Download or read book Inside the Stalin Archives written by Jonathan Brent and published by Atlas and Company. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many people, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. Here, Brent asks - why didn't this happen? To answer such a question, he draws on 15 years of unprecedented access to high level Soviet archives. He shows readers a Russia where, in 1992, women sold used toothbrushes on the street to survive, yet now the shops are filled with luxury goods. Brent encounters Stalin's spectre through these changes and takes readers deep inside his archives.
Download or read book Dimitrov and Stalin written by Georgi Dimitrov and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin's close confidant and trusted ally, served as secretary general of the Communist International (Comintern) from 1934 to its dissolution in 1943. In this collection of more than fifty top-secret letters, the real workings of the Comintern emerge clearly for the first time. Drawn from classified Soviet archives only recently opened to Russian and American scholars, these letters offer unique insights into Soviet foreign policy and Stalin's attitudes and intentions while the Great Terror of the 1930s was in progress and in the years leading up to the Second World War. Annotated by the editors to provide the historical context in which these letters were written, the collection is vivid and startlingly significant. The letters confirm the complete dependence of the Comintern on the Kremlin, while also exposing bureaucratic maneuvering, backbiting, and jockeying for influence. These messages cast much light on the Soviet confusion about policies toward foreign Communist parties, and they uncover the extent to which Stalin shaped the Comintern. Stalin's perspectives on America, French communism, and the Spanish Civil War are recorded, as are his differences with Mao Zedong and with Marshal Tito at important turning points. With the publication of these letters, the history of twentieth-century communism gains authentic evidence about a critical decade.
Download or read book Master of the House written by Oleg V. Khlevniuk and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on meticulous research in previously unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his notorious dictatorship. Oleg V. Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia's political hierarchy of the 1930s--the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party--and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin's rise. Khlevniuk's unparalleled research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov's murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin's mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding, unmatched in texture and depth, of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.
Download or read book Stalin s Library written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics, told through his personal library. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
Download or read book Stalin s Last Crime written by Jonathan Brent and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new investigation, based on previously unseen KGB documents, reveals the startling truth behind Stalin's last great conspiracy. On January 13, 1953, a stunned world learned that a vast conspiracy had been unmasked among Jewish doctors in the USSR to murder Kremlin leaders. Mass arrests quickly followed. The Doctors' Plot, as this alleged scheme came to be called, was Stalin's last crime. In the fifty years since Stalin's death many myths have grown up about the Doctors' Plot. Did Stalin himself invent the conspiracy against the Jewish doctors or was it engineered by subordinates who wished to eliminate Kremlin rivals? Did Stalin intend a purge of all Jews from Moscow, Leningrad, and other major cities, which might lead to a Soviet Holocaust? How was this plot related to the cold war then dividing Europe, and the hot war in Korea? Finally, was the Doctors' Plot connected with Stalin's fortuitous death? Brent and Naumov have explored an astounding arra of previously unknown, top-secret documents from the KGB, the presidential archives, and other state and party archives in order to probe the mechanism of on of Stalin's greatest intrigues -- and to tell for the first time the incredible full story of the Doctors' Plot.
Download or read book Stalin written by Edvard Radzinsky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1997-08-18 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Last Tsar, the first full-scale life of Stalin to have what no previous biography has fully obtained: the facts. Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion. As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide. As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.
Download or read book Lenin s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives written by Paul R. Gregory and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening look into the once-secret Soviet state and party archives that Western scholars first gained access to in the early 1990s. Paul Gregory breaks down a decades-old wall of secrecy to reveal intriguing new information on such subjects as Stalin's Great Terror, the day-to-day life of Gulag guards, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the scientific study of Lenin's brain, and other fascinating tales.
Download or read book The Affirmative Action Empire written by Terry Dean Martin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.
Download or read book A Spy in the Archives written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was 'outed' by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britain—a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor. An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home. For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy. Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.
Download or read book Stalin written by and published by Blake Styrek Publishing . This book was released on 2015-02-22 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Essay concerning Joseph Stalin.
Download or read book Stalinism As a Way of Life written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Maybe some people are shy about writing, but I will write the real truth. . . . Is it really possible that people at the newspaper haven't heard this. . . that we don't want to be on the kolkhoz [collective farm], we work and work, and there's nothing to eat. Really, how can we live?"-a farmer's letter, 1936, from Stalinism as a Way of Life What was life like for ordinary Russian citizens in the 1930s? How did they feel about socialism and the acts committed in its name? This unique book provides English-speaking readers with the responses of those who experienced firsthand the events of the middle-Stalinist period. The book contains 157 documents-mostly letters to authorities from Soviet citizens, but also reports compiled by the secret police and Communist Party functionaries, internal government and party memoranda, and correspondence among party officials. Selected from recently opened Soviet archives, these previously unknown documents illuminate in new ways both the complex social roots of Stalinism and the texture of daily life during a highly traumatic decade of Soviet history. Accompanied by introductory and linking commentary, the documents are organized around such themes as the impact of terror on the citizenry, the childhood experience, the countryside after collectivization, and the role of cadres that were directed to "decide everything." In their own words, peasants and workers, intellectuals and the uneducated, adults and children, men and women, Russians and people from other national groups tell their stories. Their writings reveal how individual lives influenced-and were affected by-the larger events of Soviet history.
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 The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History.
Download or read book The Gulag at War written by Edwin Bacon and published by Springer. This book was released on 1994-09-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gulag at War reveals for the first time official documents kept in the archives of the Soviet forced labour system. An assessment of previous western and Russian studies of the Gulag is followed by a description of its origins. The bulk of the book then concentrates on the labour camps during the Second World War years. New information is revealed regarding prisoner numbers, living conditions, the organisation of forced labour, economic production, and rebellion in the camps.
Download or read book The Complete Maisky Diaries written by Ivan Mikhaĭlovich Maĭskiĭ and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 1669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters 1929 1953 written by Anita Pisch and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the Soviet regime, posters were seen as a vitally important medium for communicating with the population of the vast territories of the USSR. Stalin’s image became a symbol of Bolshevik values and the personification of a revolutionary new type of society. The persona created for Stalin in propaganda posters reflects how the state saw itself or, at the very least, how it wished to appear in the eyes of the people. The ‘Stalin’ who was celebrated in posters bore but scant resemblance to the man Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose humble origins, criminal past, penchant for violent solutions and unprepossessing appearance made him an unlikely recipient of uncritical charismatic adulation. The Bolsheviks needed a wise, nurturing and authoritative figure to embody their revolutionary vision and to legitimate their hold on power. This leader would come to embody the sacred and archetypal qualities of the wise Teacher, the Father of the nation, the great Warrior and military strategist, and the Saviour of first the Russian land, and then the whole world. This book is the first dedicated study on the marketing of Stalin in Soviet propaganda posters. Drawing on the archives of libraries and museums throughout Russia, hundreds of previously unpublished posters are examined, with more than 130 reproduced in full colour. The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 is a unique and valuable contribution to the discourse in Stalinist studies across a number of disciplines.
Download or read book Soviet Soft Power in Poland written by Patryk Babiracki and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.
