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

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

The province of Kalinin (pre- and postrevolutionary name: Tver),
situated northwest of Moscow, is examined as an economically and
historically typical representative of central Russia under postwar
Stalinism. This regional study is intended as a contrast to the bulk of
scholarly work on this period, with its focus on the major urban and
industrial centres. Boterbloem was the first Western scholar allowed
access to the Kalinin province Communist Party records, which he uses
along with other archival evidence and interviews of survivors conducted
in 1991, during the last days of the Soviet regime. Topics covered
include postwar economic reconstruction, the relationship of Party and
people, education, the penal system, and the various failures of
industry and agriculture, with a special emphasis on the latter. The
book is marred at times by infelicities of style and translation. (There
is a helpful glossary of Russian and other foreign terms, but its
presence seems to have encouraged their overuse in the text itself.)
While Boterbloem offers few startling conclusions about the Soviet
system as a whole, he fills in some important details in our picture of
this dark era and enlivens his story with the eyewitness testimony of
those who lived through it.