Download or read book Stalin s Revenge written by Anthony Tucker-Jones and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2009-07-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1944 the Red Army crushed Army Group Centre in one of the largest offensives in military history. Operation Bagration - launched almost exactly three years after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union - was Stalin's retribution for Hitler's Operation Barbarossa. Earlier battles at Stalingrad and Kursk paved the way for Soviet victory, but as Anthony Tucker-Jones demonstrates in this fascinating study, Bagration ensured that the Germans would never regain the strategic initiative. In one fell swoop the Wehrmacht lost a quarter of its strength on the Eastern Front. And in a series of overwhelming assaults, the Red Army recaptured practically all the territory the Soviet Union had lost in 1941, advanced into East Prussia and reached the outskirts of Warsaw. As he reconstructs this massive and complex battle, Anthony Tucker-Jones assesses the opposing forces and their commanders and gives a vivid insight into the planning and decision-making at the highest level. He recreates the experience of the soldiers on the battlefield by using graphic contemporary accounts, and he sets the Bagration offensive in the wider context of the Soviet war effort. He also asks why Stalin's road to retribution proved to be such a long and bloody one - for the Germans, despite their crippling losses, managed to resist for another ten months.
Download or read book Stalin s Vengeance written by Nikolai Tolstoy and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1945, as World War II drew to a close in Europe, some 30,000 Russian Cossacks surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing they would be spared repatriation to the Soviet Union. The fate of those among them who were Soviet citizens had been sealed by the Yalta Agreement, signed by the Allied leaders a few months earlier. Ever since, mystery has surrounded Britain's decision to include among those returned to Stalin a substantial number of White Russians, who had fled their country after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and found refuge in various European countries. They had never been Soviet citizens, and should not have been handed over. Some were prominent tsarist generals, on whose handover the Soviets were particularly insistent. General Charles Keightley, the responsible British officer, concealed the presence of White Russians from his superiors, who had issued repeated orders stipulating that only Soviet nationals should be handed over, and even then only if they did not resist. Through a succession underhanded moves, Keightley secretly delivered up the leading Cossack commanders to the Soviets, while force of unparalleled brutality was employed to hand over thousands of Cossack men, women, and children to a ghastly fate. Particularly sinister was the role of the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose own machinations are scrutinized here.Following the publication of Count Nikolai Tolstoy's last book on the subject in 1986, the British government closed ranks, and three years later an English court issued a £1,500,000 judgment against him for allegedly libeling the British chief of staff who issued the fatal orders. Since then, however, Count Tolstoy has gradually acquired a devastating body of heretofore unrevealed evidence filling the remaining gaps in this tragic history. Much of this material derives from long-sealed Soviet archives, to which Tolstoy received access by a special decree from the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin. What really happened during these murky events is now revealed for the first time.
Download or read book Breaking Stalin s Nose written by Eugene Yelchin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newbery Honor Book. Sasha Zaichik has known the laws of the Soviet Young Pioneers since the age of six: The Young Pioneer is devoted to Comrade Stalin, the Communist Party, and Communism. A Young Pioneer is a reliable comrade and always acts according to conscience. A Young Pioneer has a right to criticize shortcomings. But now that it is finally time to join the Young Pioneers, the day Sasha has awaited for so long, everything seems to go awry. He breaks a classmate's glasses with a snowball. He accidentally damages a bust of Stalin in the school hallway. And worst of all, his father, the best Communist he knows, was arrested just last night. This moving story of a ten-year-old boy's world shattering is masterful in its simplicity, powerful in its message, and heartbreaking in its plausibility. One of Horn Book's Best Fiction Books of 2011
Download or read book Stalin written by Ronald Grigor Suny and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--
Download or read book The Great Terror written by Robert Conquest and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Provides accounts of on everything form the three great 'Moscow Trials' to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of thew first edition, it is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence." --
Download or read book Stalin s General written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded as the most accomplished general of World War II, the Soviet military legend Marshal Georgy Zhukov at last gets the full-scale biographical treatment he has long deserved. A man of indomitable will and fierce determination, Georgy Zhukov was the Soviet Union’s indispensable commander through every one of the critical turning points of World War II. It was Zhukov who saved Leningrad from capture by the Wehrmacht in September 1941, Zhukov who led the defense of Moscow in October 1941, Zhukov who spearheaded the Red Army’s march on Berlin and formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender in the spring of 1945. Drawing on the latest research from recently opened Soviet archives, including the uncensored versions of Zhukov’s own memoirs, Roberts offers a vivid portrait of a man whose tactical brilliance was matched only by the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which he pursued his battlefield objectives. After the war, Zhukov was a key player on the geopolitical scene. As Khrushchev’s defense minister, he was one of the architects of Soviet military strategy during the Cold War. While lauded in the West as a folk hero—he was the only Soviet general ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine—Zhukov repeatedly ran afoul of the Communist political authorities. Wrongfully accused of disloyalty, he was twice banished and erased from his country’s official history—left out of books and paintings depicting Soviet World War II victories. Piercing the hyperbole of the Zhukov personality cult, Roberts debunks many of the myths that have sprung up around Zhukov’s life and career to deliver fresh insights into the marshal’s relationships with Stalin, Khrushchev, and Eisenhower. A remarkably intimate portrait of a man whose life was lived behind an Iron Curtain of official secrecy, Stalin’s General is an authoritative biography that restores Zhukov to his rightful place in the twentieth-century military pantheon.
Download or read book Destroy Warsaw written by Andrew Borowiec and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-09-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, this book examines the background of the ill-fated 63-day uprising that pitted poorly armed Polish civilians and volunteers against Hitler's well-armed and veteran forces. Borowiec also examines Stalin's decision to stand by while Warsaw and its defenders were destroyed. Borowiec provides a day-by-day account of the combat and the efforts to resupply the partisans by Allied aircraft. In this, the first English-language history of the Uprising, Borowiec relies on his own experiences, those of other participants, and other materials not usually available to Western scholars and researchers interested in World War II. His firsthand account brings those 63 days to life.
Download or read book Stalin s Secret Pogrom written by Joshua Rubenstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952 15 Soviet Jews were secretly tried and convicted; many executions followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. This book presents an abridged version of the transcript of the trial revealing the Kremlin's machinery of destruction.
Download or read book The Revenge of the Past written by Ronald Suny and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993-12-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely work shows how and why the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large part by nationalism. Unified in their hostility to the Kremlin's authority, the fifteen constituent Union Republics, including the Russian Republic, declared their sovereignty and began to build state institutions of their own. The book has a dual purpose. The first is to explore the formation of nations within the Soviet Union, the policies of the Soviet Union toward non-Russian peoples, and the ultimate contradictions between those policies and the development of nations. The second, more general, purpose is to show how nations have grown in the twentieth century. The principle of nationality that buried the Soviet Union and destroyed its empire in Eastern Europe continues to shape and reshape the configuration of states and political movements among the new independent countries of the vast East European-Eurasian region.
Download or read book Stalin and the Scientists written by Simon Ings and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine. But from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine. A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016 A New York Times Book Review “Paperback Row” selection “Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid . . . Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today.” —The New York Times Book Review “A must read for understanding how the ideas of scientific knowledge and technology were distorted and subverted for decades across the Soviet Union.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Stalin s Singing Spy written by Pamela A. Jordan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin’s Singing Spy follows the remarkable life of NadezhdaPlevitskaya, a Russian peasant girl who achieved fame as one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favorite singers and infamy as one of Stalin’s agents. Pamela A. Jordan traces Plevitskaya’s life from her childhood in an isolated village to national stardom. She always declared that she was foremost an artist who sang for all people, regardless of their ideological leanings or socioeconomic background. She claimed throughout her career to be fundamentally apolitical, yet decades later in Europe, Plevitskaya was unmasked as one of Joseph Stalin’s secret agents along with her husband, White Russian General Nikolai Skoblin. Their experiences in exile shed light on Stalin’s covert operations and the hardships Russian émigrés faced in interwar Europe, an era of great political and economic turmoil. In addition, this book uncovers the roles that the couple played in one of the Soviets’ major intelligence coups—the 1937 kidnapping of White Russian General Evgeny Miller in Paris. Jordan recreates Plevitskaya’s sensationalized 1938 criminal trial in the Palace of Justice, where she was accused of conspiring to kidnap Miller and portrayed as a Red femme fatale. The first Western biography of Plevitskaya and the first to reconstruct her dramatic trial, this book provides a fascinating window into Soviet-era espionage in interwar Europe.
Download or read book A Failed Empire written by Vladislav M. Zubok and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok offers the first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side. A Failed Empire provides a history quite different from those written by the Western victors. In a new preface for this edition, the author adds to our understanding of today's events in Russia, including who the new players are and how their policies will affect the state of the world in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Bringing Stalin Back In written by Todd H. Nelson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this book examines the ways that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalin period in order to advance their own political objectives. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin’s rule, especially his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing the concepts of “preventive” and “complex” co-optation, this book analyzes how elites in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that espouse alternative narratives, while promoting message-friendly groups that are in line with the Kremlin’s agenda. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as the symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of great achievements, despite great cost, enabling favorably portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh but effective rulers in Russian history, such as Peter the Great. This strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism in Russia today.
Download or read book Stalin written by Mikl¢s Kun and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional volume of oral history contains exciting new information about Stalin's actual and political 'family', the political Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews and hitherto unpublished correspondence between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Zhdanov and others, the book also contains a fascinating selection from a private collection of photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period.
Download or read book An American Engineer in Stalin s Russia written by Zara Witkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1932 Zara Witkin, a prominent American engineer, set off for the Soviet Union with two goals: to help build a society more just and rational than the bankrupt capitalist system at home, and to seek out the beautiful film star Emma Tsesarskaia. His memoirs offer a detailed view of Stalin's bureaucracy—entrenched planners who snubbed new methods; construction bosses whose cover-ups led to terrible disasters; engineers who plagiarized Witkin's work; workers whose pride was defeated. Punctuating this document is the tale of Witkin's passion for Tsesarskaia and the record of his friendships with journalist Eugene Lyons, planner Ernst May, and others. Witkin felt beaten in the end by the lethargy and corruption choking the greatest social experiment in history, and by a pervasive evil—the suppression of human rights and dignity by a relentless dictatorship. Finally breaking his spirit was the dissolution of his romance with Emma, his "Dark Goddess." In his lively introduction, Michael Gelb provides the historical context of Witkin's experience, details of his personal life, and insights offered by Emma Tsesarskaia in an interview in 1989.
Download or read book Stalin and His Hangmen written by Donald Rayfield and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin’s secret police. Now, in his harrowing new book, Donald Rayfield probes the lives, the minds, the twisted careers, and the unpunished crimes of Stalin’s loyal assassins. Founded by Feliks Dzierzynski, the Cheka–the Extraordinary Commission–came to life in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Spreading fear in a time of chaos, the Cheka proved a perfect instrument for Stalin’s ruthless consolidation of power. But brutal as it was, the Cheka under Dzierzynski was amateurish compared to the well-oiled killing machines that succeeded it. Genrikh Iagoda’s OGPU specialized in political assassination, propaganda, and the manipulation of foreign intellectuals. Later, the NKVD recruited a new generation of torturers. Starting in 1938, terror mastermind Lavrenti Beria brought violent repression to a new height of ingenuity and sadism. As Rayfield shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists. Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mandelstam were all caught in Stalin’s web–courted, toyed with, betrayed, and then ruthlessly destroyed. In bringing to light the careers, personalities, relationships, and “accomplishments” of Stalin’s key henchmen and their most prominent victims, Rayfield creates a chilling drama of the intersection of political fanaticism, personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power spanning half a century. Though Beria lost his power–and his life–after Stalin’s death in 1953, the fundamental methods of the hangmen maintained their grip into the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Rayfield argues, the tradition of terror, far from disappearing, has emerged with renewed vitality under Vladimir Putin. Written with grace, passion, and a dazzling command of the intricacies of Soviet politics and society, Stalin and the Hangmen is a devastating indictment of the individuals and ideology that kept Stalin in power.
Download or read book The Last Romantic written by William L. O'Neill and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1990-09-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet and Journalist, Max Eastman is perhaps the most famous example of an American intellectual who during his life moved across the entire political spectrum. This reexamination of his career and his place in history reveals the dynamics behind his several careers and political transformations, offering new insight into one of the most influential writers of this century. It is a model biography of a key intellectual of the twentieth century. It is also both a perspective social history of his times and a study in the history of ideas. The book will find a welcome place in history, literature, and political science courses, as well as in personal libraries.
