front cover of Between Watergate and the Gulag
Between Watergate and the Gulag
The French Press and Politics, 1970–1985
Charles R. Eisendrath
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022
This book analyzes the relationship of the French press to political power. The bedrock concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is reversed for French journalists in libel cases; they enter courtrooms presumed guilty. Royal holdovers live on: Louis XIV’S system of indirect control through revocable favors persists in the form of state financial aid to the press.  The weekly Le Canard Enchaîné is a journalistic court jester that plays the same role as the fops at Versailles, telling truth to power in joke form on topics that “serious” journals avoid.

Also introduced: “surplus freedom” a novel approach for gauging self-censorship by comparing the degree of free expression a legal system permits to what publications actually exercise.
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Fragments of Lives
Chronicles of the Gulag
Jacques Rossi
Karolinum Press, 2018
In Fragments of Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life—from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi’s original illustrations and written in a tone as sharp and dry as that of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, Rossi’s vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, Rossi never considered himself a victim. Instead, in the manner of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Buber-Neumann, he sought to share and transmute his experience within the living hell of the Gulag. In so doing, he gives voice to the inmates whose lives were shattered by one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes of the twentieth century.

An impassioned reminder to always question one’s beliefs, to have the courage to give up one’s illusions at the risk of one’s life, Fragments of Lives lays bare, with acute observations and biting wit, the falsity of the Soviet utopia that transformed Rossi’s home into a “huge Potemkin village, a farcical sham dissimulating oceans of mud and blood.”
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Survival as Victory
Ukrainian Women in the Gulag
Oksana Kis
Harvard University Press, 2021

Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.

Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

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Voices from the Gulag
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Northwestern University Press, 2010

After the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began receiving, and would continue to receive throughout his life, testimonies from fellow survivors of the gulag. Originally selected by Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs in this volume are an important addition to the literature of the Soviet gulag. Written by men from a wide variety of occupations and social classes, the writing in Voices from the Gulag lends a voice to the many ordinary people—including a circus performer, a teenage boy, and a Red Army soldier—whom a brutal system attempted to erase from memory.

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