Download or read book Good Stalin written by Victor Erofeyev and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Erofeev's autobiographical novel provides both a child's and an adult's perspective on several decades of Soviet history. The book documents not only the emergence of a prominent writer, but also looks at the evolution of the Soviet dissident movement amongst the nomenklatura"--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Art Under Stalin written by Matthew Cullerne Bown and published by Holmes & Meier Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin s Genocides written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.
Download or read book The View from Stalin s Head written by Aaron Hamburger and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004-03-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten stories in The View from Stalin’s Head unfold in the post–Cold War Prague of the 1990s—a magnet not only for artists and writers but also for American tourists and college grad deadbeats, a city with a glorious yet sometimes shameful history, its citizens both resentful of and nostalgic for their Communist past. Against this backdrop, Aaron Hamburger conjures an arresting array of characters: a self-appointed rabbi who runs a synagogue for non-Jews; an artist, once branded as a criminal by the Communist regime, who hires a teenage boy to boss him around; a fiery would-be socialist trying to rouse the oppressed masses while feeling the tug of her comfortable Stateside upbringing. European and American, Jewish and gentile, straight and gay, the people in these stories are forced to confront themselves when the ethnic, religious, political, and sexual labels they used to rely on prove surprisingly less stable than they’d imagined. As Christopher Isherwood did in his Berlin Stories, Aaron Hamburger offers a humane and subtly etched portrait of a time and place, of people wrestling with questions of love, faith, and identity. The View from Stalin’s Head is a remarkable debut, and the beginning of a remarkable career.
Download or read book Stalin s Library written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library "[A] fascinating new study."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies--the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors--but detested their ideas even more.
Download or read book The Stalin Cult written by Jan Plamper and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.
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 The Road to Power written by Joseph Stalin and published by . This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONTENTS:IntroductionThe Political SituationReplies to QuestionsSpeech in Reply to DebateReply to Preobrazhensky on Point 9 of the Resolution "On the Political Situation"Election DayWe Demand!The Second WaveAll Power to the SovietsA Government of the Bourgeois DictatorshipThe Counter-Revolution is Mobilising - Prepare to Resist!Soviet PowerAn Examination in InsolenceSpeech at the Meeting of the Central Committee, October 29, 1917What do we Need?
Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.
Download or read book Engineers of the Soul written by Frank Westerman and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “fascinating” account of how Gorky, Pasternak, and other great writers were coerced to create propaganda for Stalin (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Sunday Times Best Travel Book of the Year In the Soviet Union, writers of renown, described by Stalin as “engineers of the soul,” were encouraged to sing the praises of canal and dam construction under titles such as Energy: The Hydraulic Power Station and Onward, Time! But their enthusiasm—spontaneous and idealistic at first—soon became obligatory, and as these colossal waterworks led to slavery and destruction, Soviet writers such as Maxim Gorky, Isaak Babel, Konstantin Paustovsky, and Boris Pasternak were forced to labor on in the service of a deluded totalitarian society. Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Engineers of the Soul is a journey through contemporary Russia and Soviet-era literature. Frank Westerman, a correspondent living in post-Communist Moscow, examines both the culture landscape under Stalin’s rule and the books—and lives—of writers caught in the wheels of the Soviet system as art and reality were bent to radically new purposes. “Engagingly written and extensively researched, the book covers compelling historical and literary ground.” —Financial Times “A detailed and enthralling account of his journey through Soviet literature including discovering the revolution’s best kept secrets while trying to appreciate the talented writers who created a web of deceit in the name of success.” —Publishers Weekly “A literary travelogue revealing a remarkable geography and a strange, fraught alliance when the pen was not as mighty as the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union . . . insightful.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Conversations with Stalin written by Milovan Djilas and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1962 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Content: Written from his experiences as a vice-president of Yugoslavia and aide to Tito, the author here records face to face meetingwith Stalin from 1944-1953. The author was imprisoned by the Yugoslav government from 1957-1961.
Download or read book Stalin s Wine Cellar written by John Baker and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The adventure of a lifetime to buy Stalin's secret multimillion dollar wine cellar located in Georgia; it is the Raiders of the Lost Ark of wine. In the late 1990s, John Baker was known as a purveyor of quality rare and old wines. He was the perfect person for an occasional business partner to approach with a mysterious wine list that was different to anything John, or his second-in-command, Kevin Hopko, had ever come across. The list was discovered to be a comprehensive catalogue of the wine collection of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. The wine had become the property of the state after the Russian Revolution of 1918, during which Nicholas and his entire family were executed. Now owned by Stalin, the wine was discreetly removed to a remote Georgian winery when Stalin was concerned the advancing Nazi army might overrun Russia. Half a century later, the wine was rumoured to be hidden underground and off any known map. John and Kevin embarked on an audacious, colourful and potentially dangerous journey to Georgia to discover if the wines actually existed; if the bottles were authentic and whether the entire collection could be bought and transported to a major London auction house for sale. Stalin's Wine Cellar is a wild, sometimes rough ride through the glamorous world of high-end wine.
Download or read book Bitter Waters written by Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1998-08-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on life and work after the author's release in 1935 from a Soviet labor camp, his story is told chronologically, and begins with his difficulties finding a job in the Russian provinces. This memoir may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society and economy and the indomitable creativity with which ordinary people sustained both their lives.
Download or read book The Landscape of Stalinism written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet �culture.� In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and �sold� as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls �a cartography of power� -- an organization of the entire country into �a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness,� with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers� magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.
Download or read book The Stalin Revolution written by Robert Vincent Daniels and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scorched Earth written by Jörg Baberowski and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. What Was Stalinism? -- 2. Imperial Spaces of Violence -- 3. Pyrrhic Victories -- 4. Subjugation -- 5. Dictatorship of Dread -- 6. Wars -- 7. Stalin's Heirs -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Download or read book Stalin s War written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.
