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.
Author: Roman Brackman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714650500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 510
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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.
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
Author: David Brandenberger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155360
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 759
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Book Description
A critical edition of the text that defined communist party ideology in Stalin's Soviet Union The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR--a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.
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.
Author: Zara Witkin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520351088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
In 1932 Zara Witkin, a prominent American engineer, set off for the Soviet Union with two goals: to help build a society more just and rational than the bankrupt capitalist system at home, and to seek out the beautiful film star Emma Tsesarskaia. His memoirs offer a detailed view of Stalin's bureaucracy—entrenched planners who snubbed new methods; construction bosses whose cover-ups led to terrible disasters; engineers who plagiarized Witkin's work; workers whose pride was defeated. Punctuating this document is the tale of Witkin's passion for Tsesarskaia and the record of his friendships with journalist Eugene Lyons, planner Ernst May, and others. Witkin felt beaten in the end by the lethargy and corruption choking the greatest social experiment in history, and by a pervasive evil—the suppression of human rights and dignity by a relentless dictatorship. Finally breaking his spirit was the dissolution of his romance with Emma, his "Dark Goddess." In his lively introduction, Michael Gelb provides the historical context of Witkin's experience, details of his personal life, and insights offered by Emma Tsesarskaia in an interview in 1989.
Author: Victor Levenstein
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1683481984
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Thirteen young people, all college students were arrested in 1944 in Moscow by the Soviet State security. They were charged with an attempt to assassinate Stalin. All of them were sentenced to different terms of forced labor in GULAG and three of them paid with their lives. A participant and a survivor of this affair, Victor Levenstein, tells us about this so called case in his memoir. The majority of the arrested were “children of the enemies of the People” – their parents where victims of Stalin’s purges of nineteen thirties. Their friendship began in the early school years in the privileged school in Moscow, where children of Stalin, Molotov and Soviet cultural elite where among the students. The State security learned about this group of independently thinking young people and fabricated a case of “The anti-Soviet terrorist youth group planning comrade Stalin’s assassination”. During the investigation the majority of the arrested were subjected to the physical and psychological torture. They “confessed” to the anti-Soviet activity and seven of them to the preparation of the assassination of Stalin. Interrogators concocted an adventure story of the assassination preparations featuring an apartment from the window of which the “villains” were going to shoot Stalin. The book tells us about the interrogations in the infamous Lubianka, State Security prison where Mr. Levenstein and his friends spent almost a year. The machinery of the interrogation techniques is described in detail, explaining how they were forced to implicate themselves. We learn about the life in interrogation and transitional prisons, labor camps and exile, about the fascinating people the author came across on his “journey”. One of them was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom the author met at Ekibastus penal camp – the camp, where the action of Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One day in life of Ivan Denisovich” takes place. The Russian version of the book “Tobacco smoke over the bunks…” was published in Moscow in 2009 by the prestigious publishing house “Russki Put’”. The book presentation at the Solzhenitsyn’s library-foundation was a significant cultural event in Moscow. The Russian TV dedicated a segment to it on the channel “Kul’tura” (Culture) and on the Sunday program “News of the week”. Radio broadcasts were also dedicated to the book including a program on the radio station “Liberty” for broadcast to Europe. Several positive book reviews were published in the Russian press. A condensed version of the book appeared in the Russian language literary and political magazine “Continent”, published in Moscow and Paris. In the preface to the published chapters the magazine’s editorial board wrote: “Victor Levenstein’s narration supplements books of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, E. Ginzburg with new very important details and facts, helping us imagine and understand the criminal machinery of repression created by Lenin and Stalin.”
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.
Author: Michael Krupa
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857900234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Michael Krupa was born into a poor family in south-west Poland, and in his teens was accepted into a Jesuit seminary. He ran away before taking his final vows and joined the army. Soon afterwards, the German tanks rolled into Poland and easily defeated her antiquated forces - the Polish cavalry were armed with sabres. Krupa survived Hitler's invasion, but was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and accused of spying. After enduring torture in Moscow's notorious Lubianka prison, he was sentenced to ten years' corrective labour and deported to the Pechora Gulag. Most prisoners there were worked and starved to death within a year. But Krupa managed again to escape, and in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union made one of the most extraordinary journeys of the war - from Siberia to safety in Afghanistan. Krupa's Jesuit training had given him an inner strength and resilience which enabled him to survive in the face of appalling brutality and cruelty. Luck and the kindness of strangers helped him complete his epic journey to freedom.
Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030026559X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library 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.
