Download or read book The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships written by B. Apor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-10-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to analyze the distinct leader cults that flourished in the era of 'High Stalinism' as an integral part of the system of dictatorial rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Fifteen studies explore the way in which these cults were established, their function and operation, their dissemination and reception, the place of the cults in art and literature, the exportation of the Stalin cult and its implantment in the communist states of Eastern Europe, and the impact which de-Stalinisation had on these cults.
Download or read book How to Be a Dictator written by Frank Dikötter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Brilliant' NEW STATESMAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Enlightening and a good read' SPECTATOR 'Moving and perceptive' NEW STATESMAN Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti. No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom. In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikötter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders? This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.
Download or read book China Under Mao written by Andrew G. Walder and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong. “Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today...[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others).” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful...Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart...What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.” —Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book Fascism A Very Short Introduction written by Kevin Passmore and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? Can it be both? Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That is overtly macho in style, yet attracts many women? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society? In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Kevin Passmore brilliantly unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena in the modern world—tracing its origins in the intellectual, political, and social crises of the late nineteenth century, the rise of fascism following World War I, including fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of 'failed' fascist movements in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Americas. He also considers fascism in culture, the new interest in transnational research, and the progress of the far right since 2002. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Nazi Germany written by Jane Caplan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nazi Germany may have only lasted for 12 years, but it has left a legacy that still echoes with us today. This work discusses the emergence and appeal of the Nazi party, the relationship between consent and terror in securing the regime, the role played by Hitler himself, and the dark stains of war, persecution, and genocide left by Nazi Germany.
Download or read book The Stalin Cult written by Jan Plamper and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.
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 The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 written by Sid Holt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 presents outstanding journalism and commentary that reckon with urgent topics, including COVID-19 and entrenched racial inequality. In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright details how responses to the pandemic went astray (New Yorker). Lizzie Presser reports on “The Black American Amputation Epidemic” (ProPublica). In powerful essays, the novelist Jesmyn Ward processes her grief over her husband’s death against the backdrop of the pandemic and antiracist uprisings (Vanity Fair), and the poet Elizabeth Alexander considers “The Trayvon Generation” (New Yorker). Aymann Ismail delves into how “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd” dealt with the repercussions of the fatal call (Slate). Mitchell S. Jackson scrutinizes the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and how running fails Black America (Runner’s World). The anthology features remarkable reporting, such as explorations of the cases of children who disappeared into the depths of the U.S. immigration system for years (Reveal) and Oakland’s efforts to rethink its approach to gun violence (Mother Jones). It includes selections from a Public Books special issue that investigate what 2020’s overlapping crises reveal about the future of cities. Excerpts from Marie Claire’s guide to online privacy examine topics from algorithmic bias to cyberstalking to employees’ rights. Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s perceptive Paris Review columns explore her family history in Detroit and the toll of a brutal past and present. Sam Anderson reflects on a unique pop figure in “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic” (New York Times Magazine). The collection concludes with Susan Choi’s striking short story “The Whale Mother” (Harper’s Magazine).
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism written by S. A. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.
Download or read book International Communism and the Cult of the Individual written by Kevin Morgan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the communist cult of the individual was not just a Soviet phenomenon but an international one. When Stalin died in 1953, the communists of all countries united in mourning the figure that was the incarnation of their cause. Though its international character was one of the distinguishing features of the communist cult of personality, this is the first extended study to approach the phenomenon over the longer period of its development in a truly transnational and comparative perspective. Crucially it is concerned with the internationalisation of the Soviet cults of Lenin and Stalin. But it also ranges across different periods and national cases to consider a wider cast of bureaucrats, tribunes, heroes and martyrs who symbolised both resistance to oppression and the tyranny of the party-state. Through studying the disparate ways in which the cults were manifested, Kevin Morgan not only takes in many of the leading personalities of the communist movement, but also some of the cultural luminaries like Picasso and Barbusse who sought to represent them. The cult of the individual was one of the most fascinating, troubling and revealing features of Stalinist communism, and as reconstructed here it offers new insight into one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire 1945 1961 written by Alexey Tikhomirov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the construction, dissemination, and reception of the Stalin cult in East Germany from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall. By exporting Stalin’s cult to the Eastern bloc, Moscow aspired to symbolically unite the communist states in an imagined cult community pivoting around the Soviet leader. Based on Russian and German archives, this work analyzes the emergence of the Stalin cult’s transnational dimension. On one hand, it looks at how Soviet representations of power were transferred and adapted in the former “enemy’s” country. On the other hand, it reconstructs “spaces of agency” where different agents and generations interpreted, manipulated, and used the Stalin cult to negotiate social identities and everyday life. This study reveals both the dynamics of Stalinism as a political system after the Cold War began and the foundations of modern politics through mass mobilization, emotional bonding, and social engineering in Soviet-style societies. As an integral part of the global history of communism, this book opens up a comparative, entangled perspective on the ways in which veneration of Stalin and other nationalistic cults were established in socialist states across Europe and beyond.
Download or read book Communism A Very Short Introduction written by Leslie Holmes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.
Download or read book The Devil in History written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
Download or read book Red Banners Books and Beer Mugs The Mental World of German Social Democrats 1863 1914 written by Andrew G. Bonnell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German Social Democratic Party was the world’s first million-strong political party. This book examines key themes around which the party organized its mainly working-class membership, with a focus on the experiences and outlook of rank-and-file party members.
Download or read book Who Voted for Hitler written by Richard F. Hamilton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the traditional belief that Hitler's supporters were largely from the lower middle class, Richard F. Hamilton analyzes Nazi electoral successes by turning to previously untapped sources--urban voting records. This examination of data from a series of elections in fourteen of the largest German cities shows that in most of them the vote for the Nazis varied directly with the class level of the district, with the wealthiest districts giving it the strongest support. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Bolshevism Stalinism and the Comintern written by N. LaPorte and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading authorities and cutting edge scholars, this collection re-examines the defining concepts of Stalinism and the Stalinization odel. The aim of the book is to explore how the common imperatives of a centralized movement were experienced across national boundaries.
Download or read book The Faustian Bargain written by Jonathan Petropoulos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.
