Download or read book Moscow 1956 written by Kathleen E. Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1956 Khrushchev stunned Communists by reciting a litany of Stalin’s abuses. His bid to rejuvenate the Party opened the door to upheaval, as Soviet citizens asked where the system had gone astray. Kathleen Smith contends that the year’s brief thaw set in motion a cycle of reform and retrenchment that would recur until the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Download or read book Failed Illusions written by Charles Gati and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting new look at a key event of the Cold War, Failed Illusions fundamentally modifies our picture of what happened during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Now, fifty years later, Charles Gati challenges the simplicity of this David and Goliath story in his new history of the revolt.
Download or read book The Year I Was Peter the Great written by Marvin Kalb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia—and molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called “the year of the thaw”—a time when Stalin’s dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a “genius,” a wizard of communism—Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a “madman” whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year’s end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship. "
Download or read book 1956 written by Simon Hall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vibrantly and perceptively told, this is the story of one remarkable year—a vivid history of exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats around the world. 1956 was one of the most remarkable years of the twentieth century. All across the globe, ordinary people spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, and took up arms in an attempt to win their freedom. In this dramatic, page-turning history, Simon Hall takes the long view of the year's events—putting them in their post-war context and looking toward their influence on the counterculture movements of the 1960s—to tell the story of the year's epic, global struggles from the point of view of the freedom fighters, dissidents, and countless ordinary people who worked to overturn oppressive and authoritarian systems in order to build a brave new world. It was an epic contest. 1956 is the first narrative history of the year as a whole—and the first to frame its tumultuous events as part of an interconnected, global story of revolution.
Download or read book Eisenhower 1956 written by David A. Nichols and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on hundreds of newly declassified documents to present an account of the Suez crisis that reveals the considerable danger it posed as well as the influence of Eisenhower's health problems and the 1956 election campaign.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Download or read book The 1956 Hungarian Revolution written by Csaba B‚k‚s and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the minutes of Khrushchev's first meeting with Hungarian leaders after Stalin's death in 1953, to Yeltsin's declaration on Hungary in 1992. The great majority of the material comes from archives that were inaccessible until the 1990s, and appears here in English for the first time. Book jacket.
Download or read book Moscow 1956 written by Kathleen E. Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: January: after the ice -- February: a sudden thaw -- March: a flood of questions -- April: early spring -- May: fresh air -- June: first flush of youth -- July: intellectual heat -- August: by the sweat of their brows -- September: ocean breezes -- October: storm clouds -- November: winds from the east -- December: the big chill
Download or read book Communist Parties Revisited written by Rüdiger Bergien and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.
Download or read book Under Stalin s Shadow written by Nikos Marantzidis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Stalin's Shadow examines the history of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1918 to 1956, showing how closely national Communism was related to international developments. The history of the KKE reveals the role of Moscow in the various Communist parties of Southeastern Europe, as Nikos Marantzidis shows that Communism's international institutions (Moscow Center, Comintern, Balkan Communist Federation, Cominform, and sister parties in the Balkans) were not merely external factors influencing orientation and policy choices. Based on research from published and unpublished archival documents located in Greece, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Balkan countries, Under Stalin's Shadow traces the KKE movement's interactions with fraternal parties in neighboring states and with their acknowledged supreme mentors in Stalin's Soviet Russia. Marantzidis reveals how, because the boundaries between the national and international in the Communist world were not clearly drawn, international institutions, geopolitical soviet interests, and sister parties' strategies shaped in fundamental ways the KKE's leadership, its character and decision making as a party, and the way of life of its followers over the years.
Download or read book Twelve Days written by Victor Sebestyen and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The defining moment of the Cold War: 'The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.' (Richard Nixon) The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 is a story of extraordinary bravery in a fight for freedom, and of ruthless cruelty in suppressing a popular dream. A small nation, its people armed with a few rifles and petrol bombs, had the will and courage to rise up against one of the world's superpowers. The determination of the Hungarians to resist the Russians astonished the West. People of all kinds, throughout the free world, became involved in the cause. For 12 days it looked, miraculously, as though the Soviets might be humbled. Then reality hit back. The Hungarians were brutally crushed. Their capital was devastated, thousands of people were killed and their country was occupied for a further three decades. The uprising was the defining moment of the Cold War: the USSR showed that it was determined to hold on to its European empire, but it would never do so without resistance. From the Prague Spring to Lech Walesa's Solidarity and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tighter the grip of the communist bloc, the more irresistible the popular demand for freedom.
Download or read book War in the Woods written by M. Laar and published by Howells House. This book was released on 1992 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Soviet reoccupation after World War II, Estonians faced a choice of submitting to Communist puppets or trying to survive in the traditional refuge of their forests while waiting for help from the West which never came. Those who chose the second course, Estonia's "Forest Brothers", mounted an armed resistance which, for more than a decade, seriously challenged Soviet rule. This is their story, told for the first time by sources within Estonia. This account is drawn from interviews with Forest Brothers who survived and relatives of those who died, and from documents and photographs from Soviet KGB files. It reflects Estonian courage and humor, the faith and sacrifice of a people suppressed, and the indomitable determination of a free nation to regain independence.
Download or read book Sino Soviet Conflict 1956 1961 written by Donald S. Zagoria and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if the two most powerful partners in the Communist world cannot agree on basic issues of principle and policy? Donald S. Zagoria, who was from 1951 to 1961 an analyst of Communist Bloc politics for the U.S. Government, traces the development of serious conflict between the U.S.S.R. and China from the 20th Party Congress in 1956 to the 22nd Party Congress in late 1961. This conflict has enveloped three major areas-global strategy, domestic policy, and intra-Bloc relations-and has plagued the relations between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung and affected their differing attitudes toward de-Stalinization, the communes, Yugoslavia, Taiwan, and the developing African and Asian nations. In studying these differing policies, Mr. Zagoria makes extensive use of the published statements of the Chinese and Russian Communists; his analysis of this literature is in itself an important contribution to all future evaluations of Communist intentions. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Petrified Utopia written by Marina Balina and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken together, these essays redefine the preconceived notion of Soviet happiness as the product of official ideology imposed from above and expressed predominantly through collective experience, and provide evidence that the formation of the concept of individual happiness was not contained by the limitations of important state projects, controlled by state policies and aimed toward the creation of a new society.
Download or read book The Soviet Bloc Unity and Conflict written by Zbigniew Brzezinski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of relations among the communist states. The study explores the implications of the status of Yugoslavia and China, the significance of the Hungarian revolution and the position of Poland in the Soviet bloc, and clarifies the Khrushchev-Gomulka clash of 1956 and the complex role of Tito. Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasizes the role of ideology and power in the relations among the communist states, contrasting bloc relations and the unifying role of Soviet power under Stalin with the present situation. He suggests that conflicts of interest among the ruling elites will result either in ideological disputes or in weakening the central core of the ideology, leading to a gradual decline of unity among the Communist states. The author, while on leave from his post as Professor and Director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University, and serving on the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Council, has revised and updated his important study and added three new chapters on more recent developments. He gives particular attention to the Sino-Soviet dispute.
Download or read book 1956 written by Francis Beckett and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1956: a defining year that heralded the modern era.Britain and France occupied Suez, and the Soviet Union tanks rolled into Hungary. Nikita Khrushchev's 'secret speech' exposed the crimes of Stalin, and the Royal Court Theatre unveiled John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Rock 'n' roll music was replacing the gentle pop songs of Mum and Dad's generation, and it was the first full year of independent television.As post-war assumptions were shattered, the upper middle class was shaken and the communist left was shocked, radical new ideas about sex, skiffle and socialism emerged, and attitudes shifted on an unprecedented scale - precipitated by the decline of Attlee's Britain and the first intimations of Thatcher's.From politics and conflict to sport and entertainment, this extraordinary book transports us back in time on a whirlwind journey through the history, headlines and happenings of this most momentous of years, vividly capturing the revolutionary spirit of 1956 - the year that changed Britain.
Download or read book Hungary in the Cold War 1945 1956 written by L szl¢ Borhi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Based on new archival evidence, this book examines Soviet empire building in Hungary and the American response to it." "The book analyzes why, given all its idealism and power, the U.S. failed even in its minimal aims concerning the states of Eastern Europe. Eventually both the United States and the Soviet Union pursued power politics: the Soviets in a naked form, the U.S. subtly, but both with little regard for the fate of Hungarians."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
