Paul Roderick Gregory (born 10 February 1941 in San Angelo, Texas) is a professor of economics at the University of Houston, Texas, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution [1] and a research fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research. [2] He has written about Russia and the Soviet Union. [3] [4]
He received his B.A. in 1963 and M.A. in 1964 from University of Oklahoma and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1969. [5] Gregory's book Women of the Gulag inspired an Oscar-shortlisted film of the same name, directed by Marianna Yarovskaya. [6] [7] [8]
The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The full official name of the agency changed several times.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prolific author on economic theory, Bukharin was a prominent Bolshevik and was active in the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1917 until his purge in the 1930s.
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non fictional series written between 1958 and 1968 by the Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and it was translated into English and French the following year. It describes life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative which was constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.
The ten years 1917–1927 saw a radical transformation of the Russian Empire into a socialist state, the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia covers 1917–1922 and Soviet Union covers the years 1922 to 1991. After the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), the Bolsheviks took control. They were dedicated to a version of Marxism developed by Vladimir Lenin. It promised the workers would rise, destroy capitalism, and create a socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The awkward problem, regarding Marxist revolutionary theory, was the small proletariat, in an overwhelmingly peasant society with limited industry and a very small middle class. Following the February Revolution in 1917 that deposed Nicholas II of Russia, a short-lived provisional government gave way to Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. The Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (RCP).
The Great Purge or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
Grigori Yakovlevich Sokolnikov was a Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary, economist, and Soviet politician.
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), formerly the Bolshevik Party, was a form of Bolshevism called Marxism–Leninism, an ideology of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union's ideological commitment to achieving Marxist Communism included the National Communist development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat the predominant prevailing global system of capitalism and promote the goals of Russian Communism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union—and thus Marxism–Leninism—derived and developed from the theories, policies and political praxis of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Joseph Stalin started his career as a radical student, becoming an influential member and eventually the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He served as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953.
The 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (b) was held in Moscow 18–-23 March 1919. The Congress was attended by 301 voting delegates who represented 313,766 Party members. A further 102 delegates attended with speaking rights, but no vote. It elected the 8th Central Committee.
Elena Dmitriyevna Stasova was a Russian Soviet revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and an early leader of the organisation that would go on to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Marxism and the National Question is a short work of Marxist theory written by Joseph Stalin in January 1913 while living in Vienna. First published as a pamphlet and frequently reprinted, the essay by the ethnic Georgian Stalin was regarded as a seminal contribution to Marxist analysis of the nature of nationality and helped to establish his reputation as an expert on the topic. Stalin would later become the first People's Commissar of Nationalities following the victory of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917.
Alexei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician and statesman, most prominent as premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1929 and 1924 to 1930 respectively. He was one of the accused in Joseph Stalin's show trials during the Great Purge.
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921. War communism began in June 1918, enforced by the Supreme Economic Council, known as the Vesenkha. It ended on 21 March 1921, with the beginning of the New Economic Policy, which lasted until 1928.
Women of the Gulag is a 2018 US short documentary film directed by Marianna Yarovskaya. and based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory (2013). Executive Produced by Mitchell Block and Mark Jonathan Harris, it was a Best Documentary Short shortlist nominee at the 2018 Academy Awards.
Marianna Yarovskaya is a Russian-American documentary filmmaker who is the director and producer of the 2018 Academy Award short-listed documentary film Women of the Gulag based on the book Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul Roderick Gregory (2013). She also produced Greedy Lying Bastards (2012).
This is a select bibliography of post World War II English language books and journal articles about Stalinism and the Stalinist era of Soviet history. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below.
The administrative-command system, also known as the command-administrative system, is the system of management of an economy of a state characterized by the rigid centralization of economic planning and distribution of goods, based on the state ownership of the means of production and carried out by the governmental and communist party bureaucracies ("nomenklatura") in the absence of a market economy.