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Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire is a book by American author David Remnick. Often cited as an example of New Journalism, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1994. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The book is equal parts history and eyewitness account, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. Opening with the excavation of the corpses of Poles killed in the Katyn massacre, Lenin's Tomb begins by describing the structural flaws present from the country's early days, and then uses individual accounts from a wide variety of contemporary individuals to display the modern consequences of these historical errors and cruelties.
Within the book, Remnick draws heavily on his past work as Moscow correspondent with The Washington Post . In addition to officials and public figures, current and former—one chapter in part recounts Remnick's attempts to interview Lazar Kaganovich, of Joseph Stalin's inner circle—he takes advantage of a wide variety of "everyman"-type sources. These individuals, while not themselves notable, help add richness and texture to Remnick's depiction of the world around them.
In 1997, Remnick published a follow-up work, Resurrection, dealing with the creation of a new Russian state.
The book was the required reading for the University Interscholastic League's Social Studies Competition in 2018. [7] Jay Nordlinger gave a favorable assessment of the book. [8]
The Pulitzer Prizes are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The National Book Awards were established in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, abandoned during World War II, and re-established by three book industry organizations in 1950. Non-U.S. authors and publishers were eligible for the pre-war awards. Since then they are presented to U.S. authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
David J. Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2010, he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Susan Choi is an American novelist. She is the author of several acclaimed novels, including The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), and Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Choi teaches creative writing at Yale University.
The Kremlin Wall Necropolis is the former national cemetery of the Soviet Union, located in Red Square in Moscow beside the Kremlin Wall. Burials there began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolsheviks who died during the Moscow Bolshevik Uprising were buried in mass graves. The improvised burial site gradually transformed into the centerpiece of military and civilian honor during the Second World War. It is centered on Lenin's Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–30. After the last mass burial in Red Square in 1921, funerals there were usually conducted as state ceremonies and reserved as the final honor for highly venerated politicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, and scientists. In 1925–1927, burials in the ground were stopped; funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself. Burials in the ground resumed with Mikhail Kalinin's funeral in 1946.
Richard Russo is an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher. In 2002, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel Empire Falls. Several of his works have been adapted into television series and movies.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1994.
Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev was a Russian medievalist, linguist, and a former inmate of Gulag. During his lifetime, Likhachev was considered the world's foremost scholar of the Old Russian language and its literature.
Susan Sheehan is an Austrian-born American writer.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Dmitry Gennadievich Yurasov is a Russian historian and human rights defender. Starting from age sixteen, he has been gathering information about victims of Soviet political repressions, those who were imprisoned, executed, died in detention, or went missing. He began his research in 1981 while working in the state archives as a paleographer, second rank. He secretly studied the files of those who had been killed, collecting eventually 123,000 cards from a register that, according to his estimate, amounted to 16 million files. While still only a student, he first publicly mentioned his results at a historical seminar in the central writers' building in Moscow on April 30, 1987. They caused quite a sensation, which resulted in his access to the archives being blocked, but also in many offers of help from volunteers all over the Soviet Union.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
David Streitfeld is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, best known for his reporting on books and technology. During his tenure as book reporter at The Washington Post, he definitively identified Joe Klein as the "Anonymous" author of the 1996 novel Primary Colors, upon which Klein admitted authorship, despite earlier denials.
Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief executioner of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria.
Nina Alexandrovna Andreyeva was a Soviet and Russian chemist, teacher, author, political activist, and social critic. A supporter of classical Soviet principles, she wrote an essay entitled I Cannot Forsake My Principles that defended many aspects of the traditional Soviet system, and criticized General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his closest supporters for not being true communists. In the rebuke published in the official party newspaper Pravda the essay was called The Manifesto of Anti-Perestroika Forces.
Walter Allan McDougall is an American historian, currently a professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
This is a list of works by David Remnick, American writer and editor of The New Yorker.
Ilya Iosifovich Zaslavskiy is a Russian politician of the Perestroika era, activist and specialist for the rights of disabled people, and entrepreneur. He has held seats in the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, State Duma of the Russian Federation, acted as deputy minister for the Russian Ministry of Land Policy, Construction, Housing and Utilities, and worked on the World Committee for the United Nations Decade of Disabled Persons.