Bringing Stalin Back In

Bringing Stalin Back In PDF Author: Todd H. Nelson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498591531
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this book examines the ways that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalin period in order to advance their own political objectives. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin’s rule, especially his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing the concepts of “preventive” and “complex” co-optation, this book analyzes how elites in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that espouse alternative narratives, while promoting message-friendly groups that are in line with the Kremlin’s agenda. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as the symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of great achievements, despite great cost, enabling favorably portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh but effective rulers in Russian history, such as Peter the Great. This strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism in Russia today.

Bringing Stalin Back In

Bringing Stalin Back In PDF Author: Todd H. Nelson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498591531
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

Book Description
While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this book examines the ways that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalin period in order to advance their own political objectives. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin’s rule, especially his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing the concepts of “preventive” and “complex” co-optation, this book analyzes how elites in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that espouse alternative narratives, while promoting message-friendly groups that are in line with the Kremlin’s agenda. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as the symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of great achievements, despite great cost, enabling favorably portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh but effective rulers in Russian history, such as Peter the Great. This strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism in Russia today.

Bringing Stalin Back In

Bringing Stalin Back In PDF Author: Todd H. Nelson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9781498591546
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book examines the favorable portrayal of Stalin in Russia today. Putin and he political elite have co-opted the processes of discourse formulation in Russian society, using these to advance positive perceptions of Stalin, while exercising control over the arenas in which any sort of alternative narratives on Stalinism might emerge.

The Whisperers

The Whisperers PDF Author: Orlando Figes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312428037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description
History.

In Stalin's Time

In Stalin's Time PDF Author: Vera Sandomirsky Dunham
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521209496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen.

A Red Boyhood

A Red Boyhood PDF Author: Anatole Konstantin
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 082626638X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Many children growing up in the Soviet Union before World War II knew the meaning of deprivation and dread. But for the son of an “enemy of the people,” those apprehensions were especially compounded. When the secret police came for his father in 1938, ten-year-old Anatole Konstantin saw his family plunged into a morass of fear. His memoir of growing up in Stalinist Russia re-creates in vivid detail the daily trials of people trapped in this regime before and during the repressive years of World War II—and the equally horrific struggles of refugees after that conflict. Evicted from their home, their property confiscated, and eventually forced to leave their town, Anatole’s family experienced the fate of millions of Soviet citizens whose loved ones fell victim to Stalin’s purges. His mother, Raya, resorted to digging peat, stacking bricks, and even bootlegging to support herself and her two children. How she managed to hold her family together in a rapidly deteriorating society—and how young Anatole survived the horrors of marginalization and war—form a story more compelling than any novel. Looking back on those years from adulthood, Konstantin reflects on both his formal education under harsh conditions and his growing awareness of the contradictions between propaganda and reality. He tells of life in the small Ukrainian town of Khmelnik just before World War II and of how some of its citizens collaborated with the German occupation, lending new insight into the fate of Ukrainian Jews and Nazi corruption of local officials. And in recounting his experiences as a refugee, he offers a new look at everyday life in early postwar Poland and Germany, as well as one of the few firsthand accounts of life in postwar Displaced Persons camps. A Red Boyhood takes readers inside Stalinist Russia to experience the grim realities of repression—both under a Soviet regime and German occupation. A moving story of desperate people in desperate times, it brings to life the harsh realities of the twentieth century for young and old readers alike.

Stalin's Curse

Stalin's Curse PDF Author: Robert Gellately
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

The Last Days of Stalin

The Last Days of Stalin PDF Author: Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300192223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.

On Stalin's Team

On Stalin's Team PDF Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400874211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
The first chronicle of Stalin's inner political and social circle—from a leading Soviet historian Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu—one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

What Stalin Knew

What Stalin Knew PDF Author: David E. Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300107807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Murphy asks why the Soviet Union was so unprepared for the German attack in 1941. The highly efficient Soviet intelligence services warned Stalin several times about German preparations, but they were ignored. What led Stalin to make such an enormous blunder?

Stalin's War with Germany: The road to Berlin

Stalin's War with Germany: The road to Berlin PDF Author: John Erickson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300078138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 896

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Book Description
Completing the most comprehensive and authoritative study ever written of the Soviet-German war, Erickson presents the vivid and compelling story of the Red Army's epic struggle to drive the Germans from Russian soil.