Download or read book The Times Life and Moral Dilemma of Beria written by Andrew Sangster and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are some figures in modern history who stand out not just for their amoral conduct but their cruelty. This book explores the life of the notorious Beria, Stalin’s henchman. The first part provides an outline of the turbulent history of Russia from 1900 to 1953, in order to set the background from which Beria emerged. The second section presents a biography of Beria from his youth, his early education, and his obsequious behaviour towards Stalin to his rise to be the head of the NKVD (KGB) and later to be amongst the most senior leaders of the Communist structure in the USSR. He was responsible for the deaths of millions (and for organising the Katyń massacre), infamous for murdering colleagues, and a sexual predator, and became the most feared man in the USSR next to Stalin. The third and fourth parts move away from history and biography to moral philosophy, in order to understand from where such evil conduct arises. The question of free-will is explored in the light of human insight, and these sections also discuss the most recent scientific claims concerning human behaviour, as well as the factors which influence people in decision making.
Download or read book Secret Services 1918 1939 written by Andrew Sangster and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the nature of the secret services and the role of the secret police in Britain, Russia, and Germany during the interwar years. It traces the growth of the secret services and police in these countries, indicating how they differed in their development. The SIS (MI6), MI5 and Special Branch in England appeared more like a Gentleman’s Club from Eton and Oxbridge, especially when compared to the German Gestapo, SS-SD, and Abwehr in Germany, and the Cheka, GPU, NKVD and KGB in Stalinist Russia. The British were short of money and resources, while the Germans were interested in establishing their services, and the Soviet Union poured in money, but with the emphasis on internal repression. It was the emerging signals of another World War which defined the shapes of their secret services, which later had long-term consequences for the Cold War.
Download or read book Alan Brooke Churchill s Right Hand Critic written by Andrew Sangster and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2021-04-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new biography of Churchill’s top WWII advisor is “an excellent book for anyone interested in military leadership” (The NYMAS Review). Voted the greatest Briton of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill has long been credited with almost single-handedly leading his country to victory in World War II. But without Alan Brooke, a skilled tactician, at his side the outcome might well have been disastrous. Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, more often than not served as a brake on some of Churchill’s more impetuous ideas. However, while Brooke’s diaries reveal his fury with some of Churchill’s decisions, they also reveal his respect and admiration for the wartime prime minister. In return Churchill must surely have considered Brooke one of his most difficult subordinates—but later wrote that he was “fearless, formidable, articulate, and in the end convincing.” As CIGS, Brooke was integral to coordination between the Allied forces, and so had to wrestle with the cultural strategy clash between the British and Americans. Comments in his diaries offer up his opinions of both his British and American military colleagues—his negative assessments of Mountbatten’s ability, and acerbic comments on the difficult character of de Gaulle and the weaknesses of Eisenhower. Conversely, he was clearly overindulgent in the face of Montgomery’s foibles. Brooke was often seen as a stern and humorless figure, but a study of his private life reveals a little-seen lighter side, a lifelong passion for birdwatching, and abiding love for his family. The two tragedies that befell his immediate family were a critical influence on his life. Andrew Sangster completes this new biography with a survey of the way various historians have assessed Brooke, explaining how he has lapsed into seeming obscurity in the years since his crucial part in the Allied victory in World War II.
Download or read book Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov 1896 1948 written by Kees Boterbloem and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2004 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 Kees Boterbloem offers the first full-length biography of the man once believed to be a likely candidate to succeed Josef Stalin. In so doing he provides new insights into the Soviet political system and the question of how much power was wielded by Stalin's lieutenants. In 1934 Andrei Zhdanov was promoted to the post of secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow and entered the inner circle of Stalin's partners. Notable for his involvement in implementing the artificial crisis of the Great Terror in Moscow and Leningrad, Zhdanov was later involved in the preparation and signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and acted as Stalin's Party emissary in the Winter War and the sovietization of Estonia. Boterbloem details how Zhdanov's career was put in jeopardy in the summer of 1941 when German troops almost captured Leningrad. Stalin kept Zhdanov at the Leningrad front for much of the Second World War because of his alleged failure to halt the initial German advance, where he presided over the terrible suffering of the besieged city's population. In 1945, Zhdanov's ideological commitment led to his recall to the centre of Soviet power where, more publicly visible than ever before, he berated Soviet artists, scientists, philosophers, composers, and foreign Communist Parties for failing to adhere to the Party line. Never in good health, the stress of being Stalin's main assistant in both the massive bureaucracy of the Communist Party and the attempt to restore ideological orthodoxy, combined with anxiety about his son Iurii, led to his death in 1948.
Download or read book Khrushchev Remembers written by and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Download or read book Soviet Union written by Raymond E. Zickel and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 1182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Killing Hope written by William Blum and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Killing Hope, William Blum, author of the bestselling Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, provides a devastating and comprehensive account of America's covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and - in this updated edition - beyond. Is the United States, as it likes to claim, a global force for democracy? Killing Hope shows the answer to this question to be a resounding 'no'.
Download or read book Beria s Garden written by Unto Parvilahti and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Observations and reminiscences of the Soviet Union from the years 1945-54, by a Finnish prisoner of war at the Temnisky prison camp, one of Beria's gardens, and in Siberia.
Download or read book Book Review Digest written by and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sovereignty After Empire written by Galina Vasilevna Starovotova and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin s Loyal Executioner written by Marc Jansen and published by Hoover Institution Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.
Download or read book Liberalism in Dark Times written by Joshua L. Cherniss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponents Today, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum. While right-wing populists and leftist purists righteously violate liberal norms, theorists of liberalism seem to have little to say. In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss issues a rousing defense of the liberal tradition, drawing on a neglected strand of liberal thought. Assaults on liberalism—a political order characterized by limits on political power and respect for individual rights—are nothing new. Early in the twentieth century, democracy was under attack around the world, with one country after another succumbing to dictatorship. While many intellectuals dismissed liberalism as outdated, unrealistic, or unworthy, a handful of writers defended and reinvigorated the liberal ideal, including Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin—each of whom is given a compelling new assessment here. Building on the work of these thinkers, Cherniss urges us to imagine liberalism not as a set of policies but as a temperament or disposition—one marked by openness to complexity, willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, tolerance for difference, and resistance to ruthlessness. In the face of rising political fanaticism, he persuasively argues for the continuing importance of this liberal ethos.
Download or read book New Times International written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Red Plenty written by Francis Spufford and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
Download or read book Red Cloud at Dawn written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE Following the trail of espionage and technological innovation, and making use of newly opened archives, Michael D. Gordin provides a new understanding of the origins of the nuclear arms race and fresh insight into the problem of proliferation. On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet test bomb, dubbed "First Lightning," exploded in the deserts of Kazakhstan. This surprising international event marked the beginning of an arms race that would ultimately lead to nuclear proliferation beyond the two superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States. With the use of newly opened archives, Michael D. Gordin follows a trail of espionage, secrecy, deception, political brinksmanship, and technical innovation to provide a fresh understanding of the nuclear arms race.
Download or read book Less Than One written by Joseph Brodsky and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1986 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes essays on Russian writers, Western poets, politics, and the author's native city, Leningrad.
