De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Rehabilitation of Stalin's Victims after 1953

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors, most notably Nikita Khrushchev, initiated a series of reforms which had an enormous impact on the future direction not only of the Soviet Union, but of the communist states of Eastern Europe. Among other things, de-Stalinisation meant the release and repatriation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners from labour camps, penal settlements and jails across the region, many of them victims of the terror, purges and mass repression carried out during the Stalinist period. This volume focuses on the impact of the releases on Eastern European regimes and societies, and questions the extent to which the returnees were fully rehabilitated in the judicial, political, socio-economic or moral sense. The countries covered include the Soviet Union as a whole, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as four individual Soviet Republics: Ukraine, Moldavia, Latvia and Belarus.