EXPLORE SOVIET HISTORY
These essays give historical context to the Six Lives under Communism. Explore here.
WORLD WAR, REVOLUTION, & CIVIL WAR (1917-1923)
Russia on the Brink of War
Costly Alliances
Early Communism Under Lenin (1917-1922)
The Birth of the Gulag (1918)
The Anti-Religious Campaign (1918-1928)
The Makhno Bandits (1918-1921)
A Mennonite Militia (1918-1919)
The Mennonite Massacres (1919)
Uncle Abe the Avenger (1919)
The Typhus Epidemic (1919-1920)
The Great Famine (1921-22)
The Mennonite Central Committee (1920)
To Stay or to Leave? Mennonite Immigration (1923-1926)
STALIN AT THE HELM: HOW THE MAN OF STEEL BROKE THE PEOPLE (1928-1941)
Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (1928-1933)
Collectivization - Advancements in Agriculture - Hein -
Away With the Kulaks: Dekulakization
Growth of the Gulag
Food From the Cupboards: Requisitioning
Starvation: The Holodomor Famine (1932-33)
“Collectivization is a Success” (1934)
The Great Purge (1936-38) - Anni - Neuendorf - Kolyma - Hein - Arrest & interrogation -
Life in the Kolyma Gulag: The Work of Nikolai Getman
Kolyma Gulag - Hein
Ethnic Cleansing (1941-) - Anni
Exile in the Soviet Union - Gerhard
Exile in the Urals - Berezniki - Peter
WORLD WAR II (1941-1945)
A Strange Alliance: The Mennonites & the Nazi Army
Germans in Russia: the Volksdeutsche
German Occupation - Anni
Neuendorf Village Report, 1942
Nieder-Chortitza Village Report, 1942
Isaac’s War (1942-43)
The Holocaust on the Eastern Front (1941-43)
The Great Trek (1943-44) - Anna Penner
German POWs in Soviet Captivity - Gerhard's Account
A Death March & Massacre (1945) - Anni's Account
AFTER THE WAR (1945-1953)
Living Behind Barbed Wire
A Prisoner in the Coal Mines of Donets Basin
The Life of a Zek in the 1940s
A Different Type of Prisoner in the Post-War Gulag
COMMUNISM AFTER STALIN (1953-1991)
The End of Stalin’s Gulag (1953-1956) - Peter
Soviet Leaders After Stalin: De-Stalinization, Cold War, and Repression (1953-1985)
The Gulag Archipelago: Solzhenitsyn’s Watershed Book
Our Muzzled Freedom: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The End of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)
Leaving Russia - Hein -