Download or read book Saving Stalin s Imperial City written by Steven Maddox and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Succeeds in explaining how and why a war-ravaged city suffering acute shortages invested its scant resources in protecting and reconstructing monuments.” —Slavonic and East European Review Saving Stalin’s Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders’ determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city’s wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing. “A most welcome addition to the historiography of Europe’s bombed cities and their reconstruction after World War II.” —Journal of Modern History

Download or read book Imperial Cities in the Tsarist the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires written by Ulrich Hofmeister and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until the First World War in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of a dozen cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. They analyze the imperial capitals as well as smaller cities in the periphery. All of them are "imperial cities" in the sense that they possess traces of imperial rule. By comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight trans-imperial exchanges and entanglements. This volume is essential reading to students and scholars alike interested in imperial and colonial history, urban history and European history.

Download or read book The War Within written by Alexis Peri and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize “Fascinating and perceptive.” —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books “Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured.” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Powerful and illuminating...A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work.” —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement “Much has been written about Leningrad’s heroic resistance. But the remarkable aspect of [Peri’s] book is that she tells a very different story: recounting the internal struggles of ordinary people desperately trying to survive and make sense of their fate.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times “A sensitive, at times almost poetic examination of their emotions and disordered mental states. It both contrasts with and complements the equally accurate official Soviet portrait of a stalwart population standing firm in the face of evil and in defense of Soviet ideals.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad’s wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries—now dangerous to their authors—were concealed, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II’s darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the human spirit.

Download or read book Stalin s Gulag at War written by Wilson T. Bell and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. Far from Moscow, Western Siberia was a key area for evacuated factories and for production in support of the war effort. Wilson T. Bell explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices such as black markets, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war. The region's camps were never prioritized, and faced a constant struggle to mobilize for the war. Prisoners in these camps, however, engaged in such activities as sewing Red Army uniforms, manufacturing artillery shells, and constructing and working in major defense factories. The myriad responses of prisoners and personnel to the war reveal the Gulag as a complex system, but one that was closely tied to the local, regional, and national war effort, to the point where prisoners and non-prisoners frequently interacted. At non-priority camps, moreover, the area's many forced labour camps and colonies saw catastrophic death rates, often far exceeding official Gulag averages. Ultimately, prisoners played a tangible role in Soviet victory, but the cost was incredibly high, both in terms of the health and lives of the prisoners themselves, and in terms of Stalin's commitment to total, often violent, mobilization to achieve the goals of the Soviet state.

Download or read book Moscow Monumental written by Katherine Zubovich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper"--

Download or read book Transforming Author Museums written by Ulrike Spring and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies centered not only on biography, but also literary texts, imagined spaces, different readers, historical contexts, architectural concepts, and artistic interventions. As this volume shows, the changing of spaces asks how literary museums create new ways of interlinking real and literary spaces, texts, objects, readers, and tourists.

Download or read book Russia s Hero Cities written by Ivo Mijnssen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War to Russians, ravaged the Soviet Union and traumatized those who survived. After the war, memory of this anguish was often publicly repressed under Stalin. But that all changed by the 1960s. Under Brezhnev, the idea of the Great Patriotic War was transformed into one of victory and celebration. In Russia's Hero Cities, Ivo Mijnssen reveals how contradictory national recollections were revised into an idealized past that both served official needs and offered a narrative of heroism. This triumphant narrative was most evident in the creation of 13 Hero Cities, now located across Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. These cities, which were host to some of the fiercest and most famous battles, were named champions. Brezhnev's government officially recognized these cities with awards, financial contributions, and ritualized festivities. Their citizens also encountered the altered history at every corner—on manicured battlefields, in war memorials, and through stories at the kitchen table. Using a rich tapestry of archival material, oral history interviews, and newspaper articles, Mijnssen provides a thorough exploration of two cities in particular, Tula and Novorossiysk. By exploring the significance of Hero Cities in Soviet identity and the enduring but conflicted importance they hold for Russians today, Russia's Hero Cities exposes how the Great Patriotic War no longer has the power to mask the deep rifts still present in Russian society.

Download or read book Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity written by Veronica E. Aplenc and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Second World War, Yugoslavia’s small regional cities represented a challenge for the new socialist state. These cities’ older buildings, local historic sites, and low-quality housing clashed with socialism’s promises and ideals. How would the state transform these cities’ everyday neighborhoods? In the Slovene republic’s capital city of Ljubljana, the Trnovo neighborhood embodied this challenge through its modest housing, small medieval section, vast gardens, acclaimed interwar architecture, and iconic local reputation. Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity explores how urban planners, architects, historic preservationists, neighborhood residents, and even folklorists transformed this beloved neighborhood into a Slovene socialist city district. Aplenc demonstrates that this urban redesign centered on republic-level interpretations of a Yugoslav socialist built environment, versus a re-envisioned Slovene national past or design style. This interdisciplinary study sheds light on how Yugoslav state socialism operated at the republic level, within a decentralized system, and on the diverse forces behind success or failure. With its focus on vernacular architecture, small-scale historic sites, single-family homes, and illegal housing, this book expands our understanding of the everyday built environment in socialist cities.

Download or read book Lviv Wroc aw Cities in Parallel written by Jan Fellerer and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn "recovered" by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów's demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects. The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and "bottom-up" historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political reality of the time, are complementary.

Download or read book The Winter Palace and the People written by Susan McCaffray and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was once the supreme architectural symbol of Russia's autocratic government. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the architectural symbol of St. Petersburg itself. The story of the palace illuminates the changing relationship between monarchs and their capital city during the last century and a half of Russian monarchy. In The Winter Palace and the People, Susan McCaffray examines interactions among those who helped to stage the ceremonial drama of monarchy, those who consumed the spectacle, and the monarchs themselves. In the face of a changing social landscape in their rapidly growing nineteenth-century capital, Russian monarchs reoriented their display of imperial and national representation away from courtiers and toward the urban public. When attacked at mid-century, monarchs retreated from the palace. As they receded, the public claimed the square and the artistic treasures in the Imperial Hermitage before claiming the palace itself. By 1917, the Winter Palace had come to be the essential stage for representing not just monarchy, but the civic life of the empire-nation. What was cataclysmic for the monarchy presented to those who staffed the palace and Hermitage not a disaster, but a new mission, as a public space created jointly by monarch and city passed from the one to the other. This insightful study will appeal to scholars of Russia and general readers interested in Russian history.

Download or read book Between God and Hitler written by Doris L. Bergen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, approximately 1000 Christian chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht forces wherever they went, from Poland to France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. Chaplains were witnesses to atrocity and by their presence helped normalize extreme violence and legitimate its perpetrators. Military chaplains played a key role in propagating a narrative of righteousness that erased Germany's victims and transformed the aggressors into noble figures who suffered but triumphed over their foes. Between God and Hitler is the first book to examine Protestant and Catholic military chaplains in Germany from Hitler's rise to power, to defeat, collapse, and Allied occupation. Drawing on a wide array of sources – chaplains' letters and memoirs, military reports, Jewish testimonies, photographs, and popular culture – this book offers insight into how Christian clergy served the cause of genocide, sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, even unknowingly, but always loyally.

Download or read book Empire of Friends written by Rachel Applebaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

Download or read book The Eastern Front written by Yan Mann and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War in Eastern Europe is far from a neglected topic, especially since social, cultural, and diplomatic historians have entered a field previously dominated by operational histories, and produced a cornucopia of new scholarship offering a more nuanced picture from both sides of the front. However, until now, the story has still been disjointed and specialized, whereby military, social, economic, and diplomatic histories continue to give their own separate accounts. This collection of essays attempts to bring these themes into a more cohesive whole that tells a complex, multifaceted story of war on the Eastern Front as it truly was. This is one of the few critical examinations that includes both perspectives and looks at the war as a multi‐front effort. It also reveals how myths are created around military conflicts and have direct relevance to current developments in Europe, linking them to a broader discussion of the Second World War, its impact and utility today. It gives a historical dimension to pressing issues and will be of interest and relevance to history students, policymakers, political scientists, diplomats, and foreign policy experts. The Eastern Front will be a useful reference source, since some chapters rely on extensive new archival research and materials, ego sources, as well as extensive findings of non‐Western scholars, thereby bringing their work to the attention of a broader audience.

Download or read book Socialist Churches written by Catriona Kelly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Russia, legislation on the separation of church and state in early 1918 marginalized religious faith and raised pressing questions about what was to be done with church buildings. While associated with suspect beliefs, they were also regarded as structures with potential practical uses, and some were considered works of art. This engaging study draws on religious anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and history to explore the fate of these "socialist churches," showing how attitudes and practices related to them were shaped both by laws on the preservation of monuments and anti-religious measures. Advocates of preservation, while sincere in their desire to save the buildings, were indifferent, if not hostile, to their religious purpose. Believers, on the other hand, regarded preservation laws as irritants, except when they provided leverage for use of the buildings by church communities. The situation was eased by the growing rapprochement of the Orthodox Church and Soviet state organizations after 1943, but not fully resolved until the Soviet Union fell apart. Based on abundant archival documentation, Catriona Kelly's powerful narrative portrays the human tragedies and compromises, but also the remarkable achievements, of those who fought to preserve these important buildings over the course of seven decades of state atheism. Socialist Churches will appeal to specialists, students, and general readers interested in church history, the history of architecture, and Russian art, history, and cultural studies.

Download or read book From Incarceration to Repatriation written by Susan C. I. Grunewald and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Incarceration to Repatriation explores the lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German POWs who were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than the prisoners of any other Allied nation. Susan C. I. Grunewald argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible. Engaging with recently declassified documents in former Soviet archives, archival material from multiple German governments, as well as innovative use of digital humanities methods and geographic information system (GIS) mapping, Grunewald demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the four thousand POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction. From Incarceration to Repatriation is the first book to draw together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after World War II. Attending to the ways that the memory of German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, Grunewald tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.

Download or read book Wartime Suffering and Survival written by Jeffrey K. Hass and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 872-day siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, civilians endured air raids, bread rations as low as 125 grams, food theft and speculation by opportunistic officials and shadow market traders, and death by starvation. As shocks of total war weaken institutions, desperate survival can compel violation of norms, and personal suffering can shatter long-held beliefs and practices. In Wartime Suffering and Survival, Jeffrey K. Hass uses the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II to explore the social practices and dynamics by which we cope or collapse. Using hundreds of personal accounts from diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents, Hass tells the story of how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, he describes the routines of daily life, the functioning of official institutions, and the development of illegal practices that were made and remade in the interactions of citizens and state agencies coping with new and extreme situations. The key to what Leningraders did and how they survived, Hass argues, is relations to anchors--entities of symbolic and personal significance that tethered Leningraders to each other and shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. Moving and powerful, Wartime Suffering and Survival goes to the heart of human resilience and fragility and to the core of the human condition--both individual and social.

Download or read book Time and Material Culture written by Julie Deschepper and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture. Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things—and their planning, design, manufacture, and consumption—mediated and produced particular ways of experiencing, perceiving, and representing time. As such, Time and Material Culture turns a new page in the study of the temporal and material culture of Soviet socialism and, in doing so, contributes to broader debates on the changing experiences of time in the global twentieth century. The book integrates interdisciplinary perspectives as well as regional approaches sensitive to the multinational nature of the Soviet project. Time and Material Culture will be useful to academics, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students interested in twentieth-century cultures of time.