Download or read book Stalin s Citizens written by Serhy Yekelchyk and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of the everydayness of political life under Stalin, this book examines Soviet citizenship through common practices of expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The book is set in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during the last one and a half years of World War II and immediate postwar years, the period best demonstrating how formulaic rituals could create space for the people to express their concerns, fears, and prejudices, as well as their eagerness to be viewed as citizens in good standing.
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 Stalin s Outcasts written by Golfo Alexopoulos and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children.""From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live on, I was drawn to the nonlaboring path.""As a man almost completely illiterate and therefore not prepared for any kind of work, I was forced to return to my craft as a barber.""I am as ignorant as a pipe."Golfo Alexopoulos focuses on the lishentsy ("outcasts") of the interwar USSR to reveal the defining features of alien and citizen identities under Stalin's rule. Although portrayed as "bourgeois elements," lishentsy actually included a wide variety of people, including prostitutes, gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities, in particular, Jews. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were frequent targets of disenfranchisement, singled out by officials looking to conserve scarce resources or satisfy their superiors with long lists of discovered enemies.Alexopoulos draws heavily on an untapped resource: an archive in western Siberia that contains over 100,000 individual petitions for reinstatement. Her analysis of these and many other documents concerning "class aliens" shows how Bolshevik leaders defined the body politic and how individuals experienced the Soviet state. Personal narratives with which individuals successfully appealed to officials for reinstatement allow an unusual view into the lives of "outcasts." From Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many participated in identifying insiders and outsiders and challenging the terms of membership in Stalin's new society.
Download or read book Thank You Comrade Stalin written by Jeffrey Brooks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.
Download or read book Stalin s Constitution written by Samantha Lomb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upon its adoption in December 1936, Soviet leaders hailed the new so-called Stalin Constitution as the most democratic in the world. Scholars have long scoffed at this claim, noting that the mass repression of 1937–1938 that followed rendered it a hollow document. This study does not address these competing claims, but rather focuses on the six-month long popular discussion of the draft Constitution, which preceded its formal adoption in December 1936. Drawing on rich archival sources, this book uses the discussion of the draft 1936 Constitution to examine discourse between the central state leadership and citizens about the new Soviet social contract, which delineated the roles the state and citizens should play in developing socialism. For the central leadership, mobilizing its citizenry in a variety of state building campaigns was the main goal of the discussion of the draft Constitution. However, the goals of the central leadership at times stood in stark contrast with the people’s expressed interpretation of that social contract. Citizens of the USSR focused on securing rights and privileges, often related to improving their daily lives, from the central government. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315194004, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters 1929 1953 written by Anita Pisch and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the Soviet regime, posters were seen as a vitally important medium for communicating with the population of the vast territories of the USSR. Stalin’s image became a symbol of Bolshevik values and the personification of a revolutionary new type of society. The persona created for Stalin in propaganda posters reflects how the state saw itself or, at the very least, how it wished to appear in the eyes of the people. The ‘Stalin’ who was celebrated in posters bore but scant resemblance to the man Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose humble origins, criminal past, penchant for violent solutions and unprepossessing appearance made him an unlikely recipient of uncritical charismatic adulation. The Bolsheviks needed a wise, nurturing and authoritative figure to embody their revolutionary vision and to legitimate their hold on power. This leader would come to embody the sacred and archetypal qualities of the wise Teacher, the Father of the nation, the great Warrior and military strategist, and the Saviour of first the Russian land, and then the whole world. This book is the first dedicated study on the marketing of Stalin in Soviet propaganda posters. Drawing on the archives of libraries and museums throughout Russia, hundreds of previously unpublished posters are examined, with more than 130 reproduced in full colour. The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 is a unique and valuable contribution to the discourse in Stalinist studies across a number of disciplines.
Download or read book Remembering Stalin s Victims written by Kathleen E. Smith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet leaders twice attempted to liberalize Communist rule and both times their initiatives hinged on criticism of Stalin. During the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" and again during Gorbachev's glasnost, antistalinism proved a unique catalyst for democratic mobilization.
Download or read book The Forsaken written by Tim Tzouliadis and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.
Download or read book The Secret Betrayal written by Nikolai Tolstoy and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin and the Fate of Europe written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.
Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Download or read book Revelations from the Russian Archives written by Diane P. Koenker and published by . This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Stalinist Era written by David L. Hoffmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing Stalinism in its international context, The Stalinist Era explains the origins and consequences of Soviet state intervention and violence.
Download or read book Stalin s Citizens written by Serhy Yekelchyk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being a good citizen under Stalin meant taking an active part in political rituals, such as elections, parades, festive meetings, political information sessions, and subscriptions to state bonds. In Stalin's Citizens, Serhy Yekelchyk examines how ordinary citizens came to embrace some parts of this everyday Stalinist politics and resist others. The first study of the everyday political life under Stalin, this book examines citizenship through common practices of expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The Stalinist state understood citizenship as practice, with participation in a set of political rituals and public display of certain "civic emotions" serving as the marker of a person's inclusion in the political world. The state's relations with its citizens were structured by rituals of celebration, thanking, and hatred-rites that required both political awareness and a demonstrable emotional response. Soviet functionaries transmitted this obligation to ordinary citizens through the mechanisms of communal authority, including workplace committees, volunteer agitators, and other forms of peer pressure, as much as through brutal state coercion. Yet, the populace also often imbued these ceremonies with different meanings: as a popular fête, an occasion to get together after work, a chance to purchase goods not available on other days, and an opportunity to indulge in some drinking. The people also understood these political rituals as moments of negotiation whereby they would fulfill their "patriotic duty" but expected the state to reciprocate by providing essential services and basic social welfare. Nearly-universal passive resistance to required attendance challenges theories about the mass internalization of communist ideology. Focusing on the last years of World War II and immediate postwar years, Yekelchyk shows how formulaic rituals under Stalin could create space for the people to express their concerns, fears, and prejudices, as well as their eagerness to be viewed as citizens in good standing.
Download or read book Stalin s Defectors written by Mark Edele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Defectors is the first systematic study of the phenomenon of frontline surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union's 'Great Patriotic War' against the Nazis in 1941-1945. No other Allied army in the Second World War had such a large share of defectors among its prisoners of war. Based on a broad range of sources, this volume investigates the extent, the context, the scenarios, the reasons, the aftermath, and the historiography of frontline defection. It shows that the most widespread sentiments animating attempts to cross the frontline was a wish to survive this war. Disgruntlement with Stalin's 'socialism' was also prevalent among those who chose to give up and hand themselves over to the enemy. While politics thus played a prominent role in pushing people to commit treason, few desired to fight on the side of the enemy. Hence, while the phenomenon of frontline defection tells us much about the lack of popularity of Stalin's regime, it does not prove that the majority of the population was ready for resistance, let alone collaboration. Both sides of a long-standing debate between those who equate all Soviet captives with defectors, and those who attempt to downplay the phenomenon, then, over-stress their argument. Instead, more recent research on the moods of both the occupied and the unoccupied Soviet population shows that the majority understood its own interest in opposition to both Hitler's and Stalin's regime. The findings of Mark Edele in this study support such an interpretation.
Download or read book State of Madness written by Rebecca Reich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.
