Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment
By Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, Wojciech Materski, and Maia A. Kipp
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2008

The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.

Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver — now subsumed under “Katyn” — present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian – Polish relations up to the present.

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953
By Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2007

Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many.

The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.

This book gives voice to the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of ordinary Russian people-workers, peasants, soldiers-as expressed in their own words during the vast upheavals of 1917. The documents in the volume are selected from the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow and other Russian collections and most have never been published before. They include letters from individuals to newspapers, institutions, or leaders; collective resolutions and appeals; and even poetry written by self-taught, lower-class authors.

Using a mixture of narrative and hitherto unpublished letters from workers, peasants and soldiers, Steinberg brings 1917 to life again. . . . The result is utterly fascinating. -- Alison Rowat, Glasgow Herald

"his volume will be particularly useful as collateral reading for graduate and upper-division undergraduate students in history and Soviet studies. -- History: Reviews of New Books

A wonderful achievement, a rare amalgam of excellent scholarship and original source materials. -- Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

A volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press.