Intimacy & Terror -Op/111

This interesting anthology of 10 Soviet diaries from the 1930s mixes voices of protest and despair with those of people who seemingly accommodated themselves to Stalinist oppression. Lyubov Shaporina, founder of the Puppet Theater, expresses moral outrage at the wave of arrests and mass deportations sweeping Leningrad, mingled with grief at the death of her little daughter three years earlier. Andrei Arzhilovsky, a farmer killed by a firing squad in 1937, offers a scathing critique of the Soviet regime's monstrous crimes in diary excerpts dated 1936-1937. Moscow poet Lev Gornung records literary chitchat with Anna Akhmatova. With self-conscious lyricism, Vladimir Stavsky, editor of the journal Novy mir and general secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, evokes his inner turmoil but neglects to mention his denunciation of Osip Mandelshtam, which led to the poet's arrest and to his death in a labor camp. Among the other diarists are a struggling mother of four and a Moscow actor who murdered his lover. Garros is former Moscow correspondent for Le Monde; Lahusen, a Slavic professor at Duke; Korenevskaya, a scholar with Progress Publishers in Moscow. Photos. (Nov.)