Katya's Cruelty: A Short Story

The NKVD or the Soviet Secret Police treated their prisoners in cruel ways. They starved them to death, spat on their faces, slapped them, and called them pigs. Ruta Sepetys made sure to emphasize the NKVD’s treatment towards Lina, and the other prisoners, to showcase how they felt. It allowed the reader to step in their shoes. “It was hard to imagine that the war rages somewhere in Europe. We had a war of our own, waiting for the NKVD to choose the next victim, to throw us in the next hole. They enjoyed hitting and kicking us in the fields” (Sepetys, 163). The prisoners had to work in order to get their rations. They worked all day in order to receive one slice of bread, and on a good day, some

Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich utilizes an authentic narrative told through a modest authorial voice to show the reader what life is like in a Soviet labor camp in the harsh winter of 1951. In this book, space and language converged in an austere union that rendered time the most defining theme, and yet also utterly meaningless. Language is the unifying force that retains the characters’ humanity, yet ironically also strips them of it in certain contexts. Solzhenitsyn conveys space through the brutal cold of the Russian tundra that cuts through every character and every scene alike, ever-present and implacable. Time is the oppressive force driving the plot just as the guards drive the prisoners – forward, step by step, each minute of each hour that passes controlled from above by the powers that be. Themes like those of human dignity, unjust punishment, camaraderie, steadfast faith, and the unforgiving cold emerged, perpetuated through the use of these facets of language, space, and time, to tell the story of one day in the life of one man: Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

During a chance encounter, Danilov and Vassily meet the beautiful and educated Tanya, a soldier in the Stalingrad home defense campaign. They both fall in love with Tanya. In an attempt to win Tanya’s love, Danilov offers Tanya a safer position within the military, however, she prefers to fight with a rifle in her hand and looks to Vassily as a hero worthy of praise. His shy uncertainty and obvious discomfort in her presence only serve to intensify their feelings for each other.

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

In their lives a distant and cold character exists. When the war began in Sarajevo the men on the hills cut off the city’s water. Kenan’s elderly neighbor Mrs. Ristovski thrusted her plastic bottles towards him when he opened the door and all she said was “A promise is a promise.” and left him standing at the doorway. Even before the war Mrs. Ristovski had always acted abrasively; knocking on their door early in the morning and complaining about their first born’s crying. Not once has she shown

In the book Sofia Petrovna, the author Lydia Chukovskaya writes about Sofia Petrovna and her dreadful experiences as a widowed mother during the Russian Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. There were four basic results of the Russian Stalinist Terror: first, it was a way of keeping people in order; second, it kept Stalin in power and stopped revolutions from forming, made people work harder to increase the output of the economy, and separated families as well as caused deaths of many innocent people due to false charges.

Imagery: The author uses imagery to describe the Russian prisoners’ lives in the camps. This imagery makes them look pathetic and frail, causing the reader to feel empathetic and sorry for them. Also we see the same idea of imagery within the hospitals and what happens in them. The description of gore and fear emphasizes the theme of death

example of how life was in Russia by talking through the story and reflecting her experience

Lina Vilkas is a fifteen year old girl living in Lithuania in the early 1940’s. In the story, Lina and her family are taken from their home late one night by Russian NKVD soldiers. These soldiers force the fatherless family onto a train, along with a crowd of other people, and take them to many different work camps to work as slaves. The conditions Lina and her family were put into were very poor and many lives were lost on their journey as prisoners of the NKVD. The Vilkas family goes through many struggles while trying to survive the trip while being separated from Papa. Lina, even though she was so young, was very strong for being able to help her mother take care of Jonas the best she could, even though she had problems of her own. The conflicts in this story affected Lina greatly; she survived harsh housing conditions, low food rations, and abusive NKVD officers.

During the train ride the NKVD gave the prisoner food rations mainly bread and water. Also during the train ride Andrius found a colorful shiny rock. Mrs. Rimas a Liberian holds the rock a say she the queen of the cattle cart, everyone laughed except for the lady who give birth because her baby died. It took weeks to get to the labor camps, but when they finally step off the train Lina met Kretzsky a NKVD officar of the work camp. Once Lina and her family, enter inside their hunt they saw Ulyushka inside who demand debt for saying inside the hunt. Even worst, in the night Lina saw Andrius mother inside a nice comfortable NKVD house putting on makeup. Lina thought Andrius and her mother are part of the NKVD, but his mother is being forced to be a prostitute. After she saw Andrius mother, she run into Andrius she rudely told him he part of the Soviet. Andrius heart-broken told her his mother is a prostitute to earn food ration for him and told her he felt guilty for it. Weeks later Jonas starts getting scurvy from not eating fruits and

Nikolai Litvin recalls his experiences from his tenure as a Red Army soldier in his memoir 800 Days on the Eastern Front. Litvin transcribed his memories of the war seventeen years after he left the military, which provided him ample time to process his experiences and formulate complete thoughts on what happened. Using a concise writing style, Litvin packs his memoir with vivid details of military operations and offers subtle details about Stalinist thinking and Soviet life. The memoir contains some significant Soviet bias, and Litvin’s point of view is clearly impacted by the unique experiences of a Red Army soldier. To truly understand 800 Days on the Eastern Front, the reader must decipher how Litvin understands his experiences, the impacts of internalized Stalinist thoughts and how Litvin reflects them, and how Litvin reveals the truths he believes about the war.

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

When they abducted Filippo, the group threatens his family that Filippo will lose an ear unless they receive the money. They keep Filippo chained in a large hole near an abandoned house: “... [his] skin was dirty, caked with mud and shit. He was naked… Round the right leg he had a big chain fastened with a padlock. The skin was scraped and raw.

The novel explores what life might be like outside of camp on one occasion, when Ivan Denisovich’s wife sent him a letter about carpet dyeing. Despite having an opportunity outside of camp, Denisovich was indifferent because “he lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family” (44). The guards give prisoners work to do, and that is the prisoner’s only purpose in life once they are incarcerated. How the sun represents incarceration despite the sun’s lively connotations, it transcends the confusion that the labour camp and the Soviet government were stirring in the prisoner’s head. Using the moon’s symbolism, it leads prisoners and the readers to contemplate on this underlying turmoil.

A female dog roamed the streets of Moscow, her simplistic life pertaining only to finding enough to eat and surviving the harsh cold of the Soviet Union. The only indication that she was a stray were the bony ribs sticking out of her wind-ruffled coat. When the strange men clothed in bulky army uniforms, cornered her in a small dark alley, she did not bite, bark, or run such as the others had. The dog simply allowed her captors to carry her to the nearby truck that was spewing dark clouds of exhaust into the crisp night air. She was placed in the back among three other dogs on their way to an unknown destination.