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Kees Boterbloem, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953, Ithaca: McGill-Queen's Unversity Press, 1999, xii, 435 pp.
This book belongs to the growing body of literature on Russian history which utilizes formerly closed archives in Russia. In this sense, the book is interesting, providing much information on Kalinin Province in northwest Russia, not very far from Moscow. (Like many geographical and street names in the former Soviet Union, Kalinin Province no longer exists; it has recently reverted to its old name, Tver' Province.) The book also makes an important contribution to the study of post-war Russia, the age of "high Stalinism," which, as Boterbloem correctly notes, has not been studied as closely as the preceding historical periods such as World War II, the terror of the 1930s, or the revolutionary periods.
Kalinin Province was overwhelmingly ethnic Russian: in 1926 some 93% of the population was ethnic Russian, with 6% Karelian, and 1% other nationalities not specified in the book. Like many other nationalities in the Soviet Union, the Karelians suffered from Stalin's "ethnic terror" in the 1930s, but apart from a couple of sentences on p. 32, discussion of the Karelians is minimal. Nor is the Jewish population given much attention here.
Obviously there were very few Jews in this rural province. The author does indicate in passing that when some parts...