Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 1249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.
Download or read book Operation Barbarossa written by David M Glantz and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 22 June 1941 Hilter unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union. Spearheaded by four powerful Panzer groups and protected by an impenetrable curtain of air support, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht advanced from the Soviet Union's western borders to the immediate outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov in the shockingly brief period of less than six months. The sudden, deep, relentless German advance virtually destroyed the entire peacetime Red Army and captured almost 40 percent of European Russia before expiring inexplicably at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. An invasion designed to achieve victory in three to six weeks failed and, four years later, resulted in unprecendented and total German defeat. David Glantz challenges the time-honoured explanation that poor weather, bad terrain and Hitler's faulty strategic judgement produced German defeat, and reveals how the Red Army thwarted the German Army's dramatic and apparently inexorable invasion before it achieved its ambitious goals.
Download or read book Hitler s Decision to Invade Russia 1941 written by Robert Cecil and published by David McKay Company. This book was released on 1976 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Hitler refused to examine the possibilities of a compromise peace with Stalin, he ensured that not only Germany would lose the war, but that the Russians would be drawn into the heart of Europe's pursuit of the retreating forces of the Third Reich.
Download or read book The Devils Alliance written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals, the two mammoth and opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners. The Pact that they agreed had a profound -- and bloody -- impact on Europe, and is fundamental to understanding the development and denouement of the war. In The Devils' Alliance, acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse explores the causes and implications of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, an unholy covenant whose creation and dissolution were crucial turning points in World War II. Forged by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, the nonaggression treaty briefly united the two powers in a brutally efficient collaboration. Together, the Germans and Soviets quickly conquered and divided central and eastern Europe -- Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia -- and the human cost was staggering: during the two years of the pact hundreds of thousands of people in central and eastern Europe caught between Hitler and Stalin were expropriated, deported, or killed. Fortunately for the Allies, the partnership ultimately soured, resulting in the surprise June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, the powers' exchange of materiel, blueprints, and technological expertise during the period of the Pact made possible a far more bloody and protracted war than would have otherwise been conceivable. Combining comprehensive research with a gripping narrative, The Devils' Alliance is the authoritative history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact -- and a portrait of the people whose lives were irrevocably altered by Hitler and Stalin's nefarious collaboration.
Download or read book Barbarossa written by David M. Glantz and published by Tempus Publishing, Limited. This book was released on 2001 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 22 June 1941 Hitler unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union. Spearheaded by four powerful Panzer groups and protected by an impenetrable curtain of air support, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht advanced from the Soviet Union's western borders to the immediate outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov in the shockingly brief period of less than six months. The sudden, deep, relentless German advance virtually destroyed the entire peacetime Red Army and captured almost 40 percent of European Russia before expiring inexplicably at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. An invasion designed to achieve victory in three to six weeks failed and, four years later, resulted in unprecedented and total German defeat. David Glantz challenges the time-honoured explanation that poor weather, bad terrain and Hitler's faulty strategic judgement produced German defeat, and reveals how the Red Army thwarted the German Army's dramatic and apparently inexorable invasion before it achieved its ambitious goals.
Download or read book The Berkut written by Joseph Heywood and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lost classic by beloved novelist Joseph Heywood that helped put the writer on the map, THE BERKUT begins at dusk as SS Colonel Gunter Brumm parachutes silently through the sulphuric haze in the smoldering ruins of Berlin, past the Soviet troops that encircle the skeleton that the city has become in April 1945. With the precision and skill that has marked his brilliant military career, Brumm has completed the first stage of a simple yet seemingly impossible mission: to evade the Allied forces swarming over Europe and to smuggle "Herr Wolf," the greatest war criminal of the twentieth century, to safety. Less than twenty-four hours later a special Russian team snakes its way into Berlin's city limits, headed for the Reich Chancellery. It is led by Vasily Petrov, "the Berkut"—named after the Russian eagles trained to hunt wolves, a man handpicked by Stalin himself for his ability to track down his quarry and driven by the knowledge that failure means certain death. THE BERKUT is a classic story of pursuit, of hunters and the hunted, that pits two elite teams against each other—both of them brave, resourceful, of great physical prowess and so fully motivated that only the winners will survive. Scores of other characters populate this engrossing thriller: priests, deserters, partisans, Nazis on the run, Swiss guides, Austrian refugees—as well as a larger-than-life OSS operative who is the only person among the hundreds of thousands of Allied troops in Europe who realizes that Herr Wolf is not only alive but on the verge of escaping justice. Joseph Heywood's novel is a story of enormous conviction and urgency, made even more compelling for being based on facts that have yet to be proven fiction.
Download or read book Faustian Bargain written by Ian Ona Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-publication subtitle: Soviet-German military cooperation in the interwar period.
Download or read book The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War written by Geoffrey C. Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1995-08-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have heatedly debated the Soviet role in the origins of the Second World War for more than 50 years. At the centre of these controversies stands the question of Soviet relations with Nazi Germany and the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. Drawing on a wealth of new material from the Soviet Archives, this detailed and original study analyses Moscow's response to the rise of Hitler, explains the origins of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and charts the road to Operation Barbarossa and the disaster of the surprise German attack on the USSR in June 1941.
Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
Download or read book Hitler s War written by David Irving and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hitler Book written by Henrik Eberle and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin had never been able to shake off the nightmare of Adolf Hitler. Just as in 1941 he refused to understand that Hitler had broken their non-aggression pact, he was in 1945 unwilling to believe that the dictator had committed suicide in the debris of the Berlin bunker. In his paranoia, Stalin ordered his secret police, the NKVD, precursor to the KGB, to explore in detail every last vestige of the private life of the only man he considered a worthy opponent, and to clarify beyond doubt the circumstances of his death. For months two captives of the Soviet Army -- Otto Guensche, Hitler's adjutant, and Heinz Linge, his personal valet--were interrogated daily, their stories crosschecked, until the NKVD were convinced that they had the fullest possible account of the life of the Fü In 1949 they presented their work, in a single copy, to Stalin. It is as remarkable for the depth of its insight into Adolf Hitler -- from his specific directions to Linge as to how his body was to be burned, to his sense of humor -- as for what it does not say, reflecting the prejudices of the intended reader: Joseph Stalin. Nowhere, for instance, does the dossier criticize Hitler's treatment of the Jews. Today, the 413-page original of Stalin's personal biography of Hitler is a Kremlin treasure and it is said to be held in President Putin's safe. The only other copy, made by order of Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959, was deposited in Moscow Party archives under the code number 462A. It was there that Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, two German historians, found it. Available to the public in full for the first time, The Hitler Book presents a captivating, astonishing, and deeply revealing portrait of Hitler, Stalin, and the mutual antagonism of these two dictators, who between them wrought devastation on the European continent.
Download or read book When Titans Clashed written by David M. Glantz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On first publication, this uncommonly concise and readable account of Soviet Russia's clash with Nazi Germany utterly changed our understanding of World War II on Germany’s Eastern Front, immediately earning its place among top-shelf histories of the world war. Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, much of it the authors' own work, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time. In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the Germany Army and put an end to Hitler's imperial designs. In swift and stirring prose, When Titans Clash provides the clearest, most complete account of this epic struggle, especially from the Soviet perspective. Drawing on the massive and unprecedented release of Soviet archival documents in recent decades, David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and noted military historian Jonathan House expand and elaborate our picture of the Soviet war effort—a picture sharply different from accounts that emphasize Hitler's failed leadership over Soviet strategy and might. Rafts of newly available official directives, orders, and reports reveal the true nature and extraordinary scale of Soviet military operations as they swept across the one thousand miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring stubborn defenses and monumental offensives and counteroffensives and ultimately costing the two sides combined a staggering twenty million casualties. Placing the war within its wider context, the authors also make use of recent revelations to clarify further the political, economic, and social issues that influenced and reflected what happened on the battlefield. Their work gives us new insight into Stalin's political motivation and Adolf Hitler’s role as warlord, as well as a better understanding of the human and economic costs of the war—for both the Soviet Union and Germany. While incorporating a wealth of new information, When Titans Clashed remains remarkably compact, a tribute to the authors' determination to make this critical chapter in world history as accessible as it is essential.
Download or read book Hitler s Death written by V. K. Vinogradov and published by Chaucer Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique insight into the death throes of the Third Reich and guaranteed to cause controversy! At last one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War has been solved.
Download or read book Grand Delusion written by Gabriel Gorodetsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, in the light of archival material. It challenges the view that Stalin was about to invade Germany when Hitler made a pre-emptive strike, arguing that Stalin was actually negotiating for peace in order to redress the European balance of power.
Download or read book The Speeches of Adolf Hitler April 1922 August 1939 written by Adolf Hitler and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Russian Roots of Nazism written by Michael Kellogg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White émigrés contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: it arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. From 1920–1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White émigré organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military-paramilitary schemes. This organization's warnings of the monstrous 'Jewish Bolshevik' peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.
Download or read book Becoming Hitler written by Thomas Weber and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into thecharismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of afully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923.
