Lewis Siegelbaum

Lewis Siegelbaum, who teaches at Michigan State University, is the author of Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile.

Spectral Enemies: The First Terrorist

Lewis Siegelbaum, 11 February 2010

A short time after the Russian prime minister P.A. Stolypin was assassinated in September 1911, Alexander Guchkov made a speech in the State Duma about the impact of revolutionary terrorism in which he recalled an assassination attempt from 45 years earlier:

The generation to which I belong was born on the eve of Karakozov’s shots; in the 1870s and 1880s, a bloody and menacing wave of...

Letter
I will leave it to readers of my review to determine whether the portions of the transcript of Saltykov’s interview that it cited contain evidence of hectoring. I also wrote of ‘incomprehension’ on the part of that particular interviewer, a characterisation that I would now extend to Robert Latypov and Aleksander Kalikh. Nobody could deny that Memorial has honourably represented the victims of...

Witness Protection: Communist Morality

Lewis Siegelbaum, 10 April 2008

The NKVD came for Angelina and Nelly Bushueva’s father in 1937, when they were one and three years old. Nine months later, the sisters were sent to different orphanages when their mother, Zinaida, was sent to the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, along with their baby brother, Slava. Zinaida’s own mother found Nelly several weeks later but didn’t...

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