Download or read book The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution written by Lara Douds and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
Download or read book Former People written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called "former people" and "class enemies"—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.
Download or read book Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution written by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-25 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- Prelude to revolution -- Rising crime before the October revolution -- Why did the crime rate shoot up? -- Militias rise and fall -- An epidemic of mob justice -- Crime after the Bolshevik takeover -- The Bolsheviks and the militia -- Conclusion
Download or read book The Russian Revolution written by Sean McMeekin and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the century, the Russian economy was growing by about 10% annually and its population had reached 150 million. By 1920 the country was in desperate financial straits and more than 20 million Russians had died. And by 1950, a third of the globe had embraced communism. The triumph of Communism sets a profound puzzle. How did the Bolsheviks win power and then cling to it amid the chaos they had created? Traditional histories remain a captive to Marxist ideas about class struggle. Analysing never before used files from the Tsarist military archives, McMeekin argues that war is the answer. The revolutionaries were aided at nearly every step by Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland who sought to benefit - politically and economically - from the changes overtaking the country. To make sense of Russia's careening path the essential question is not Lenin's "who, whom?", but who benefits?
Download or read book Truth Behind Bars written by Paul Kellogg and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.
Download or read book The Fate of the Russian Revolution written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Red Flag Unfurled written by Ronald Suny and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering the Russian Revolution a century later Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after the October Uprising, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores how scholars and political scientists have tried to understand this historic upheaval, the civil war that followed, and the extraordinary intrusion of ordinary people onto the world stage. Suny provides an assessment of the choices made in the revolutionary years by Soviet leaders—the achievements, costs, and losses that continue to weigh on us today. A quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the revolution is usually told as a story of failure. However, Suny reevaluates its radical democratic ambitions, its missed opportunities, victories, and the colossal agonies of trying to build a kind of “socialism” in the inhospitable, isolated environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxists and anyone looking for alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.
Download or read book The Fate of the Russian Revolution written by Sean Matgamna and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution written by Lara Douds and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
Download or read book Year One of the Russian Revolution written by Victor Serge and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eyewitness account of the world-changing uprising—from the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary. “A truly remarkable individual . . . an heroic work” (Richard Allday of Counterfire). Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to Soviet democracy and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia. Praise for Victor Serge “Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” —Susan Sontag, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Award “His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation . . . His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them.” —Partisan Review “I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth.” —John Berger, Booker Prize–winning author “The novels, poems, memoirs and other writings of Victor Serge are among the finest works of literature inspired by the October Revolution that brought the working class to power in Russia in 1917.” —Scott McLemee, writer of the weekly “Intellectual Affairs” column for Inside Higher Ed
Download or read book Telling October written by Frederick C. Corney and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Telling October' chronicles the construction of an official 'foundation narrative' by the Soviet Union as the new state sought to legitimise itself by portraying the October Revolution as the inevitable culmination of a historical process.
Download or read book October written by China Miéville and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multi-award-winning author China Miéville captures the drama of the Russian Revolution in this “engaging retelling of the events that rocked the foundations of the twentieth century” (Village Voice) In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilization that still resonates loudly today.
Download or read book Russia in Flames written by Laura Engelstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.
Download or read book Making Sense of War written by Amir Weiner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconceptualizes the historical experience of the Soviet Union from a different perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, this work situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet - not just the Stalinist - system." - publisher.
Download or read book The Last of the Tsars written by Robert Service and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of the finest Russian historians writing today. In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. Now Robert Service, the eminent historian of Russia, examines Nicholas's life and thought from the months before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service's deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of previously untapped sources, including the Tsar's diaries and recorded conversations, as well as the testimonies of the official inquiry, shed remarkable new light on his troubled reign, also revealing the kind of Russia that Nicholas wanted to emerge from the Great War. The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic.
Download or read book Red Flag Wounded written by Ronald Suny and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking the degeneration of the Russian Revolution Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism. Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.
Download or read book The Russian Revolution 1917 written by Rex A. Wade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the 1917 Russian Revolution from its February Revolution beginning to the victory of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October.
