Silence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin's Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union by Cathy A. Frierson (review)

Although there have been several books on Stalin's Great Terror, Cathy Frierson's book, Silence Was Salvation, offers a new perspective by looking through the eyes of the children of Stalin's "enemies of the state." She reveals the long-term difficulties that children who lost one or both parents suffered during this terrible time, expanding the historical understandings of the true impact of Stalin's atrocities.

The book is a collection of ten oral histories gathered from child survivors of Stalin's Terror over fifty years after the event, and Frierson has truly mastered this craft. She begins the book by detailing her methodology for gathering the life stories of her interviewees. She reveals that she conducted most of the interviews in Russian in her respondent's homes to provide a more "personal approach." She divided her interviews into three parts: life before the arrest of the interviewee's parent or parents, life as a child of repression, and life as an adult after Stalin had died. At times the interviews took place over several days, since the respondents were older and some were frail. Frierson began with standard questions to ensure a common theme, but allowed the survivors to express their stories in their own manner. She also asked how the victims responded to Stalin's death, gaining insight into how repression impacted the perceptions of these young sufferers.

Frierson located several of those she interviewed through Memorial, a civic organization organized to bring survivors together, honor the victims, and collect the histories of the survivors. She explains that she selected survivors who represented different groups of Stalin's enemies, including "prerevolutionary gentry, former imperial military officers, Socialist Revolutionaries, the scientific intelligentsia, forced deportees from the western borderlands…, persons accused of spreading war rumors…, slave laborers returning to the USSR … after World War II, high-ranking Old Bolsheviks, and opponents … in the intraparty struggle for succession" following Lenin's death (19). This decision meant that many of her respondents were born to wealthy families rather than the poor, but still reflects the breadth of Stalin's purge. She also worked to include varied attitudes toward Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet era. Although she included victims with differing national identities, all of her respondents lived in European Russia. Frierson herself admits that the book would have been more representative if she had collected more interviews from the approximately ten million children who suffered this fate or if she had been able to gather them closer to the time of the events. However, until the glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1990s, the Soviet government did not permit the stories to be told and by that time, many of the victims had died, leaving their stories untold. I only wish that she had been able to provide more than the ten interviews she used for her book.

Frierson's title comes from Irena Andreevna Dubrovina, one of her subjects, who explained that when her father was convicted, her mother cautioned her, "You must not talk with anyone about this. Because if you say even one word about this, then they will arrest me and take me away. You'll be left on your own" (127). Dubrovina remembered these words, recalling later that when others were arrested, "this was the reality that nourished my silence, so as not to harm anyone, including myself. Silence was salvation. That's what I knew" (139). Frierson's book allows these individuals to break this silence safely, revealing their struggles to the world.

The book is divided into ten chapters, one for each oral history. Frierson begins each chapter with a short quote from the respondent, the date and location of the interview, and a brief introduction to the person she is interviewing. After providing some background on the...