Bitter Waters: Life And Work In Stalin's Russia

By Ann Healy and Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov

Book Overview

One dusty summer day in 1935, a young writer named Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Siberian labor camp where he had spent the last eight years of his life. His total assets amounted to 25 rubles, a loaf of bread, five dried herrings, and the papers identifying him as a convicted "enemy of the people." From this hard-pressed beginning, Andreev-Khomiakov would eventually work his way into a series of jobs that would allow him to travel and see more of ordinary life and work in the Soviet Union of the 1930s than most of his fellow Soviet citizens would ever have dreamed possible. Capitalizing on this rare opportunity, Bitter Waters is Andreev-Khomiakov's eyewitness account of those tumultuous years, a time when titanic forces were shaping the course of Russian history.Later to become a successful writer and editor in the Russian emigre community in the 1950s and 1960s, Andreev-Khomiakov brilliantly uses this memoir to explore many aspects of Stalinist society. Forced collectivization, Five Year Plans, purges, and the questionable achievements of "shock worker brigades" are only part of this story. Andreev-Khomiakov exposes the Soviet economy as little more than a web of corruption, a system that largely functioned through bribery, barter, and brute force--and that fell into temporary chaos when the German army suddenly invaded in 1941. Bitter Waters may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society during the tumultuous 1930s. From remote provincial centers and rural areas, to the best and worst of Moscow and Leningrad, Andreev-Khomiakov's series of deftly drawn sketches of people, places, and events provide a unique window on the hard daily lives of the people who built Stalin's Soviet Union.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813323908
• ISBN13: 9780813323909
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Life under Stalin

This book was very well written and shows what effect being a political prisoner has on one man even after he returns to the "real world." This is an intelligent man who works in manufacturing and views Soviet life under Stalin in an unfavorable light. He knows how to work the system and keep himself under the radar until World War II breaks out. I found this book compelling and enjoyed reading it very much.

How Communism does not work.

Many people think that Stalin's Russia was a productive industrializing country in the 1930s. Andreev-Khomiakov points out that it wasn't. This was a country which gave minimal wages to most of its workers. It was also a country that did not provide materially for its citizens. In a sense, this country was a totalitarian dictatorship where a few got rich, and most were poor. Industry was poorly run, since nobody was competing against another company. People also stole and cheated on the system because they had to. The author gives a convincing story on the system that Communism placed in Russia. This is certainly a great book to read about how Stalin's system did not work. This shows the inner workings of Communism and why this system died in the 1990s. An interesting read for those interested in Stalin's Russia.

One of the best books ever written on the 1930's USSR

If you're one of those people fascinated by the Soviet Union in the 1930s your mind will be blown by this quite fabulous book. Like virtually no other work I've read on the subject it brings home quite how anarchic life was for many people and how the ludicrously inhuman way in which the Soviet Union was run helped crush the population's soul. Anyone interested enough in this topic to probe further should also read "An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia", which is almost as good as this work. Andreev-Khomiakov's greatest talent is his ability to wriggle right into the psyches of the opposers and the opposed to produce a graphic explanation of what was so wrong with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also produces enough anecdotes to show how some people can retain their most human qualities at a time when everyone around them is descending into brutality. I say again -- this is a quite extraordinary work. Buy it now!