See no evil

by Dariusz Tolczyk

"Believing that human actions could be controlled by a totalitarian government, Stalin and his followers subjected millions of Soviet citizens to acts of state terrorism and imprisonment in labor camps. But this was not enough. Seeking to control human thought as well, Soviet authorities provided official words and images to legitimize the gulag, distort its moral nature, and even glorify its "necessary" violence. This book is the first in English to examine official Soviet concentration camp literature from the early 1920s through the mid 1960s. Dariusz Tolczyk probes the evolution of this literature, the totalitarian thinking that inspired it, and the scandalous role played by Russian literary intellectuals who collaborated in its creation."--BOOK JACKET.