The Soviet Union

As Edward Acton and Tom Stableford note in the introduction to this volume of translated sources, the years following the opening of the archives have been exciting times for scholars of the Soviet Union. This is not the first such collection, but it is perhaps one of the most successful and it does an excellent job of giving those who do not speak Russian ‘a taste of the intellectual feast that is underway’ (p. xviii). This collection, a successor to the editors’ earlier volume covering the revolutionary period up to the Stalinist 1930s, opens in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Here the reader can piece together the key political developments of the period: Pravda’s report on the pact and the secret additional protocol; a radio broadcast by Molotov; Beria's 1940 memorandum to Stalin recommending the mass shootings of Polish POWs and so on. In addition, we also have an extract from the recollections of a schoolgirl in Poland remembering the Soviet invasion and the arrest of friends and neighbours. This kind of careful balancing of the political and social dimensions is retained throughout the volume, though it is particularly strong in the chapters on the Second World War. A variety of sources allow the reader to glimpse the experiences of ordinary Soviet citizens: letters home from Soviet soldiers fighting on the front line, a letter from a daughter taken prisoner by the Germans on occupied territory, secret police reports on public morale, diaries, and retrospective memoirs and interviews. One of the most moving of these personal sources is an extract from the diary of a teenager living through the Leningrad blockade. Torn apart by hunger and guilt for stealing food from his family, Yura Ryabinkin wrote: ‘I’m an unworthy son to my mother and an unworthy brother to my sister [...] For me the whole world has become just one thing—food. My whole purpose is to get food...’ (p. 95). Yura Ryabinkin died in 1942

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