INTIMACY AND TERROR: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Edited by Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevsfcaya, and Thomas Lahusen. New Press. 394 pp. $27.50

Can a totalitarian regime forcibly deprive human beings of their memory? Not without bizarre consequences. Or so it would appear from this impressive collection of personal diaries written in the Soviet Union during the harshest years of Joseph Stalin's rule.

Discovered in public and private archives around Russia, the 10 diaries included here reveal drastically different strategies of remembering-and forgetting.

Some diarists found memory a deadly foe: one imprisoned farmer completed an embittered recollection of life in a labor camp, only to be shot by a firing squad a week later. Others found it easier to forget, including the simple disciple who ended with the dedication, "Stalin, you is dear to us all." Still others took refuge in the prosaic: one collective farmer recorded nothing but the daily weather and every item requisitioned, bought, or traded. Most eloquent, though, is the diary in which a year of the writer's life is simply missing--"crossed out like an unnecessary page." No doubt, such silences contain the loudest memories.

--Ji Park