
Language: eng
Number of pages: 481
ISBN-13: 9780875804286
Work titles: Zhiznʹ--sapozhok neparnyĭ
Description: This is the memoir of a young woman who became an actress in the Gulag. Tamara Petkevich had a relatively privileged childhood in the beautiful, impoverished Petrograd of the Soviet regime's early years, but when her father--a believer in the Communist ideal--was arrested, 17-year-old Tamara was branded a "daughter of the enemy of the people." She searched for her father while struggling to support her mother and two sisters, finish school, and enter university. Shortly before the Russian outbreak of World War II, Petkevich was forced to quit school and, against her better judgment, she married an exiled man whom she had met in the lines at the information bureau of the NKVD (People{u2019}s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Her mother and one sister perished in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and Petkevich was herself arrested. This book relates her attempts to defend herself against charges of having a connection to the Leningrad terrorist center, counter-revolutionary propaganda, and anti-Semitism that resulted in a sentence of seven years' hard labor in the Gulag.
Notes: Includes index.