The two most widely known pieces of memoir literature during the Stalin era are Eugeniia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Beautifully written, widely cited, and deeply moving, their accounts portray individual struggles to maintain personal freedom in the face of nearly overwhelming political forces that sought to suppress individual rights and initiatives. Both memoirs are set in the context of political and police actions, which the authors reference throughout. Readers might come away from them, as they often have, believing that beneath the surface of the totalitarian state, lived a wide array of individuals who mightily resisted its dominating influence and also harbored the desire for
