Soviet Suppression of Academia

Recently scholarship has paid increasing attention to the Soviet dissident movement that emerged in the mid-20th century; but what Petr A. Druzhinin asks happened to those academics who did not form part of this circle? Through its intimate portrayal of the persecution of non-dissident literary scholar Konstantin Azadovsky <i>The Soviet Suppression of Academia</i> sheds new light on the relationship between power and culture in Soviet Russia.<br/> <br/>Based on rare access to KGB materials and other sources this book traces Azadovsky's persecution from the 1960s when he refused to become a KGB informant to his arrest on trumped-up drug charges and imprisonment in a labour camp in the 1980s to his struggle for rehabilitation through the early 1990s. Here for the first time in English one of the KGB's secret operations against a prominent intellectual is revealed in full horrific detail. By telling the fascinating story of an individual's struggle with the powerful state machine this book provides much-needed insight into the experience of life under KGB monitoring and repression and adds nuance to ongoing debates about the relationship between Soviet intellectuals and the state.