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CHILDREN OF THE GULAG by Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. 480 pp. $55.00.
The Western world's awakening to the existence of Soviet labor camps was largely fueled by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's narrative memoir The Gulag Archipelago (1973). The word gulag has come not only to describe the particular Soviet system of exile, internment, labor, and punishment for millions of Russians but also to broadly symbolize the condition of great suffering, hardship, and isolation. Despite the popular view of the gulag as a system of political repression, most of the people who perished or survived in these camps were not political prisoners. Many of them were children.
Cathy Frierson and Semyon Vilensky dedicate their book Children of the Gulag to the child victims and survivors of Soviet repression. They describe how, from 1918 to 1953, the children of persons categorized by the Soviet partystate as "enemies of the people" shared their parents' fate, which included famine, war, imprisonment, forced migration and labor, death from such conditions, and execution. In just 1937 and 1938, a conservatively estimated 1.4 million children lost a parent to execution. Of the 20 million people convicted of...