Download or read book Molotov Remembers written by V. M. Molotov and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 2007-09-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In conversations with the poet-biographer Felix Chuev, Molotov offers an incomparable view of the politics of Soviet society and the nature of Kremlin leadership under communism. Filled with startling insights and indelible portraits, the book is an historical source of the first order. A mesmerizing and chilling chronicle. —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book Molotov written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a top Soviet bureaucrat

Download or read book Molotov s Magic Lantern written by Rachel Polonsky and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the British journalist Rachel Polonsky moves to Moscow, she discovers an apartment on Romanov Street that was once home to the Soviet elite. One of the most infamous neighbors was the ruthless apparatchik Vyacheslav Molotov, a henchman for Stalin who was a participant in the collectivizations and the Great Purge—and also an ardent bibliophile. In what was formerly Molotov's apartment, Polonsky uncovers an extensive library and an old magic lantern—two things that lead her on an extraordinary journey throughout Russia and ultimately renew her vision of the country and its people. In Molotov's Magic Lantern, Polonsky visits the haunted cities and vivid landscapes of the books from Molotov's library: works by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova, and others, some of whom were sent to the Gulag by the very man who collected their books. With exceptional insight and beautiful prose, Polonsky writes about the longings and aspirations of these Russian writers and others in the course of her travels from the Arctic to Siberia and from the forests around Moscow to the vast steppes. A singular homage to Russian history and culture, Molotov's Magic Lantern evokes the spirit of the great artists and the haunted past of a country ravaged by war, famine, and totalitarianism.

Download or read book Molotov A Biography written by D. Watson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive biography of Molotov and reflects the range of sources that have become available to historians since the fall of the USSR. It is a commentary on Soviet history. Molotov played his part in revolution, Civil War, Lenin's Russia, Stalin's struggle with the oppositions, collectivization, industrialization, the Terror, the Great Patriotic War, the beginnings of the Cold War, and in the Khrushchev era.

Download or read book Cocktails with Molotov written by Barry Farber and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After reading Cocktails with Molotov you'll wonder if there's anything Barry Farber hasn't done, if there's anywhere he hasn't been. From a young age, Farber had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. In Cocktails with Molotov, Barry Farber's collection of real life short stories, you'll read of his encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, the King of Albania, and Buzz Aldrin; of his knowledge of 26 foreign languages and how foreign language came through for him in the knick of time. He shares tales from his childhood in North Carolina and his time spent venturing abroad, from his life as a young reporter and as a seasoned journalist, along with astounding narratives of everything in between. A lifelong seeker of adventures and excitement, Barry Farber's lighthearted and humorous storytelling will keep you occupied for hours; you won't be able to put down the book until you're finished - each story is as compelling and informative as the one before it. Get prepared to meet a man who has lived a full life.

Download or read book Stalin s Letters to Molotov written by Josef Stalin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1925 and 1936, Josef Stalin wrote frequently to his trusted friend and political colleague Viacheslav Molotov. The more than 85 letters collected in this volume constitute a unique historical record of Stalin's thinking--both personal and political--and throw valuable light on the way he controlled the government, plotted the overthrow of his enemies, and imagined the future. Illustrations.

Download or read book Khrushchev The Man and His Era written by William Taubman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the life story of twentieth-century Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, featuring information from previously inaccessible Russian and Ukrainian archives.

Download or read book Stalin written by Oleg V. Khlevniuk and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others. Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin’s policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin’s favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin’s childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book’s conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era. “This brilliant, authoritative, opinionated biography ranks as the best on Stalin in any language.”—Martin McCauley East-West Review “A historiographical and literary masterpiece.”—Mark Edele, Australian Book Review “A very digestible biography, yet one packed with revelations.”—Paul E. Richardson, Russian Life Magazine

Download or read book The Maisky Diaries written by Gabriel Gorodetsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The terror and purges of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain’s drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, Churchill’s rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.

Download or read book Rethinking the Soviet Experience written by Stephen F. Cohen and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.

Download or read book Stalin s General written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major profile of the Soviet general credited with a decisive role in key World War II victories compares his legend with his achievements while surveying his eventful post-war experiences as Krushchev's disgraced defense minister. 15,000 first printing.

Download or read book On Stalin s Team written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chronicle of Stalin's inner political and social circle—from a leading Soviet historian Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu—one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

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 Master of the House written by Oleg V. Khlevniuk and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on meticulous research in previously unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his notorious dictatorship. Oleg V. Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia's political hierarchy of the 1930s--the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party--and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin's rise. Khlevniuk's unparalleled research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov's murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin's mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding, unmatched in texture and depth, of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.

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 Stalin s Library written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library 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 Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg written by Francine Hirsch and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s had both provided a model for Nuremberg and made a mockery of it, undermining any pretense of fairness and justice. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis before being invaded by them. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung over the courtroom, as did the fact that the everyone knew that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, attempting to pin one of their own major war crimes on the Nazis. For lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues, focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. Soviet Justice at Nuremberg illuminates the ironies of Stalin's henchmen presiding in moral judgment over the Nazis. In effect, the Nazis had learned mass-suppression and mass-murder techniques from the Soviets, their former allies, and now the latter were judging them for crimes they had themselves committed. Yet the Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting--and the losses--in World War II, and this gave them undeniable authority. Moreover, Soviet jurists were the first to conceive of a legal framework for viewing war as a crime, and without that framework the IMT would have had no basis. In short, there would be no denying their place at the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Illuminating the shifting relationships between the four countries involved (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.) Hirsch's book shows how each was not just facing off against the Nazi defendants, but against each other and offers a new history of Nuremberg.