Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953

Investigations of Stalin’s regime have usually concentrated on events in Moscow, Leningrad, and some of the rapidly developing industrial centres of the Soviet Union. In contrast, this book presents a look at the lives of Russians in a typical province that remained largely unnoticed in either Soviet propaganda during the 1930s and 1940s or later Western studies of these years. With access to the records of the Communist Party of the Kalinin province, the author supplements archival evidence with published accounts and interviews with those who survived the last years of Stalin’s life, taking us into their lives. Covering a wide range of topics, such as industry, agriculture, party affairs, repression and education, the book looks at the complicated relationship between the political elite of the Communist Party and its rank and file members during what was perhaps the grimmest period in Soviet and Russian history. The result is a study of how the postwar Stalinist regime dealt with those in the Kalinin Province, from ordinary Communist Party members and Red Army veterans to collective farmers and anti-labour camp inmates.