Books in the Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes series

A poignant collection of letters written by the Latvian poet, novelist, and newspaper editor Arsenii Formakov while interned in Soviet labor camps

"Security Empire examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differing interpretations of communism and local histories and illuminates the difference between veteran agents who fought in foreign wars and younger, more radical agents who combatted 'enemies of communism' in the Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe"--Jacket.

Offering an approach that synthesizes history and economics, this book develops explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. It draws on archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves.

Policing Stalins Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalins Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive.It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.

The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. This book investigates the failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system.

A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror

The first archive-based study of official corruption under Stalin and a compelling new look at the textures of everyday Soviet life after World War II