Paul R. Gregory

"Taken together, these fourteen short stories give the reader a surprisingly deep understanding of totalitarianism."--Jacket.

Gregory and Stuart have revamped this definitive text to mirror major changes within the global economy of the 21st century. In addition to a new title, the book now features more emphasis on transition, the acceleration of globalization, present trading agreements, and recent exchange rate regimes.

"The opening of the once secret Soviet state and party archives in the early 1990s was an event of profound significance. Western scholars gained access to the same documents as had Soviet leaders, penetrating the official wall of secrecy that had stood firm for decades. But while considerable archive-based research on that period has been published over the past five years, relatively little work has been devoted to the economics of the Stalin system. Although the Stalinist command economy is supposedly a thing of the past, it continues to plague Russia's transition to a market economy, and, more important, it continues to have considerable emotional appeal as a substitute for a market economy.". "Examining the period from the early 1930s through Stalin's death in 1953 - the period of the creation of the Stalinist system - this book reveals what we have learned from the archives, what has surprised us, and what has confirmed what we already knew."--BOOK JACKET.

xiii, 392 p. : 24 cm

"During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin's Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, Paul Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply in the literature. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin's Great Terror, Gregory relates the stores of these five women--from different social strata and regions--in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as the adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. Gregory begins with a synopsis of Stalin's rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the twentieth century." -- Publisher's website.