Voices from the Past: A Collection of Short Stories Preserving Facts and Thoughts for Posterity to Pause and Ponder: Russia—Soviet Union: 1917-1971
About this ebook
In the first Part of this stirring collection, “In Whose Name?”, stories follow the period when the civil war engulfed the Motherland and the White Army volunteers are defending Holy Russia from the Reds.
In “The Dispossessed,” stories describe tragic times when Stalin reneges on the promise of the revolution—All land to the peasants—and launches an onslaught on peasants through forced farm collectivization and deportation of millions to Siberia.
Stories in “I Believe” tell how the Communists imposed Marxist dogma to eradicate belief in God, they close churches, kill and send clergymen to the concentration camps and conduct relentless anti-religious propaganda.
In the fourth part State secret police watchdogs relentlessly hound “The Enemies of the People” and send millions without trial to prisons and gulags.
In “The Humdrum Life in Socialist Paradise” stories capture snapshots of ordinary citizens’ days in the Socialist-Communist state and their struggle to survive under Soviet rule and Bolshevik dictatorship.
The last Part, “Behind the Iron Curtain,” tells with wry humor stories about events after World War Two, Cold War Years, and Collective Leadership in Soviet Union.
About the author
Author Orest M. Gladky was a writer between 1945 and 1977 and his short stories were published in Russian immigrant journals and newspapers in England, New York, San Francisco and Buenos Aires. He wrote as a victim of his times. Branded an "Enemy of the People" for his volunteer service as a boy age16—soldier in the White Army in the Russian civil war which followed the 1917 revolution, he survived as such through the years when the victorious Reds established and carried forward the notoriously dictatorial policies which dogmatically sought to enhance the power of the State through reduction of individual power and too often the literal destruction of the individual. Orest M. Gladky loved Holy Russia as constituted before Soviet control and never forgave that hierarchy not only for its tyrannies but also its stupidities. When the civil war ended he was forced to fear and flee State power, then learned to hate it, which he did even under German occupation and throughout his World War Two refugee sojourning in Europe and England. Even as he settled and remained in the United States, he continued to hate those who destroyed his Russia. Gladky was a man driven to write and that he did, in scores of stories, prompted not simply by memories of a tumultuous and perilous personal life but also by a deep wish that today's readers learn of those days and be given pause. The world should fear Communism in itself. Russia got to know it with millions of victims, with rivers of blood and tears, and she herself will shake off the red beast in a year predetermined not by us... - Orest M. Gladky, "In Whose Name?" 1967. Newsp. Rossia. 7787:6. New York.
Author Orest M. Gladky was a writer between 1945 and 1977 and his short stories were published in Russian immigrant journals and newspapers in England, New York, San Francisco and Buenos Aires. He wrote as a victim of his times. Branded an "Enemy of the People" for his volunteer service as a boy age16—soldier in the White Army in the Russian civil war which followed the 1917 revolution, he survived as such through the years when the victorious Reds established and carried forward the notoriously dictatorial policies which dogmatically sought to enhance the power of the State through reduction of individual power and too often the literal destruction of the individual. Orest M. Gladky loved Holy Russia as constituted before Soviet control and never forgave that hierarchy not only for its tyrannies but also its stupidities. When the civil war ended he was forced to fear and flee State power, then learned to hate it, which he did even under German occupation and throughout his World War Two refugee sojourning in Europe and England. Even as he settled and remained in the United States, he continued to hate those who destroyed his Russia. Gladky was a man driven to write and that he did, in scores of stories, prompted not simply by memories of a tumultuous and perilous personal life but also by a deep wish that today's readers learn of those days and be given pause. The world should fear Communism in itself. Russia got to know it with millions of victims, with rivers of blood and tears, and she herself will shake off the red beast in a year predetermined not by us... - Orest M. Gladky, "In Whose Name?" 1967. Newsp. Rossia. 7787:6. New York.
