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 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 Soviet Internationalism after Stalin written by Tobias Rupprecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet Union is often presented as a largely isolated and idiosyncratic state. Soviet Internationalism after Stalin challenges this view by telling the story of Soviet and Latin American intellectuals, students, political figures and artists, and their encounters with the 'other' from the 1950s through the 1980s. In this first multi-archival study of Soviet relations with Latin America, Tobias Rupprecht reveals that, for people in the Second and Third Worlds, the Cold War meant not only confrontation with an ideological enemy but also increased interconnectedness with distant world regions. He shows that the Soviet Union looked quite different from a southern rather than a Western point of view and also charts the impact of the new internationalism on the Soviet Union itself in terms of popular perceptions of the USSR's place in the world and its political, scientific, intellectual and cultural reintegration into the global community.

Download or read book Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin written by George F. Kennan and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The material contained in this book is drawn from lectures, some of which were delivered in 1957-1958 in the schools at Oxford University, others — in the spring of 1960 — at Harvard University... This is a study of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the major Western countries, from the inception of the Soviet regime in 1917 to the end of World War II. It is not intended as a chronological account of the happenings in this phase of diplomatic history, but rather as a series of discussions of individual episodes or problems.” — George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin Kennan describes the diplomatic dilemmas that grew out of ignorance and mutual distrust, beginning with the Allied intervention in Russia in 1918, through World War I, the Versailles conference, Stalin’s bloody purges of 1934-1938, the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939, the end of World War II, and the meeting in Yalta between Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. “It is not often that a book as instructive as this one manages at the same time to be so engrossing that it is bound to keep even general readers fascinated long past their bedtimes. The book’s message is a stern one; the pleasure in reading it derives from the elegant and yet fresh prose style that is one of the many gifts of [the author who] is an artist as well as an experienced diplomat; a moralist as well as a consummate historian. With superb felicity and grace, he here unfolds a historical narrative rich in prophetic judgments — prophetic in the Biblical sense of the word. Not everyone, of course, will agree with all of Mr. Kennan’s conclusions, but there is so much that is useful in this volume that even those who have reservations about one or another of the judgments in it will welcome it warmly as a significant contribution in several ways.” — Marshall D. Shulman, The New York Times “Superbly concise, meaty, and lucid. It surveys the whole fascinating, involved drama of Communism’s rise to world power.” — Newsweek “Every adult American ought to read it.” — William L. Shirer “Surely one of the most important books since the end of the last war... an over-all view that transcends the provinciality of so much of our foreign policy and embraces the whole immense area from Washington to Peking.” —The New Yorker “An important, a disturbing, a deeply moving book.” — New York Herald Tribune Book Review “Not only Mr. Kennan’s finest book, but also the best that has been written on Russia in this century.” — Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart “In this absorbing and eloquent book... Mr. Kennan reviews with much perception and sensitivity the ragged course of relations between the Soviet Union and the West from 1917 to 1945. While there is much in Western understanding and action to be criticized in the early years, during the inter-war period and during World War II, Mr. Kennan is keenly aware of the intense hostility of the Communist stance which exacerbated all problems.” — Foreign Affairs “Kennan, a fine writer as well as historian and diplomat, has made a magnificent attempt to put into order the chaotic relations between Russia and the West from the Communist Revolution to the end of World War II... A most important book, deserving the widest possible readership.” — Kirkus “[A] remarkable ‘best-seller.’ This fact is a tribute to both the author and the subject with which he deals. It is superfluous to comment on Mr. Kennan’s authority or on the brilliance of his lucid prose, which are again in evidence in this work. It is a volume not easily put aside as a mere purveyor of information; it solicits judgments and proffers them lavishly, inviting agreement or dissent.” — Slavic Review “[A] valuable volume. It is full of flashes of insight, into both Soviet and Western attitudes and policies, and it reveals the painful dilemmas Wilson, Roosevelt, and other Western leaders faced in dealing with this new state and system.” — The Slavic and East European Journal

Download or read book Bitter Waters written by Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1998-08-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on life and work after the author's release in 1935 from a Soviet labor camp, his story is told chronologically, and begins with his difficulties finding a job in the Russian provinces. This memoir may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society and economy and the indomitable creativity with which ordinary people sustained both their lives.

Download or read book Life and Terror in Stalin s Russia 1934 1941 written by Robert W. Thurston and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.

Download or read book The Development of Capitalism in Russia written by Vladimir I. Lenin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONTENTS The Development of Capitalism in Russia The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists The Differentiation of the Peasantry The Landowners' Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy The Growth of Commercial Agriculture The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry The Formation of the Home Market

Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

Download or read book Stalin s World written by Sarah Davies and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on declassified material from Stalin’s personal archive, this is the first systematic attempt to analyze how Stalin saw his world—both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Stalin rarely left his offices and viewed the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books. Analyzing these materials, Sarah Davies and James Harris provide a new understanding of Stalin’s thought process and leadership style and explore not only his perceptions and misperceptions of the world but the consequences of these perceptions and misperceptions.

Download or read book Soviet Fiction Since Stalin written by Rosalind J. Marsh and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1986 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one with an interest in Soviet writing of the last thirty years will want to ignore this book.

Download or read book The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire written by Fred Coleman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1996 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Coleman, A Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, has spent over thirty years gathering observations and experiences to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of the fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed essentially to its demise. From the Kremlin Palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin's troubled presidency through 1995, Coleman was the man on the scene for virtually every defining event of Russian history in the postwar era.

Download or read book Stalin and the Fate of Europe written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.

Download or read book Georgia after Stalin written by Timothy K. Blauvelt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores events in Georgia in the years following Stalin’s death in March 1953, especially the demonstrations of March 1956 and their brutal suppression, in order to illuminate the tensions in Georgia between veneration of the memory of Stalin, a Georgian, together with the associated respect for the Soviet system that he had created, and growing nationalism. The book considers how not just Stalin but also his wider circle of Georgians were at the heart of the Soviet system, outlines how greatly Stalin was revered in Georgia, and charts the rise of Khrushchev and his denunciation of Stalin. It goes on to examine the different strands of the rising Georgian nationalist movements, discusses the repressive measures taken against demonstrators, and concludes by showing how the repressions transformed a situation where Georgian nationalism, the honouring of Stalin’s memory and the Soviet system were all aligned together into a situation where an increasingly assertive nationalist movement was firmly at odds with the Soviet Union.

Download or read book Communist Russia Under Lenin and Stalin written by Terry Fiehn and published by Hodder Murray. This book was released on 2002 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive advanced core text on Russia from 1900 to the 1950s. It offers students an insight into the causes of the Russian Revolution in 1917; the nature, the achievements and failure of Lenin's and Stalin's regimes; and the ongoing historiographical debate about this period and the current reinterpretations of it.

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 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 Lost Kingdom written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prizewinning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine -- only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 500 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy. An authoritative and masterful account of Russian nationalism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent empire-building quest.