Ekaterina Olitskaia: A Social Revolutionary Against Russian Political Beliefs

2011 Words5 Pages

Imagine yourself in prison. You are awakened one day by the guard, who orders you and others to the prison yard. You are being moved, but no one has told you where. If you move to the left or the right, you will be shot on the spot. You and 50 other prisoners are loaded into small trucks- There is little room for you to move, the air hot with the breath of the other prisoners. After an incredibly long journey, you are moved from the trucks to a train, specifically a cattle car. Where will this train take you? No prisoner knows. The guards do, though, and allow you to take some winter clothing- a scarf, a pair of gloves, a coat. This does not tell you much though, as Russia in winter is usually a cold place. In talking with your fellow prisoners, you realize that everyone has been arrested for similar reasons, reasons for which many of them advocate their innocence. They were forced to sign the confession, they said. They were tortured; they might have not even known why they were arrested. Soon you piece together the commonalities between them- You all are political prisoners- imprisoned for your political beliefs, or imprisoned because you were supposedly a part of a giant conspiracy to overthrow the ‘People’s Government’ and sell the country to the greedy and exploitive capitalists. For Ekaterina Olitskaia, this story would be similar to her experiences shared in “My Reminiscences,” and for millions of others in the Soviet Union during the 1930s this story would be similar. How did this situation come to be? Why were people jailed for their political beliefs? One has to look back to the situation of Russia from 1900 to the 1930s to trace the path and beliefs of Olitskaia and others to determine why they were jailed during the Gr... ... middle of paper ... ...ed Hellbeck, Jochen. "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul," in Stalinism: New Directions. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. London & New York: Routledge, 2000 Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilevich. Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir Edited and Translated by Deborah Kaple. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Olitskaia, Ekaterina. “My Reminiscences,” from In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Zhukov, Innokenty. "Voyage of the 'Red Star' Pioneer Troop to Wonderland." In Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, edited by James Von Geldern and Richard Stites. Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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