One Day That Shook the Communist World

One Day That Shook the Communist World PDF Author: Paul Lendvai
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400837642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise. One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.

Ten Days That Shook The World

Ten Days That Shook The World PDF Author: John Reed
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359345212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
An impassioned firsthand account of the Russian Revolution An American journalist and revolutionary writer, John Reed became a close friend of Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 revolution in Russia. Ten Days That Shook the World is Reeds extraordinary record of that event. 'It flashed upon me suddenly: they were going to shoot me!' This electrifying eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, written by an American journalist in St Petersburg as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, is an unsurpassed record of history in the making. John Reed (1887-1920) American journalist and poet-adventurer whose colorful life as a revolutionary writer ended in Russia but made him the hero of a generation of radical intellectuals. Reed became a close friend of V.I. Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 October revolution. He recorded this historical event in his best-known book TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1920). Reed is buried with other Bolshevik heroes beside the Kremlin wall.

Ten Days that Shook the World

Ten Days that Shook the World PDF Author: John Reed
Publisher: Books Explorer
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Account of the November Revolution in Russia.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich PDF Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374534684
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times). This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.

The Village Against the World

The Village Against the World PDF Author: Dan Hancox
Publisher:
ISBN: 1781681309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sanchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution PDF Author: Csaba B‚k‚s
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
This volume presents the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the minutes of Khrushchev's first meeting with Hungarian leaders after Stalin's death in 1953, to Yeltsin's declaration on Hungary in 1992. The great majority of the material comes from archives that were inaccessible until the 1990s, and appears here in English for the first time. Book jacket.

Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain PDF Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

The Forsaken

The Forsaken PDF Author: Tim Tzouliadis
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748130314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.

The Left Side of History

The Left Side of History PDF Author: Kristen Ghodsee
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II: British officer Frank Thompson, brother of the great historian E.P. Thompson, and fourteen-year-old Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female member of the armed anti-fascist resistance. But these people were not merely anti-fascist; they were pro-communist, idealists moved by their socialist principles to fight and sometimes die for a cause they believed to be right. Victory brought forty years of communist dictatorship followed by unbridled capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today in democratic Eastern Europe there is ever-increasing despair, disenchantment with the post-communist present, and growing nostalgia for the communist past. These phenomena are difficult to understand in the West, where “communism” is a dirty word that is quickly equated with Stalin and Soviet labor camps. By starting with the stories of people like Thompson and Lagadinova, Ghodsee provides a more nuanced understanding of how communist ideals could inspire ordinary people to make extraordinary sacrifices.

1968

1968 PDF Author: Mark Kurlansky
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0345455827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “In this highly opinionated and highly readable history, Kurlansky makes a case for why 1968 has lasting relevance in the United States and around the world.”—Dan Rather To some, 1968 was the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap; avant-garde theater; the upsurge of the women’s movement; and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. In this monumental book, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that pivotal year, when television’s influence on global events first became apparent, and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the world. Encompassing the diverse realms of youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media, 1968 shows how twelve volatile months transformed who we were as a people—and led us to where we are today.