Russian Nights Autocracy and Testimony: Life in Russia during the Soviet Period as Told by Those Who Lived it
About this ebook
This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of testimonies, gathered between 2001 and 2005 of actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1917-1956. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-Party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG.
Russian Nights offers a wide and detailed perspective of what we call “the Russian Century”: Lenin’s takeover, the all-powerful Party, the GULAG, and the Second World War.
About the author
Roberto Echavarren is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he studied philosophy and law. He then pursued graduate studies in Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Paris VIII. Echavarren taught at the University of London before teaching at New York University for twenty years. He has published five novels, notably his last three short novels combined under "Archipiélago" (Archipelago). He was awarded the 2021 Amado Alonso International Prize of Literary Criticism for his "El pensamiento chino" (Chinese Thought) book. In 2022 he published "One Against All, Lenin and His Legacy."