Download or read book Stalin and the Cold War in Europe written by Gerhard Wettig and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War was a unique international conflict partly because Josef Stalin sought socialist transformation of other countries rather than simply the traditional objectives. This intriguing book, based on recently accessible Soviet primary sources, is the first to explain the emergence of the Cold War and its development in Stalin's lifetime from the perspective of Soviet policy-making. The book pays particular attention to the often-neglected "societal" dimension of Soviet foreign policy as a crucial element of the genesis and development of the Cold War. It is also the first to put German postwar development into the context of Soviet Cold War policy. Stalin vainly tried to mobilize the Germans with slogans of national unity and then to discredit the West among the Germans by forcing the surrender of Berlin. Further attempts to prevail deadlocked him into a confrontation with the newly united Western powers. Comparing Stalin's internal statements with Soviet actions, Gerhard Wettig draws original conclusions about Stalin's meta-plans for the regions of Germany and Eastern Europe. This fascinating look at Soviet politics during the Cold War provides readers with new insights into Stalin's willingness to initiate crisis with the West while still avoiding military conflict.
Download or read book Stalin s Folly written by Konstantin Pleshakov and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's cunning and ruthlessness brought him to supreme power in the Soviet Union. Yet in the summer of 1941 he appeared to lose his touch. With unparalleled access to the Soviet archives, this text reveals why the dictator behaved as he did.
Download or read book Stalin s War on Japan written by Charles Stephenson and published by Pen & Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Japan surrender in 1945 because of the death and devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or because of the crushing defeat inflicted on their armies by the Soviet Union in Manchukuo, the puppet state they set up in north-east China? Indeed, the Red Army's rapid and total victory in Manchukuo has been relatively neglected by historians. Charles Stephenson, in this scholarly and highly readable new study, describes the political, diplomatic and military build-up to the Soviet offensive and its decisive outcome. He also considers to what extent Japan's capitulation is attributable to the atomic bomb or the stunningly successful entry of the Soviet Union into the conflict. The military side of the story is explored in fascinating detail - the invasion of Manchukuo itself where the Soviet 'Deep Battle' concept was employed with shattering results, and secondary actions in Korea, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. But equally absorbing is the account of the decision-making that gave rise to the offensive and the political and diplomatic background to it, and in particular the Yalta conference. There, Stalin allowed the Americans to persuade him to join the war in the east; a conflict he was determined on entering anyway. Charles Stephenson's engrossing narrative throws new light on the last act of the Second World War.
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 Other War written by Albert L. Weeks and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2003-04-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 22, 1941, just less than two years after signing the Nazi-Soviet Agreements, Adolf Hitler's German army invaded the Soviet Union. The attack hardly came as a surprise to Josef Stalin; in fact, history has long held that Stalin spent the two intervening years building up his defenses against a Nazi attack. With the gradual declassifying of former Soviet documents, though, historians are learning more and more about Stalin's grand plan during the years 1939-1941. Longtime Soviet expert Albert L. Weeks has studied the newly-released information and come to a different conclusion about the Soviet Union's pre-war buildup_it was not precaution against German invasion at all. In fact, Weeks argues, the evidence now suggests Soviet mobilization was aimed at an eventual invasion of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were quietly biding their time between 1939 and 1941, allowing the capitalist powers to destroy one another, all the while preparing for their own Westward march. Stalin, Weeks shows, wasn't waiting for a Nazi attack_Hitler simply beat him to the punch.
Download or read book Stalin s War written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.
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 s Italian Prisoners of War written by Maria Teresa Giusti and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.
Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 1249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.
Download or read book Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars written by Ethan Pollock and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War -- "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front" -- "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948 -- "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb -- "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics -- "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950 -- "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism -- Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.
Download or read book Red Famine written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
Download or read book Stalin s Curse written by Robert Gellately and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.
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 War of Extermination 1941 1945 Planning Realization and Documentation written by Joachim Hoffmann and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breakthrough bestseller by a German academic (and longtime researcher with the German military archives) that documented Stalin's murderous war against the German army and the German people to today's German public. Based on the late Joachim Hoffmann's lifelong study of German and Russian military records, Stalin's War of Extermination not only reveals--as never before--the Red Army's grisly record of atrocities against soldiers and civilians, but establishes beyond cavil that torture, murder, and rape of the captive and the helpless was official Soviet policy, as ordered by Comrade J.V. Stalin. In detail: Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to invade Western Europe in order to initiate the "World Revolution." The outbreak of war between Germany and the Western Allies in 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to prepare an attack against Europe which was unparalleled in history both in terms of Stalin's far-reaching goals as well as in terms of the amount of troops and armaments amassed at the Soviet border. Of course, Stalin's aggressive intentions did not escape Germany's notice who in turn planned a preventive strike against the Red Army. However, the Germans obviously underestimated both the strength of the Red Army and the determination of its leaders. What unfolded in June 1941 was undoubtedly the most-cruel war in history. Dr. Hoffmann's book shows in detail how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their unwilling soldiers to fight against the Germans who were anticipated as liberators from Stalinist oppression by most Russians. Stalin ordered not only to kill all German POWs, but also to kill Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands alive, because they failed to fight to their death. Dr. Hoffmann also explains how Soviet propagandists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers, dehumanized by Soviet propaganda and brutality, finally reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder befell East Germany. After reading this book, the world should thank the German Army that they prevented Stalin from succeeding with his plans of World Revolution, despite all the wrongdoings the Germans committed themselves. An indispensable book for all students of World War II as it actually happened, as well as a revisionist classic that has shaken anti-German propagandists to the marrow.
Download or read book Grand Delusion written by Gabriel Gorodetsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, in the light of archival material. It challenges the view that Stalin was about to invade Germany when Hitler made a pre-emptive strike, arguing that Stalin was actually negotiating for peace in order to redress the European balance of power.
Download or read book Stalin and the Bomb written by David Holloway and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.
Download or read book The Spectre of War written by Jonathan Haslam and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new history showing that the fear of Communism was a major factor in the outbreak of World War II The Spectre of War looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a masterful new interpretation. Looking beyond traditional explanations based on diplomatic failures or military might, Jonathan Haslam explores the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the interwar period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Haslam transforms our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy. Haslam offers a panoramic view of Europe and northeast Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, connecting fascism’s emergence with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion—only to usher in the later advent of war. Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century.
