Table of Contents

PREFACE vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Introduction 3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lives and Times 3 Yuri Slezkine, Lives as Tales 18 PART I. Civil War as a Way of Life (1917-1920) 31 1. Ekaterina Olitskaia, My Reminiscences (1) 33 2. Anna Litveiko, In 1917 49 3. P. E. Melgunova-Stepanova, Where Laughter Is Never Heard 66 4. Anna Andzhievskaia, A Mother's Story 73 5. Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, The Road to Exile 82 6. Nadezhda Krupskaia, Autobiography 111 7. Tatiana Varsher, Things Seen and Suffered 113 8. Zinaida Patrikeeva, Cavalry Boy 118 9. Irina Elenevskaia, Recollections 123 10. Sofia Volkonskaia, The Way of Bitterness 140 PART II. Toward "New Forms of Life" (The 1920s) 167 11. Agrippina Korevanova, My Life 169 12. Anonymous, What Am I to Do? 207 13. Ekaterina Olitskaia, My Reminiscences (2) 209 14. Paraskeva Ivanova, Why I Do Not Belong in the Party 213 15. Maria Belskaia, Arina's Children 219 16. Antonina Solovieva, Sent by the Komsomol 235 17. Nenila Bazeleva et al., Peasant Narratives (1) 241 18. Anna Balashova, A Worker's Life 243 19. Valentina Bogdan, Students in the First Five-Year Plan 252 20. Alla Kiparenko, Building the City of Youth 277 21. Anna Iankovskaia, A Belomor Confession 282 22. Lidia Libedinskaia, The Green Lamp 286 PART III. "Life Has Become Merrier" (The 1930s) 303 23. Pasha Angelina, The Most Important Thing 305 24. Efrosinia Kislova et al., Peasant Narratives (2) 322 25. Fruma Treivas, We Were Fighting for an Idea! 324 26. N. I. Slavnikova et al., Speeches by Stakhanovites 331 27. Ulianova, A Cross-Examination 342 28. Anna Shchetinina, A Sea Captain's Story 350 29. Kh. Khuttonen, Farewell to the Komsomol 354 30. Anastasia Plotnikova, Autobiography 356 31. A. V. Vlasovskaia et al., Speeches by Stakhanovites' Wives 359 32. Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, A Family Chronicle 367 33. Evdokia Maslennikova, The Story of My Life 391 34. Valentina Bogdan, Memoirs of an Engineer 394 35. Frida Troib et al., Engineers' Wives 419 36. Ekaterina Olitskaia, My Reminiscences (3) 424 GLOSSARY 435 INDEX 437

Promotional Information

A pleasure to read and hugely absorbing. The variations in the memoirs, the clear evidence that many were written under extremely circumscribed conditions, gives one of the best introductions possible to Soviet history. Hearing the voices of individuals writing in different eras gives the reader a sense not only of the experiences women lived through (many of them terribly tragic) but also of the language they used and the terms in which they thought about their own life experiences. -- Elizabeth A. Wood, MIT

About the Author

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago and coeditor of The Journal of Modern History. She is the author of, most recently, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s and Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989. Yuri Slezkine is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor of Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture and the author of Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North.

Reviews

"Give[s] depth and human dimension to a place and period too often shrouded in polemics and ideology."--Publishers Weekly "Each autobiography here transforms the story of a private life into the story of the country and the times..."--Kirkus Reviews