140×215 (60×90/16), hard cover, ill., 752 pp., 2005
ISBN 5-86793-357-1

Renowned Russian historian, Viktor Berdinskikh, reveals a secret page of 20th century Russian history: the transportation of ethnic groups into special settlements in the 1930’s – 1940’s. Many studies have been devoted to the millions of prisoners of Stalin’s camps, but historical literature has largely overlooked the plight of the so-called ‘exiled peoples’. These Russian Germans, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars and dispossessed peasants were uprooted from their lives and transported often thousands of miles from their homelands. Using archive material and unique historical evidence, the author studies both the mechanism of deportation and the system of special settlements in Russia’s far-north, Kazakhstan and Siberia. The consequences of Stalin’s wholesale dispossession of peasants and the national humiliation of millions of people are still perceived with anger by many inhabitants of Russia today.

World rights available