Shooting Stalin

Shooting Stalin PDF Author: James Edward Abbe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Although he was a contemporary of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon--and was just as smart and foolhardy--James Abbe is by no means as famous as his legendary colleagues. American-born Abbe published superb photo documentaries featuring Stalin's Moscow, the last years of the Weimar Republic and the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Obsessive and fearless, Abbe got close to the dictators of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, Franco--and in 1932, he was the only American given permission to photograph Stalin. Eventually, photographing world leaders became his specialty. In pursuit of various interests, Abbe made contact with Russian film directors and artists such as Sergej Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, indulging his passion for film, theater, dance and, above all, the mysteries of whatever happened backstage. Many of his pictures--portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin--have become icons of modern photography. Others, like his portrait of Thomas Mann, remained unknown until their recent discoveries. Shown here is a cross-section of the rich catalogue of Abbe's work, in more than 300 tritones.

Shooting Stalin

Shooting Stalin PDF Author: James Edward Abbe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Although he was a contemporary of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon--and was just as smart and foolhardy--James Abbe is by no means as famous as his legendary colleagues. American-born Abbe published superb photo documentaries featuring Stalin's Moscow, the last years of the Weimar Republic and the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Obsessive and fearless, Abbe got close to the dictators of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, Franco--and in 1932, he was the only American given permission to photograph Stalin. Eventually, photographing world leaders became his specialty. In pursuit of various interests, Abbe made contact with Russian film directors and artists such as Sergej Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, indulging his passion for film, theater, dance and, above all, the mysteries of whatever happened backstage. Many of his pictures--portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin--have become icons of modern photography. Others, like his portrait of Thomas Mann, remained unknown until their recent discoveries. Shown here is a cross-section of the rich catalogue of Abbe's work, in more than 300 tritones.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Stalin and the Kirov Murder

Stalin and the Kirov Murder PDF Author: Robert Conquest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780888642004
Category : Soviet Union
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
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Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin

Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin PDF Author: Paul R. Gregory
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817910360
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Drawing from Hoover Institution archival documents, Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the tragic story of Stalin's most prominent victims: Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and his wife, Anna Larina.

Bloodlands

Bloodlands PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465032974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940

Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940 PDF Author: George Sanford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134302991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. This informative book examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.

The Secret File of Joseph Stalin

The Secret File of Joseph Stalin PDF Author: Roman Brackman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135758409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This account of Stalin's life begins with his early years, the family breakup caused by the suspicion that the boy was the result of an adulterous affair, the abuse by his father and the growth of the traumatized boy into criminal, spy, and finally one of the 20th century's political monsters.

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov PDF Author: Peter Pringle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416566023
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.

Revelations from the Russian Archives

Revelations from the Russian Archives PDF Author: Diane P. Koenker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780393803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description


Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143132156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1249

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Book Description
“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.