Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Random House Incorporated
ISBN: 1400066921
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
A major profile of the Soviet general credited with a decisive role in key World War II victories compares his legend with his achievements while surveying his eventful post-war experiences as Krushchev's disgraced defense minister. 15,000 first printing.
Author: Seweryn Bialer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
Author: Harold Shukman
Publisher: Phoenix
ISBN: 9781842125137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
A star cast of distinguished contributors--including Dmitri Volkogonov, John Erickson, Catherine Andreyev, David Glantz, and Oleg Rzheshevsky--paint a crucial portrait of a defining period in world history. Unlike most military history, which usually deals with large-scale army movements and campaign strategy, this looks at the training, experience, and personalities of the generals themselves. The result is illuminating, revealing how 25 men succeeded in taking Stalin from the Volga to Berlin.
Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300112047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.
Author: Dr. Vadim Birstein
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1849546894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin's enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond's nemesis in Ian Fleming's novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH's operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks - often without cause - across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for 'Death to Spies'. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin's political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations - this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.
Author: Konstantin Pleshakov
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0618773614
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Stalin's cunning and ruthlessness brought him to supreme power in the Soviet Union. Yet in the summer of 1941 he appeared to lose his touch. With unparalleled access to the Soviet archives, this text reveals why the dictator behaved as he did.
Author: Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016128X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
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.
Author: John Keegan
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780224982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
John Keegan has assembled a cast of seventeen generals whose reputations were made (and some of them broken) by Churchill and the Second World War. Churchill's reputation as prime minister during the Second World War fluctuated according to the successes and failures of his generals. Most of them were household names, and often heroes, during the war years. All of them were prey to the intolerance, interference, irascibility - and the inspiration - of the man who wanted to be both the general in the field and the presiding strategic genius. He sacked his warlords ruthlessly, yet in the end he came to be served by perhaps the greatest generals this country has ever produced. Includes chapters on Wavell, Ironside, Ritchie, Auchinleck, Montgomery, Alexander, Percival, Wingate, Slim and Carton de Wiart. Note: The Publisher regrets that the biographical note for Gary Sheffield is incorrect in the book. Please refer to the Orion website (www.orionbooks.co.uk) for the correct version.
Author: Geogry Zhukov
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473831830
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1256
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Book Description
The complete and unredacted autobiography by Stalin’s star general, chronicling his many campaigns throughout WWII. At Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin—as well as virtually all the principal battles on the Eastern Front during the Second World War—Georgy Zhukov played a major role. He was Stalin’s pre-eminent general throughout the conflict, and he chronicled his brilliant career as he saw it in this essential text. Here, Zhukov reveals intriguing insights into who he was, both as a man and as a commander. He also delves into the military thinking and decision-making at the highest level of the Soviet command—making this volume essential reading for anyone studying the conflict in the east. This edition of the memoirs, which were first published in heavily censored form, features an introduction by Professor Geoffrey Roberts in which he summarizes the additional material omitted from previous editions. He also provides, in an appendix, a translation of Zhukov’s account of the 1953-7 period as well as an interview with Zhukov that has previously not been available in English.
Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library "[A] fascinating new study."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. 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. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies--the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors--but detested their ideas even more.
