Former People

Former People

Tadzhikistan.4 In Leningrad itself, however, the main target was former people. On February 16, 1935, a report marked “top secret” was drafted by the NKVD of the Leningrad district for Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the NKVD, alerting him to ...

Author: Douglas Smith

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9781466827752

Category: History

Page: 496

View: 404

Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called "former people" and "class enemies"—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.
Categories: History

Stalin s Outcasts

Stalin s Outcasts

7 The irrationality of a policy that vilified relatives of “former people” for generations was not lost on party leaders. One official argued that this purge campaign would have to be abandoned soon before it appeared utterly senseless.

Author: Golfo Alexopoulos

Publisher: Cornell University Press

ISBN: 9781501720505

Category: History

Page: 256

View: 436

"I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children." "From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live on, I was drawn to the nonlaboring path." "As a man almost completely illiterate and therefore not prepared for any kind of work, I was forced to return to my craft as a barber." "I am as ignorant as a pipe." Golfo Alexopoulos focuses on the lishentsy ("outcasts") of the interwar USSR to reveal the defining features of alien and citizen identities under Stalin's rule. Although portrayed as "bourgeois elements," lishentsy actually included a wide variety of people, including prostitutes, gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities, in particular, Jews. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were frequent targets of disenfranchisement, singled out by officials looking to conserve scarce resources or satisfy their superiors with long lists of discovered enemies. Alexopoulos draws heavily on an untapped resource: an archive in western Siberia that contains over 100,000 individual petitions for reinstatement. Her analysis of these and many other documents concerning "class aliens" shows how Bolshevik leaders defined the body politic and how individuals experienced the Soviet state. Personal narratives with which individuals successfully appealed to officials for reinstatement allow an unusual view into the lives of "outcasts." From Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many participated in identifying insiders and outsiders and challenging the terms of membership in Stalin's new society.
Categories: History

Value Obligation and Meta ethics

Value  Obligation  and Meta ethics

Further , the reason why possible people count , people , that is , who could be brought into being , is the good and ... And as former people , the time when they could flourish or suffer may well seem to be past , allowing our moral ...

Author: Robin Attfield

Publisher: Rodopi

ISBN: 905183862X

Category: Philosophy

Page: 344

View: 969

This work defends an interrelated set of theses in value-theory, normative ethics and meta-ethics. The three Parts correspond to these three areas. Part One (Value) defends a biocentric theory of moral standing, and then the coherence and objectivity of belief in intrinsic value, despite recent objections. Intrinsic value is located in the flourishing of living creatures; specifically, a neo-Aristotelian, species-relative account is supplied of wellbeing or flourishing, in terms of the development of the essential capacities of one's species. There follows a theory of priorities, or of relative intrinsic value, in which the satisfaction of basic needs takes priority over other needs and over wants, and the interests of complex and sophisticated creatures over those of others, where they are at stake. Part Two defends a practice-consequentialist theory of the criteria of rightness and of obligation, which leaves room for supererogation, underpins our intuitions about justice, commends population growth only where it is genuinely desirable, and responds better than act-consequentialism to objections like that concerned with the separateness of persons. Part Three sifts meta-ethical theories, rejects moral relativism, and defends a cognitivist and naturalist meta-ethic. In defending analytical naturalism, it takes into account the latest literature on supervenience. By responding to recent discussions, this study supersedes my Theory of Value and Obligation (1987). It is equipped with detailed end-notes and an ample bibliography, which could prove a research tool of itself.
Categories: Philosophy

Comrades

Comrades

He had persecuted kulaks , clerics , ' bourgeois nationalists ' , members of already suppressed parties , ex - oppositionists and ' former people ' . Tens of millions of people fell into these categories . Many of them were returning ...

Author: ROBERT. SERVICE

Publisher: Harvard University Press

ISBN: 067402530X

Category: Communism

Page: 622

View: 525

Service offers a history of communism, drawing the uncomfortable conclusion that the poverty and injustice that enabled its rise are still dangerously alive. Unsettling and compelling, this is a comprehensive study of one of the most important movements of the modern world.
Categories: Communism

Debating the Past

Debating the Past

In the struggle between the “old former people” (victims of repression, dissidents) and the “new former people” (from the communist elite), history functions as a resource for political legitimization and satisfies parties' and elites' ...

Author: Rumen Daskalov

Publisher: Central European University Press

ISBN: 9786155053535

Category: History

Page: 376

View: 289

The book is comprised of the four major debates on modern Bulgarian history from Independence in 1878 to the fall of communism in 1989. The debates are on the Bulgarian–Russian/Soviet relations, on the relations between Agrarians and Communists, on Bulgarian Fascism, and on Communism. They are associated with the rule of key political personalities in Bulgarian history: Stambolov (1887–1894), Stamboliiski (1919–1923), Tsar Boris III (1918–1943), and the communist leaders Georgi Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov (1956–1989). The debates are traced through their various articulations and dramatic turns from their beginnings to the present day.
Categories: History

Art as the Cognition of Life

Art as the Cognition of Life

Kavtaradze—former chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Georgia; Kamenev—member of the Central Committee; former deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, former chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense, ...

Author: Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronskiĭ

Publisher: Mehring Books

ISBN: 9780929087764

Category: Communism and literature

Page: 555

View: 661

Voronsky was an outstanding figure of post-revolutionary Soviet intellectual life, editor of the most important literary journal of the 1920s in the USSR and a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. A defender of "fellow traveler" writes and an opponent of the Proletarian Culture movement, Voronsky was one of the authentic representatives of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism in the twentieth century. He was executed by Stalin in 1937. Following Voronsky's "rehabilitation" in 1957, several of his writings were published in the USSR in heavily censored form. All cuts have been restored for this edition.
Categories: Communism and literature

US Grenada Relations

US Grenada Relations

Former People's Revolutionary Government attorney general. Interview with the author, June 21, 2006. Ortiz, Frank. Former US ambassador to Barbados. Telephone interview conducted on August 10, 1994. Ostroff, David.

Author: G. Williams

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9780230609952

Category: Social Science

Page: 298

View: 528

Why did the world's strongest power intervene militarily in the tiny Commonwealth Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983? This book focuses on United States-Grenada relations between 1979 and 1983 set against the wider historical context of US-Caribbean Basin relations. It presents an in-depth study of US policy during the Carter and Reagan presidencies and the deterioration of relations with the Marxist-Leninist People's Revolution Government (PRG) of Grenada. It considers in detail the murderous internal power struggle that destroyed the PRG and the decisionmaking process that resulted in a joint US-Caribbean military intervention.
Categories: Social Science

Divided in Unity

Divided in Unity

After unification, every former People's Police officer had to go through this seminar, which comprised four weeks of straight lectures. The retraining efforts of the Berlin Police were (like personnel selection) based on the provisions ...

Author: Andreas Glaeser

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226297842

Category: History

Page: 400

View: 169

More than a decade after unification, Germany remains deeply divided. Following East and West German police officers on their patrols through the newly-united city of Berlin and observing how they make sense of one another in a fast-changing environment, Andreas Glaeser explains how East-West boundaries have been maintained by the interactions of institutions, practices, and cultural forms-including diverging patterns of understanding rooted in vastly different social systems, readily revived Cold War images, the continuing search for an adequate response to Germany's Nazi past, and the politics and organization of unification, which impose highly asymmetrical burdens on east and west. Glaeser also leverages his ethnography to develop an innovative approach to studying identity formation processes. Central to his theory is an emphasis on the exchange of identifications and the particular ways in which they are deployed and recognized in interpretations, narratives, and performances as parts of face-to-face encounters, political discourses, and organizational practices.
Categories: History

Lenin s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives

Lenin s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives

The language of Bolshevism also refers to “former people” (byvshie liudi), who, through their offenses against the ... Among the ranks of “former people” were supporters of the old regime, religious persons, merchants, land owners, ...

Author: Paul R. Gregory

Publisher: Hoover Press

ISBN: 9780817948139

Category: History

Page: 162

View: 920

An enlightening look into the once-secret Soviet state and party archives that Western scholars first gained access to in the early 1990s. Paul Gregory breaks down a decades-old wall of secrecy to reveal intriguing new information on such subjects as Stalin's Great Terror, the day-to-day life of Gulag guards, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the scientific study of Lenin's brain, and other fascinating tales.
Categories: History

European Elites and Ideas of Empire 1917 1957

European Elites and Ideas of Empire  1917   1957

Aristocratic intellectuals were, a recent historian of the Russian nobilityin-exile argued, the 'Former People' of Europe.74 In fact, the category of 'former people' applies to the majority of twentieth-century Europeans.

Author: Dina Gusejnova

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781316666708

Category: History

Page:

View: 288

Who thought of Europe as a community before its economic integration in 1957? Dina Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova's book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin who became pioneers of Europe's future regeneration. In the minds of transnational elites, the continent's future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires. This title is available as Open Access.
Categories: History