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OUT OF THE RED SHADOW

ANTI-SEMITISM IN STALIN'S RUSSIA

A disturbing, significant contribution to our knowledge of official Soviet anti-Semitism, based on recently declassified Communist Party and KGB archives. Kostyrchenko earned his doctorate and high positions in the Soviet Union as a researcher and archivist of WW II history and the USSR's aircraft industry. As formerly secret archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB became available to the public, Kostyrchenko began recording this dispassionate yet voluminous study of the Soviet Union's obsession with obliterating Jewish life. Soviet Jews were the first to discover that ``the victory over fascism did not put an end to the Jewish national tragedy'' in Eastern Europe. At first, Stalin's attacks on organized Jewish life appeared to be just another arm of his Russification program that affected Armenians and other Soviet nationalities. But the author cites several reports and letters that make clear how disturbed the inner circle of the Kremlin was that so many prominent figures in the Soviet arts and sciences were Jews. Stalin appeared to give Jewish nationhood a boost with the 1934 establishment of the semi-autonomous region of Birobidzhan. Documentation published here, however, suggests that the remote region, far from being a ``Crimean Zion,'' was a typically cynical response to Stalin's fears of a ``Soviet Zionism.'' The uncanny ability of Stalin's kingpins to sniff out ``hidden sedition'' in anything Jewish is linked to large and small policies, from the Soviet Union's turning on the fledgling (and then quite socialist) state of Israel to the banning of Jewish burial societies. Kostyrchenko considers whether state anti-Semitism was Stalin's personal vendetta against Jews or a logical outgrowth of totalitarianism, concluding that the answer lies squarely between the two. Lurid documentation here, heaping layers of bitter irony upon Jewish and gentile hopes that the USSR would be the anti-fascist champion of multiethnic comradeship. (36 pages photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1995

ISBN: 0-87975-930-5

Page Count: 331

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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