Bitter Waters Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov Recounts His Personal Term Paper

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Bitter Waters

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov recounts his personal experiences living in Stalinist Russia in his book Bitter Waters. Having spent nearly a decade in a Siberian labor camp during the early part of Stalin's regime, Andreev-Khomiakov had already held a jaded view of Soviet domestic policies decades before he would be able to chronicle his story. Released from the labor camp, suddenly, without any money or connections, Andreev-Khomiakov wandered around his homeland in search of work and livelihood. "During the years of my imprisonment all my ties with freedom had been severed, and it made absolutely no difference where I went," (2). However, Andreev-Khomiakov was prohibited from living in forty-one cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, so he first settled in a small rural town. The author in fact made many small towns and cities his home over the course of the next several years, and although he was freed from the shackles of labor camp, he never tasted freedom at all. He watched the Soviet Union degenerate into a corrupted and nefarious version of socialist ideals, only to then be invaded by the Germans in 1941 during the Second World War. Remarkably, Andreev-Khomiakov would spend more time as a prisoner after the invasion, for he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Scandinavia and in Berlin. After the end of the war, Andreev-Khomiakov was finally able to pursue his writing career as an expatriate and his memoirs are captured in Bitter Waters.

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From economic instability to forced collectivism to political purging, Bitter Waters captures the failures and farce of Stalinism.

Economic hardship drove much of Stalin's policies and politics, but Stalinism drove the Soviet Union into economic despair, corruption, and chaos. When Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Siberian labor camp, he experienced initial boon, having received a well-paying and fairly pleasant position. He notes, "The beneficence of fate was reflected also in the fact that it released me from the camps at a time when the storms of the First Five-Year Plan and '100% collectivization' ... were dying down," (8). Rations had been nearly abolished and the people were no longer suffereing from the ravages of famine. However, Andreev-Khomiakov's luck would turn, as would the fate of his homeland. Face-to-face with bureaucratic entanglements and restrictions, Andreev-Khomiakov also encountered the first signs of the new Stalinist regime. Stalin had forced his predecessor Trotsky into exile and usurped some of Trotsky's programs for rapid industrialization and exploitation of natural resources (28). Far from being a smooth or organized endeavor, Stalin's early economic plans proved futile, and would only turn much of the Soviet Unions into wasteland. Andreev-Khomiakov also experienced first-hand the nature of factory work under….....

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