Stalin and the Lubianka

Stalin and the Lubianka PDF Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300171897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This fascinating documentary history is the first English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

Stalin and the Lubianka

Stalin and the Lubianka PDF Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300171897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This fascinating documentary history is the first English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

In Lubianka's Shadow

In Lubianka's Shadow PDF Author: Leopold Braun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In Lubianka's Shadow chronicles the life of a Catholic priest, Father Léopold Braun, who was a pastor near the Lubianka political prison in the heart of Moscow, witnessed Stalin's purges and the Soviet government's campaign against organized religion

Stalin's World

Stalin's World PDF Author: Sarah Davies
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300182813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Drawing on declassified material from Stalin’s personal archive, this is the first systematic attempt to analyze how Stalin saw his world—both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Stalin rarely left his offices and viewed the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books. Analyzing these materials, Sarah Davies and James Harris provide a new understanding of Stalin’s thought process and leadership style and explore not only his perceptions and misperceptions of the world but the consequences of these perceptions and misperceptions.

Stalin's Library

Stalin's Library PDF 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.

The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy

The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy PDF Author: Peter Whitewood
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of the capitalist world – Britain and France – who were perceived as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced they had been overcome by the capitalist powers. The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy reveals that – in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Warsaw –Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet leadership's central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany; this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism.

Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia

Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia PDF Author: Denis Skopin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000547221
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book is devoted to the phenomenon of removal of people declared "public enemies" from group photographs in Stalin’s Russia. The book is based on long-term empirical research in Russian archives and includes 57 photographs that are exceptional in terms of historical interest: all these images bear traces of editing in the form of various marks, such as blacking-out, excisions or scratches. The illustrative materials also include a group of photographs with inscriptions left by officers of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. To approach this extensive visual material, Denis Skopin draws on a wealth of Stalin-era written sources: memoirs, diaries and official documents. He argues that this kind of political iconoclasm cannot be confused with censorship nor vandalism. The practice in question is more harrowing and morally twisted, for in most cases the photos were defaced by those who were part of victim’s intimate circle: his/her colleagues, friends or even close family members. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, visual culture, Russian studies and Russian history and politics.

Stalin and His Hangmen

Stalin and His Hangmen PDF Author: Donald Rayfield
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014191419X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators - hangmen. Drawing on newly released archival material, Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin's inner circle than ever before. Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What motivated his chiefs of police, Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Manzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria? What did they want? What were their relations with the regime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and experience mould them? And how does the terror they create connect with the terror they felt? Stalin and His Hangmen reconstructs the psychological mechanism of a whole regime and what it held together. The extent of the misery caused by Stalin and his Hangmen can be compared in Europe only to that brought about by Hitler and his henchmen. But Stalin's heritage is, if possible, even worse than Hitler's. His rule enslaved three generations, not one, the horror of what he did has not yet been fully understood and his countrymen have not yet found the strenth to disavow him. All the more important, then, that this diabolical tale should be told.

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.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial PDF Author: Lynne Viola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190674164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression -- the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution -- and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.

Remembering Stalin's Victims

Remembering Stalin's Victims PDF Author: Kathleen E. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717952
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In Remembering Stalin's Victims, Kathleen E. Smith examines how government reformers' repudiation of Stalin's repressions both in the 1950s and in the 1980s created new political crises. Drawing on interviews, she tells the stories of citizens and officials in conflict over the past. She also addresses the underlying question of how societies emerging from rep1;essive regimes reconcile themselves to their memories. Soviet leaders twice attempted to liberalize communist rule and both times their initiatives hinged on criticism of Stalin. During the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" and again during Gorbachev's glasnost, anti-Stalinism proved a unique catalyst for democratic mobilization. Under Gorbachev, dissatisfaction with half truths about past atrocities united citizens from all walks of life in the Memorial Society, an independent mass movement that eventually challenged the very notion of reform communism. Smith investigates why citizens risked confrontation with the Communist Party in order to promote recognition of the victims of Stalinism and recompense for their survivors. Efforts to acknowledge the bitter legacy of totalitarian rule, while originally supporting a stable statesociety reform coalition, ultimately provoked "radical" demands for openness about the past, official accountability, and institutional guarantees of human rights, Smith explains. The battle over the Soviet past, she suggests, not only illuminates the dynamic between elite and mass political actors during liberalization, but also reveals the scars that totalitarian rule has left on Russian society and the long-term obstacles to reform it has created.