Download or read book Stalin s Swans written by James Coffey and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Stalin knew Eleanor Stefanov when she was a girl, and he was a young Marxist revolutionary in Saint Petersburg. He admired this child for her beauty, intelligence, and courage, but what he admired most was seeing this lovely Russian girl as a committed church hating, Romanov hating, capitalist hating Communist. However, what Stalin didn't know was Eleanor, as a teenager, would be given a gift, a revolver, and that gift would change her life forever. Secretly she would develop the motto: A woman's right to own a gun is her right to be free.The Soviet secret police destroyed millions of lives. What if every Russian, whom the secret police had sought to arrest, had met their oppressors with a gun? Eleanor Stefanov did. Excerpt: "She knew how to use her pistol: clean and load. Sights on target. Squeeze the trigger. Problem solved. During the chaos of the February Revolution, which toppled Nicholas II, a member of the Red Guard had given Eleanor the revolver and taught her how to use it. She would report to work dressed as a humble proletariat secretary, but as soon as her duties were finished, she would rush home and change into men's clothing. For a season she drifted away from voluntary party activities, even though these were important for party advancement. The power of the gun was more alluring. Target practice became her top priority. Secretly she became very skilled. . . . The police never challenged her because there was no real police enforcement, just bands of armed, illiterate men with a few women mixed in. The old gentleman who had given her the revolver told her, "Protect your virtue with this pistol. A lot of men, Bolshevik or Menshevik, will rape a young woman like you and think nothing of it-like eating a meal-and then give the leftovers to their buddies. This will stop them. Don't hesitate for a moment, Comrade Daughter."
Download or read book Swans of the Kremlin written by Christina Ezrahi and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical ballet was perhaps the most visible symbol of aristocratic culture and its isolation from the rest of Russian society under the tsars. In the wake of the October Revolution, ballet, like all of the arts, fell under the auspices of the Soviet authorities. In light of these events, many feared that the imperial ballet troupes would be disbanded. Instead, the Soviets attempted to mold the former imperial ballet to suit their revolutionary cultural agenda and employ it to reeducate the masses. As Christina Ezrahi's groundbreaking study reveals, they were far from successful in this ambitious effort to gain complete control over art. Swans of the Kremlin offers a fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia's two major troupes, the Mariinsky (later Kirov) and the Bolshoi, quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period. Despite all controls put on them, they managed to maintain the classical forms and traditions of their rich artistic past and to further develop their art form. These aesthetic and professional standards proved to be the power behind the ballet's worldwide appeal. The troupes soon became the showpiece of Soviet cultural achievement, as they captivated Western audiences during the Cold War period. Based on her extensive research into official archives, and personal interviews with many of the artists and staff, Ezrahi presents the first-ever account of the inner workings of these famed ballet troupes during the Soviet era. She follows their struggles in the postrevolutionary period, their peak during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes with their monumental productions staged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1968.
Download or read book On Stalin s Team written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chronicle of Stalin's inner political and social circle—from a leading Soviet historian Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu—one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.
Download or read book Stalin s Quest for Gold written by Elena Osokina and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives—economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel—Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.
Download or read book The Silver Swan written by Sallie Bingham and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits us to this day.” —Gloria Steinem A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. “Don’t touch that girl, she’ll burn your fingers,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke’s billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in Honolulu, and Falcon’s Lair overlooking Beverly Hills. Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father’s fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights. In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the stereotypes that have defined Duke’s story while also confronting the disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.
Download or read book Folklore for Stalin written by Frank J. Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, folklore, like literature, became an instrument of the political propagandist. Folklorists devoted considerable efforts to attending to what purported to be a rebirth of the Russian epic tradition, producing works of pseudofolklore that as often as not featured Joseph Stalin in the hero's role. Miller's account of this curious episode in the history of popular culture and totalitarian politics, and his synopses and translations of "classic" examples of folklore for Stalin, seek to serve as a resource not only for the study of contemporary folklore but also for the political scientist.
Download or read book Wild Swans written by Jung Chang and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-20 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
Download or read book Stalin s Millennials written by Tinatin Japaridze and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Joseph Stalin’s increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin—the one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin’s complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba’s native land—now the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.
Download or read book Red Swan written by Sebastian Heilmann and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The resilience of the Communist party-state, in combination with a rapidly expanding economy, represents a significant deviant case for the debate about models of development. This book focuses on the manner in which China's governmental system can be developed, formulated, implemented, adjusted, and revised. Policy-making is seen as an open ended process with an uncertain outcome, driven by conflicting interests, recurrent interactions, and continuous feedback, rather than determined by history, regime type, or institutions. Key to this are the capacity to deal with both existing and emerging challenges, correction mechanisms when conflicts arise, and adaptive capabilities in a changing economic or international context.
Download or read book Stalin written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From the bestselling author of The Romanovs. “The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.
Download or read book Enemy Number One written by Rósa Magnúsdóttir and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Stalin's anti-American campaign to Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence policy, this book addresses the Soviet propaganda and ideology directed towards the United States during the early Cold War.
Download or read book Information Bulletin written by Soviet Union. Posolʹstvo (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia 1928 39 written by A. Kemp-Welch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's fascination with writers was fully reciprocated as the many 'Odes to Stalin' show. During the 1970s a hugely elaborated system was established for the regulation of belles-lettres based on institutions, ideas and individuals. This original study, ten years in preparation, is based on extensive access to Soviet archives. Much new evidence has been uncovered about the inner workings of cultural policy in the Stalin period and documents by Stalin himself are published for the first time.
Download or read book Dancing with Stalin written by Christina Ezrahi and published by . This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nina Anisimova was born in 1909 in imperial St Petersburg. One of the most renowned character dancers of the Stalinist period, she won her way into the hearts of her audience over many decades. Yet few knew that her exemplary career was a fragile construct built atop a dark secret. In 1938, at the height of the Great Terror, Nina vanished. Only a handful of people knew that this famous dancer had not only been arrested by Secret Police, accused of being a Nazi Spy, but sentenced to forced labour in a camp in Kazakhstan. There, her art would become a salvation, giving her a reason to fight for her life when she found herself without winter clothes in temperatures of minus 40 degrees. Over the coming weeks, Nina's husband, Kostia Derzhavin, began to piece together what had happened to his wife. What he decided to do next was almost without precedent - to take on the ruthless Soviet state to prove her innocence. He would put himself in danger to save the woman he loved. Dancing for Stalin is a remarkable true story of suffering and injustice, of courage, resilience and love.
Download or read book Soviet Fiction since Stalin written by Rosalind J. Marsh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986, Soviet Fiction since Stalin presents a comprehensive overview of the literature of the post Stalin period in the Soviet Union. The rapid advances in science and technology in these years are reflected in the themes of many of the major novelists – Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel and Grossman- and scientific subjects frequently offer a vehicle for the exploration of the wider socio-political, moral, and philosophical ideas. As the period advances, however, literature becomes the first medium in which to express mistrust of scientific advance, and hence, indirectly, of Soviet policy as a whole. Rosalind J. Marsh uses a broad definition of ‘science’ which enables her to cover topics ranging from de-Stalinization, nationalism, and anti- Semitism in science, to Lysenko and scientific charlatanism, the Soviet rejection of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the atom bomb, and also such general problems as secrecy, careerism, and bureaucracy. The bulk of the book concentrates on the Khrushchev years but there is also plentiful discussion of more recent writing such as that of Zinoviev and Voinovich. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Soviet literature, Russian Literature and literature in general.
Download or read book Stalin written by Sarah Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of Joseph Stalin has always provoked heated and often polarized debate. The recent declassification of a substantial portion of Stalin's archive has made possible this fundamental new assessment of the Soviet leader. In this groundbreaking 2005 study, leading international experts challenge many assumptions about Stalin from his early life in Georgia to the Cold War years with contributions ranging across the political, economic, social, cultural, ideological and international history of the Stalin era. The volume provides a deeper understanding of the nature of Stalin's power and of the role of ideas in his politics, presenting a more complex and nuanced image of one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. This study is without precedent in the field of Russian history and will prove invaluable reading for students of Stalin and Stalinism.
Download or read book Stalin s Apologist written by S. J. Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win the U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known. Stalin's Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor's vivid narrative unveils a figure driven by ambition, whose early success reporting on Bolshevik Russia--he was foremost in predicting Stalin's rise to power--established his international reputation, fed his overconfident contempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents' reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history's greatest man-made disasters. Later, he took the rigged show trials of Stalin's Great Purges at face value, blithely accepting the guilt of the victims. He believed himself the leading expert on the Soviet Union, and his faith in his own insight drew him into a downward spiral of distortions and untruths, typified by his memorable excuse for Stalin's crimes, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Taylor brilliantly captures the full range of Duranty's astonishing life, from his participation in the Satanic orgies of Aleister ("the Beast") Crowley, to his dramatic front-line reporting during World War I, to his epic womanizing and heavy drug and alcohol abuse. It is the bitter, ironic story of a man who had the rare opportunity to bring to light the suffering of the millions of Stalin's victims, but remained a prisoner of vanity, self-indulgence, and success.
