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Notebooks for the Grandchildren is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand what went wrong after the great Russian Revolution of 1917.Through the eyes of young Ukrainians like himself, who came of age fighting for the Revolution but were murdered in the late 1930s, Mikhail Baitalsky recounts the Revolution’s hopes—and its tragic unraveling under Stalin. He narrates how Stalin rose to power and carried out the “political counterrevolution” that silenced so many. Arrested three times by the Stalin regime, Baitalsky survived to tell the story of what happened.
List of contents
ForewordAcknowledgementsList of Maps and FiguresGlossaryIntroductory CommentsYuula BenivolskiTranslator’s NoteA Brief Chronology of the Russian Revolution and its AftermathTranslator’s IntroductionNotebooks for the Grandchildren
Baitalsky’s Introduction: Preliminary Remarks: The 1920s and the 1970sNOTEBOOK 11 Communist Youth League Christening
2 Our Jacobin Monastery
3 Were We Cultured?
4 Standards of Human Behaviour
5 Primary and Secondary Feelings
6 Husbands and Wives in the Communist Youth League
7 A Few Remarks about the Language of the Times
NOTEBOOK 21 How It Was and How It Became
2 The Family of an Odessa Tailor
3 Ideological Commitment and Calvinism
4 I Saw My Homeland
5 Friendship with Grisha
6 Days and Evenings Without Romance
7 Cain, Abel and the ‘Platform of the 83’
8 The View from the Window of Cell No.9
NOTEBOOK 31 I Make the Worst Choice
2 My First Arrest
3 A Year of Successes in Astrakhan
4 I Could Have Remained Silent about This Too
5 Features of the New Order
6 More about Boris and the Features of the Time
NOTEBOOK 41 Holy and Unholy Work
2 My Second Arrest
3 ‘We Know All about You’
4 Butyrka Humanism
5 Becoming Acquainted with Vorkuta
NOTEBOOK 51 At the Brick Factory
2 Tents for the Condemned
3 Borya Elisavetsky
4 Vorkuta, Kotlas, Kirov
5 Russian Patriots
PhotographsNOTEBOOK 61 They Even Found Me Here
2 My Co-Butyrnik
3 You Don’t Get Something For Nothing
4 A Credo on the Subject of Wages
5 The Scream of a Woman in the Corridor
6 ‘Consider Yourself Lucky!’
NOTEBOOK 71 Distinguishing Padding from Content
2 I End Up in the First Circle
3 We Delve into the Psalms of the New David
4 The Cunning Machine of the Special Judicial Sessions
5 Conversations in the Main Alley
NOTEBOOK 81 To Vorkuta for the Second Time
2 To Each His Own
3 Even Those Who Were Deported Are Voting
4 Joseph Rakhmetov
5 A Period of Camp Liberalisation
6 A Puddle With a Watchtower on Its Shore
NOTEBOOK 91 Meaningless Yackers Fall in Line
2 Vorkuta– My Alma Mater
3 The Poisonous Weapon of Hushing Things Up
4 Love and Hatred
5 On Very Ordinary Honesty
6 I Hope for an Echo
Translator’s PostscriptAppendix 1: Timeline of Baitalsky’s Life
Appendix 2: Baitalsky’s Other Writings
Appendix 3: Baitalsky: Obituaries and Eulogies
Appendix 4: Russian Government Archival Documentation of The Mass Executions February 1937–September 1938
Appendix 5: The Vorkuta Hunger Strike: What Russian Government Archives Have Revealed
Appendix 6: The 1938 Executions of the Left Opposition Supporters at the Brick Factory: The Executioner’s Official Report
Appendix 7: Excerpts from The Official Conviction and Rehabilitation Documents of a Leader of the 1936 Vorkuta Hunger Strike and 13 Co-Defendants
Appendix 8: The Moscow Trials 1936–1938
BibliographyIndex
