Download or read book Stalin s Witnesses written by Julius Wachtel and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-09 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fictionalized yet historically faithful account of how four Soviet citizens and a German expatriate became "witnesses" at the most notorious show trials in modern history. Their false testimony sent top Communists to the executioner and left Stalin the undisputed ruler of the USSR. Revised edition, includes Prequel and images of actual documents.

Download or read book Stalin s Witnesses written by Julius Wachtel and published by . This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vilna, the Russian Empire, 1905. En route to deliver a secret pamphlet entrusted to him by his older brothers, a boy falls into the clutches of the Czar's secret police. Another decade will pass before the Crown gives way, not to liberally minded revolutionaries like Vladimir Romm but to the pitiless disciples of an embittered lawyer named Lenin. For the next three-quarters of a century Marxism, in its cruelest form, will rule Russia. As World War I yields to an uneasy peace, Romm joins Soviet intelligence. In 1934 he is named Izvestia's inaugural correspondent to Washington and strives to bring key Americans to the Soviet side. But as Romm's career reaches its zenith he is suddenly recalled, arrested, and forced to serve with four others as "witnesses" at the notorious 1937 Moscow show trial.

Download or read book Stalin s Witnesses written by Julius Wachtel and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vilna, the Russian Empire, 1905. En route to deliver a secret pamphlet entrusted to him by his elder brothers, a young boy falls into the clutches of the Czar's secret police. Another decade will pass before the Crown gives way, not to liberally-minded revolutionaries like Vladimir Romm, the boy now a young man, but to the pitiless disciples of an embittered lawyer named Lenin. For the next three-quarters of a century, Marxism in its cruelest form will rule over Russia. Returning to Vilna during the winter of 1918 for the first time since his youth, Romm finds it occupied by Polish troops. He takes charge of a Communist militia and leads the Red Army to a small yet significant win for the fledgling Soviet state. As World War I yields to an uneasy peace, Romm joins Soviet intelligence. He is posted under various guises to Germany, France, Japan and Geneva. In 1934 Romm is named Izvestia's inaugural correspondent to Washington where he is given orders to bring key Americans to the Soviet side. But as his career reaches its zenith, Romm is suddenly recalled, arrested and forced to serve with four others as 'witnesses' at the notorious 1937 Moscow show trial. "Stalin's Witnesses" is a novel. While it sticks closely to the historical record, the witnesses speak in their own voices, guiding our journey through a tangle of fascinating events to tease out the underlying truths. It's their story, and it helped set the stage for our own.

Download or read book Dissent on the Margins written by Emily B. Baran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses' international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, they faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states struggled to reconcile the proper limits on freedom of conscience with European norms and domestic concerns. Dissent on the Margins provides a new and important perspective on one of America's most understudied religious movements.

Download or read book The Last Days of Stalin written by Joshua Rubenstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.

Download or read book The Last Days of Stalin written by Joshua Rubenstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of the months before and after Joseph Stalin’s death and how his demise reshaped the course of twentieth-century history. Joshua Rubenstein’s riveting account takes us back to the second half of 1952 when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin’s murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force, and was also broadening a vicious campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin’s sudden collapse and death in March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in the twentieth century. The Last Days of Stalin is an engaging, briskly told account of the dictator’s final active months, the vigil at his deathbed, and the unfolding of Soviet and international events in the months after his death. Rubenstein throws fresh light on the devious plotting of Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and other “comrades in arms” who well understood the significance of the dictator’s impending death; the witness-documented events of his death as compared to official published versions; Stalin’s rumored plans to forcibly exile Soviet Jews; the responses of Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles to the Kremlin’s conciliatory gestures after Stalin’s death; and the momentous repercussions when Stalin’s regime of terror was cut short. “A fascinating and often chilling reconstruction of the months surrounding the Soviet dictator’s death.” —Saul David, Evening Standard (UK) “A gripping look at the power struggles after the Red Tsar’s death.” —Victor Sebestyen, The Sunday Times (UK) “Stalin’s death in March 1953 cut short another spasm of blood purges he was planning, but triggered only limited Soviet reforms. To some Westerners it promised an extended period of peace, but others feared it would leave the West even more vulnerable. Joshua Rubenstein’s lively, detailed, carefully crafted book chronicles a key twentieth-century turning point that didn’t entirely turn, revealing what difference Stalin’s death did and didn’t make and why.” —William Taubman, author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Download or read book Conversations with Stalin written by Milovan Djilas and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1962 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Content: Written from his experiences as a vice-president of Yugoslavia and aide to Tito, the author here records face to face meetingwith Stalin from 1944-1953. The author was imprisoned by the Yugoslav government from 1957-1961.

Download or read book The Voices of the Dead written by Hiroaki Kuromiya and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev. Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested, executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests, beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners, homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into the enigma of Stalinist terror.

Download or read book Witness to History 1929 1969 written by Charles E. Bohlen and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “At the end of the 1920’s the Foreign Service of the United States... introduced a program of regional specialization. It was a fortunate innovation, for, among other things, it provided the Service with a group of well‐trained Russian‐language specialists just at the time when the United States was beginning its new and troubled association with the Soviet Union. One of the first of these was Charles E. Bohlen, and for the next 40 years he was to be involved in every major development in Soviet American relations, serving under William C. Bullitt in the Moscow embassy in 1934, acting as interpreter and adviser at the wartime conferences at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, succeeding George F. Kennan as Ambassador to Moscow in 1953, and, in later years, advising Presidents about Russian attitudes at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Diplomatic memoirs are generally thin stuff and often mere exercises in self‐inflation. This cannot be said of this absorbing account. Anyone who reads it will understand what George Kennan meant when he described his friend as ‘a man interested... both passionately and dispassionately in everything that concerned the Russian scene.’ It is clear that, from that bright snowy day when he jumped down on the station platform at Negoreloye in March, 1934, until the very end of his career, his hunger to learn all he could about Russia and its rulers was unabated; but it is also apparent that he always strove to remain objective about what he learned and to remember that his role was not to pass judgment on the behavior of the Soviet Government but to understand it and to use that understanding for the good of his country. His memoirs are the record of how he accomplished this... the account of the various phases of the author’s career is rich in circumstantial detail and in anecdote. Particularly effective are Mr. Bohlen’s descriptions of the men he met during his career. These include a shrewd assessment of de Gaulle, whom Bohlen saw frequently during his term as Ambassador to France from 1962 until 1968, and a series of impressions of the Secretaries of State under whom he served. Among these he admired Marshall most and Dulles, who unceremoniously exiled him to Manila in 1957, least.” — Gordon A. Craig, The New York Times “A fascinating account of a most extraordinary career.” — W. Averell Harriman “No single person was present at more of the high-level diplomatic encounters of the wartime and immediate post-war periods than Charles Bohlen. And none was better equipped to judge them. His memoirs have, therefore, unique historical value and should go far to answer the questions of those who are now challenging the soundness of American decisions in that time.” — George F. Kennan “This book is original, reflective, well written, full of new aperçus for the journalist and fresh fuel for the historian... an admirable book.” — The Economist “Few diplomats covered as much ground, fewer have written so compelling a book... [a] solid, worthy book.” — Times Literary Supplement “Absorbing throughout... There is much that is amusing, for Bohlen has a bump of irreverence, and much that is new... A definite contribution to history.” — Joseph P. Lash “The book... is of major historical importance... for its perception and the light which it sheds on the statesmen and the major crises of our time.” — Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly “[Bohlen was] one of the leading diplomats of his time but also an outstanding connoisseur of Russian history and culture... an important book.” — Adam B. Ulam, Slavic Review “[An] extraordinary book... a dynamic narrative... for anyone... interested in the ups and downs of American-Soviet policies, this should prove a most useful book.” — Stephen D. Kertesz, The Review of Politics “[An] important book... I found these memoirs both fascinating and enlightening.” — F. H. Soward, International Journal

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 Joseph Stalin written by Ronald Hingley and published by London : Hutchinson. This book was released on 1974 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this detailed, crisply written, highly readable volume, Ronald Hingley --one of the Western world's leading experts on Soviet Russia -- deals fully with Stalin's Life and Legend for the first time. He sets them in the context of what really happened, using sources independent of Stalin, and quarrying recently discovered material. He also examines the backlash of the anti-Stalinist counter-legend, originally prompted by Trotsky, and developed since the dictator's death by Khrushchev and Western-published Trotskyite biographers.

Download or read book Stalin s Daughter written by Rosemary Sullivan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist PEN Literary Award Finalist New York Times Notable Book Washington Post Notable Book Boston Globe Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States—leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father’s regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Wisconsin. With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us. Illustrated with photographs.

Download or read book Stalin s Meteorologist written by Olivier Rolin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2018 The beautifully illustrated, heartbreaking story of an innocent man in a Soviet gulag, told for the first time in English. One fateful day in 1934, a husband arranged to meet his wife under the colonnade of the Bolshoi theatre. As she waited for him in vain, he was only a few hundred metres away, in a cell in the notorious Lubyanka prison. Less than a year before, Alexey Wangenheim – a celebrated meteorologist – had been hailed by Stalin as a national hero. But following his sudden arrest, he was exiled to a gulag, forced to spend his remaining years on an island in the frozen north, along with thousands of other political prisoners. Stalin’s Meteorologist is the thrilling and deeply moving account of an innocent man caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia. It's a timely reminder of the human consequences of political extremism.

Download or read book Last Witnesses written by Svetlana Alexievich and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterpiece” (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize–winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.” Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. Praise for Last Witnesses “There is a special sort of clear-eyed humility to [Alexievich’s] reporting.”—The Guardian “A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium. . . . Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses.”—The New Republic “A profound triumph.”—The Big Issue “[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities. . . . It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict.”—The Washington Post

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 and the Kirov Murder written by Robert Conquest and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No description