Выигравшие лотерею: Сталинский период в воспоминаниях современников-свидетелей

The article deals with the ways in which the memoirs of Il’ia Ehrenburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Emma Gershtein, and Raisa Orlova testify to their authors’ life during the Stalinist terror and to the fates of their contemporaries who fell victim to persecutions. Ehrenburg compared his having avoided arrest during the years of terror to having drawn a lucky lottery ticket: indeed, though each of the four memoirists took various measures to escape repres-sions, a great deal depended on sheer luck. Nevertheless, there was also the authors’nbsp; partial concurrencenbsp;with the ide-ology of the Soviet system. These are issues that Lidiia Ginzburg called ‘areas of identification’ or ‘points of compatibility’, that is, aspects of the Soviet reality with which even the criticsof the regime consented, feeling a genuine inner need to cultivate such consent.