Download or read book Inside Stalin s Secret Police written by Robert Conquest and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin s Secret Police written by Rupert Butler and published by Amber Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white photographs and expertly written, Stalin’s Secret Police is a chilling history of the Soviet secret police from 1917 to the fall of Communism.
Download or read book Stalin s Police written by Paul Hagenloh and published by . This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin’s Police offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering study traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Paul Hagenloh argues that the policing methods employed in the late 1930s were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade. Hagenloh’s vivid and monumental account is the first to show how Stalin’s peculiar brand of policing—in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order—supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror.
Download or read book Agents of Terror written by Alexander Vatlin and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Stalin's Great Terror, more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they did not commit. Who carried out these purges, and what motivated them? Alexander Vatlin opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrators using detailed evidence from one Moscow suburb. Spurred by ambition or fear, local secret police rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting "enemies of the people"-even when it meant fabricating evidence. Vatlin confronts head-on issues of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.
Download or read book Smersh written by Dr. Vadim Birstein and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin's enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond's nemesis in Ian Fleming's novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH's operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks - often without cause - across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for 'Death to Spies'. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin's political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations - this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.
Download or read book Yezhov written by John Arch Getty and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive study of Nikolai Yezhov's rise to become the chief of Stalin's secret police--and the dictator's "iron fist"--during the Great Terror Head of the secret police from 1937 to 1938, N. I. Yezhov was a foremost Soviet leader during these years, second in power only to Stalin himself. Under Yezhov's orders, millions of arrests, imprisonments, deportations, and executions were carried out. This book, based upon unprecedented access to Communist Party archives and Yezhov's personal archives, looks into the life and career of the enigmatic man who administered Stalin's Great Terror. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov seek to answer a series of troubling questions. What kind of person calmly and efficiently sends thousands of innocent people to their deaths? What could prepare a man for such a role? How could a person whom acquaintances describe as friendly, pleasant, and even gallant carry out one of history's most horrifying campaigns of terror? The authors uncover the full details of Yezhov's rise to power and conclude that he was not merely Stalin's tool but a skillful maneuverer in his own right. The historical documents provide a thorough portrait of Yezhov and reveal a man of fanatical dedication to his leader and his party--a man who became a willing murderer. Readers will find his story chilling, the more so in our own times, when the impulse to terror that engulfed Yezhov seems neither surprising nor unfamiliar.
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 Stalin s Secret War written by Rupert Butler and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of terror has been a characteristic of Russia from the days of the Tsars. During 'the Great Patriotic War', Soviet soldiers and citizens feared not only the Germans but the secret police. The agents of the NKVD waged a merciless campaign against their own people. The full extent of this operation is told in this compelling study.
Download or read book Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial written by Lynne Viola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression -- the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution -- and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.
Download or read book Stalin s Loyal Executioner written by Marc Jansen and published by Hoover Institution Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.
Download or read book Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin s Russia written by Denis Skopin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to the phenomenon of removal of people declared "public enemies" from group photographs in Stalin’s Russia. The book is based on long-term empirical research in Russian archives and includes 57 photographs that are exceptional in terms of historical interest: all these images bear traces of editing in the form of various marks, such as blacking-out, excisions or scratches. The illustrative materials also include a group of photographs with inscriptions left by officers of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. To approach this extensive visual material, Denis Skopin draws on a wealth of Stalin-era written sources: memoirs, diaries and official documents. He argues that this kind of political iconoclasm cannot be confused with censorship nor vandalism. The practice in question is more harrowing and morally twisted, for in most cases the photos were defaced by those who were part of victim’s intimate circle: his/her colleagues, friends or even close family members. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, visual culture, Russian studies and Russian history and politics.
Download or read book Stalin s Terror written by B. McLoughlin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British, Irish, Russian, American, German and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.
Download or read book Stalin s Secret War written by Nikolai Tolstoy and published by New York, N.Y. : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. This book was released on 1982 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin and the Lubianka written by David R. Shearer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating documentary history is the first English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.
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 Young Heroes of the Soviet Union written by Alex Halberstadt and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can trauma be inherited? In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry, and reckoning, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin--to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness, and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.
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.
