Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State

Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State PDF Author: H. Hudson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137010541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book combines social and institutional histories of Russia, focusing on the secret police and their evolving relationship with the peasantry. Based on an analysis of Cheka/OGPU reports, it argues that the police did not initially respond to peasant resistance to Bolshevik demands simply with the gun—rather, they listened to peasant voices.

Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State

Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State PDF Author: H. Hudson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137010541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book combines social and institutional histories of Russia, focusing on the secret police and their evolving relationship with the peasantry. Based on an analysis of Cheka/OGPU reports, it argues that the police did not initially respond to peasant resistance to Bolshevik demands simply with the gun—rather, they listened to peasant voices.

The Secret History of Soviet Russia's Police State

The Secret History of Soviet Russia's Police State PDF Author: Martyn Whittock
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 147214239X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
'[R]eadable and thoughtful . . . does an excellent job of exploring how the murderous political police in all its incarnations defined the Soviet Union, and left a poisonous legacy still with us today' Professor Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory and A Short History of Russia Repression, control, manipulation and elimination of enemies assisted in the establishment of the Soviet state, and helped maintain it in power, but could not, in the end, prevent its collapse. Citizens of the West have, for the most part, been told a very simplified story of the repressive 'totalitarian' state that was the USSR. In fact, it was sustained by more than just policing and force. No amount of revisionist history can erase the reality of millions controlled, imprisoned and killed, but there was much more to the USSR's one-party state than this. Whittock tells a more complex story of the combination of cruelty, co-operation and compromise required to build and run a one-party state. Much of this is the story of the role played by the secret police in creating and sustaining such a form of government, but it is much more than simply a 'history of the secret police'. This is because the 'police state' which emerged (in which dissent, both real and imaginary, was undoubtedly policed, threatened and ruthlessly eliminated) was more than just the product of the arrests, interrogations, executions and imprisonments carried out by the secret police. The USSR was also made possible by a battle for hearts and minds which led millions of people to feel that they really had benefited from the system and had a stake in the new society.

Stalin's Peasants

Stalin's Peasants PDF Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195104592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Drawing on Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, this work analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village

Proletarian Peasants

Proletarian Peasants PDF Author: Robert Edelman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In this book, conceived and written for the general reader as well as the specialist, Robert Edelman uses a case study of peasant behavior during a particular revolutionary situation to make an important contribution to one of the major debates in contemporary peasant studies. Edelman's subject is the peasantry of the right-bank Ukraine, and he uses local and regional archives seldom available to Western scholars to give a detailed picture of the ways in which the inhabitants of one of Russia's most advanced agrarian regions expressed their discontent during the years 1905–1907. By the 1890s, the landlords of Russia’s Southwest had organized a highly successful capitalist form of agriculture, and Edelman demonstrates that their peasants responded to these dramatic economic changes by adopting many of the forms of political and social behavior generally associated with urban proletarians.

Policing Stalin's Socialism

Policing Stalin's Socialism PDF Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300156227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Policing Stalin's Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive. It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.

Face to the Village

Face to the Village PDF Author: Tracy McDonald
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487514085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In the summer of 1924, the Bolshevik Party called on scholars, the police, the courts, and state officials to turn their attention to the villages of Russia. The subsequent campaign to 'face the countryside' generated a wealth of intelligence that fed into the regime's sense of alarmed conviction that the countryside was a space outside Bolshevik control. Richly rooted in archival sources, including local and central-level secret police reports, detailed cases of the local and provincial courts, government records, and newspaper reports, Face to the Village is a nuanced study of the everyday workings of the Russian village in the 1920s. Local-level officials emerge in Tracy McDonald's study as vital and pivotal historical actors, existing between the Party's expectations and peasant interests. McDonald's careful exposition of the relationships between the urban centre and the peasant countryside brings us closer to understanding the fateful decision to launch a frontal attack on the countryside in the fall of 1929 under the auspices of collectivization.

Soviet State Security Services 1917–46

Soviet State Security Services 1917–46 PDF Author: Douglas A. Drabik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472844092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 65

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Book Description
The Bolsheviks' seizure of power in Russia in late 1917 was swiftly followed by the establishment of the Cheka, the secret police of the new Soviet state. The Cheka was central to the Bolsheviks' elimination of political dissent during the Russian Civil War (1917–22). In 1922 the Soviet state-security organs became the GPU and then the OGPU (1923–34) before coalescing into the NKVD. After it played a central role in the Great Terror (1936–38), which saw the widespread repression of many different groups and the imprisonment and execution of prominent figures, the NKVD had its heyday during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). During the conflict the organization deployed full military divisions, frontier troop units and internal security forces and ran the hated GULAG forced-labour camp system. By 1946, the power of the NKVD was so great that even Stalin saw it as a threat and it was broken up into multiple organizations, notably the MVD and the MGB – the forerunners of the KGB. In this book, the history and organization of these feared organizations are assessed, accompanied by photographs and colour artwork depicting their evolving appearance.

Peasant Rebels Under Stalin

Peasant Rebels Under Stalin PDF Author: Lynne Viola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195351320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The first book to document the peasant rebellion against Soviet collectivization, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin retrieves a crucial lost chapter from the history of Stalinist Russia. The peasant revolt against collectivization, as reconstructed by author Lynne Viola, was the most violent and sustained resistance to the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. Conservative estimates suggest that over the course of the 1020s and early 1930s, more than 1,100 people were assassinated, more than 13,000 villages rioted, and over 2.5 million people participated in this active struggle of resistance. This book is about the men and women who tried to preserve their families, communities, and beliefs from the depredations of Stalinism. Their acts were often heroic, but these heroes were homespun, ordinary people who were driven to acts of desperation by cruel and brutal state policies. This is a study of peasant community, culture, and politics through the prism of resistance. Based on newly declassified Soviet archives, including previously inaccessible OGPU (secret police) reports, Viola's work documents the manifestation in Stalin's Russia of universal strategies of peasant resistance in what amounted to a virtual civil war between state and peasantry. This book is must reading for scholars of Soviet history, Stalinism, popular resistance, and Russian peasant culture.

Despite Cultures

Despite Cultures PDF Author: Botakoz Kassymbekova
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, Botakoz Kassymbekova analyzes the tactics of Soviet officials at the center and periphery that produced, imitated, and improvised governance in this Soviet southern borderland and in Central Asia more generally. She shows how the tools of violence, intimidation, and coercion were employed by Muslim and European Soviet officials alike to implement Soviet versions of modernization and industrialization. In a region marked by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity, the Soviet plan was to recognize these differences while subsuming them within the conglomerate of official Soviet culture. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad. The system was tenuously based on individual leaders who struggled to decipher the language of Bolshevism and maintain power through violent repression.

A Companion to the Russian Revolution

A Companion to the Russian Revolution PDF Author: Daniel Orlovsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118620844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject. A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s. Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.