Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime

V. Shentalinskii ploughed deeply in the KGB archives searching for official documents about the mysterious disappearance or the silencing of a whole generation of soviet writers, with B. Pasternak, M. Bulgakov, A. Akhmatova, I. Babel, B. Pilnjak, A. Platonov, O. Mandelstam and N. Hagen-Thorn as the most known.His findings are mind-boggling: about two thousand writers were arrested during the soviet regime. More than fifteen hundred of those died in prison or work camps.The CP of the USSR with its uncontrolled power 'collectivized' literature by installing a State controlled Writers Union, which created its own Gulag: those writers who were considered critical of the regime or didn't follow the official line, were literally (executed) or figuratively (publication interdiction) eliminated.Extremely painful are the forced written 'confessions' of the authors. They were promised a free leave if they avowed to be traitors, but after the confession they got a shot in the back of the neck. V. Shentalinskii even found the exact dates of the executions.As Beria said: 'Give me anybody and within 24 hours I shall force him to confess that he is a British spy.'This book contains also details on the murder of the Spanish POUM leader Andres Nin (the father of Anais) and some dreadful paragraphs on Gorki. He turns out to be the servile mouthpiece of Stalin during the Kulak liquidation, but the killing of his son was a dire warning that his position was far from safe.This depressing book is a must for all those interested in the history of the ancient USSR, and more specifically in its treatment of literature and its status within the 'communist' State.I also recommend Ismail Kadare's book on the same subject 'Le crepuscule des dieux de la steppe'.Varlam Shalamov's book 'Kolyma Tales ' tells the story of the death of A. Platonov.

I disagree with the Kirkus Reviewer. I find the author's personal narrative and the stories about the writers' lives to be smoothly integrated into a very absorbing narrative. This book contains fascinating insights into the ordeals of Babel, Florensky, Platonov, and several other writers. Author Shentalinsky is to be commended. A second volume with more of the same would be a continuing major contribution to the unerstanding of the lives of writers in a repressive state.