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Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Awarded the 2010 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic Studies, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. The book has been translated into Russian and will be published by ROSSPEN in 2013.

This book is one of the first attempts to explore the post-Stalin era. It considers the massive exodus of prisoners from the Gulag and the process of rehabilitation. Extensive work was required to establish relevant legal processes and penal reforms. But the book also traces the social impact of de-Stalinisation, necessitating further research to locate reports on popular opinion, letters, and court-cases. A total of fourteen months were spent researching in archives and libraries in Russia, including work in three regional centres. The holdings of ten archives were used in the final manuscript.