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Humanities
Kees Boterbloem.
McGill Queen's University Press. xxvi, 436. $49.95
One of the most striking images in Nineteen Eighty-Four was the memory hole, which served to dispose of facts inconvenient to Big Brother's totalitarian regime. The novel's dystopic excesses found real-life expression in the Soviet Union, where some of the bloodiest and most discreditable pages of the country's history were obscured by so-called 'blank spots' - officially imposed boundaries to historical exploration.
The spots, of course, were never truly blank. Even inside the USSR the history of collectivization, famine, purges, and repressions was known if not acknowledged. Outside the country these topics were the subject of an extensive literature. What was lacking in both places, however, was a solid documentary base. Archives - especially those pertaining to such sensitive topics as famine, purges, or repression - were off-limits to most researchers, foreign and domestic.
Only at the very end of the Communist era did the barriers begin to come down. The documentary record, it turned out, had been concealed but not obliterated. Researchers now...