Véronique Garros (1958–2013)

Although I was never able to finish this, it wasn't because it was a bad book; on the contrary, it's an excellent collection that would be a worthy textbook for a Russian history course. I like how the diarists were not all famous people or anything; one, for example, was just a poor middle-aged farmer. It was just that this is hardly pleasure reading and I found I couldn't commit to the whole thing, 400+ pages of small print.

I wrote about one of the diarists, Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky, in a guest entry for the death penalty blog Executed Today. Arzhilovsky, a middle-aged farmer and father of four, was shot by firing squad in 1937 because of his alleged membership of a "counterrevolutionary kulak sabotage organization."… (meer)