Stalin's Nemesis

Stalin's Nemesis PDF Author: Bertrand M. Patenaude
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, a brilliant writer and orator who was also an authoritarian organizer. He might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naive young Americans in awe of the great theoretician. The household was awash with emotional turmoil - tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous. Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house and kill the man they regarded as a traitor, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic - at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico. This title offers a brilliant reconstruction of one of the most infamous state crimes, and a panoramic view of Trotsky's incredible life. ." from Book jacket (abridged).

Stalin's Nemesis

Stalin's Nemesis PDF Author: Bertrand M. Patenaude
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, a brilliant writer and orator who was also an authoritarian organizer. He might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naive young Americans in awe of the great theoretician. The household was awash with emotional turmoil - tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous. Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house and kill the man they regarded as a traitor, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic - at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico. This title offers a brilliant reconstruction of one of the most infamous state crimes, and a panoramic view of Trotsky's incredible life. ." from Book jacket (abridged).

Hitler and Stalin

Hitler and Stalin PDF Author: Laurence Rees
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610399668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world around them. Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed. Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.

Stalin's American Spy

Stalin's American Spy PDF Author: Tony Sharp
Publisher: Hurst & Company Limited
ISBN: 1849043442
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured by them and interrogated too by their Soviet superiors, Field's forced 'confessions' were manipulated by Stalin and his East European satraps to launch a devastating series of show-trials that led to the imprisonment and judicial murder of numerous Czechoslovak, German, Polish and Hungarian party members. Yet there were other events in his very strange career that could give rise to the suspicion that Field was an American spy who had infiltrated the Communist movement at the behest of Allen Dulles, the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland who later headed the CIA. Never tried, Field and his wife were imprisoned in Budapest until 1954, then granted political asylum in Hungary, where they lived out their sterile last years. This new biography takes a fresh look at Field's relationship with Dulles, and his role in the Alger Hiss affair. It sheds fresh light upon Soviet espionage in the United States and Field's relationship with Hede Massing, Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky. It also reassesses how the increasingly anti-Semitic East European show-trials were staged and dissects the 'lessons which Stalin sought to convey through them.

The History of the Galician Division of the Waffen SS

The History of the Galician Division of the Waffen SS PDF Author: Michael James Melnyk
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
The first volume of a two part set on the history of the Galician Division is based on over 25 years research by accomplished historian Michael James Melnyk who has sourced additional new and hitherto unseen original material on all aspects of the Division's history from archives and private collections in Europe, Australia, North American and Canada. Complemented by the individual accounts and contributions of many veterans which add an engaging personal dimension, this new definitive two volume account supersedes his earlier divisional history published in 2002. As a recognised authority on the subject he has produced the most reliable and exhaustive account to date lavishly illustrated with many rare and unique photos and crammed full of details, notes and references in this last ever book to include direct and new material from the participants.

Stalin's Agent

Stalin's Agent PDF Author: Boris Volodarsky
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191045535
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description
This is the history of an unprecedented deception operation - the biggest KGB deception of all time. It has never been told in full until now. There are almost certainly people who would like it never to be told. It is the story of General Alexander Orlov. Stalin's most loyal and trusted henchman during the Spanish Civil War, Orlov was also the Soviet handler controlling Kim Philby, the British spy, defector, and member of the notorious 'Cambridge Five'. Escaping Stalin's purges, Orlov fled to America in the late 1930s and lived underground. He only dared reveal his identity to the world after Stalin's death, in his 1953 best-seller The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, after which he became perhaps the best known of all Soviet defectors, much written about, highly praised, and commemorated by the US Congress on his death in 1973. But there is a twist in the Orlov story beyond the dreams of even the most ingenious spy novelist: 'General Alexander Orlov' never actually existed. The man known as 'Orlov' was in fact born Leiba Feldbin. And while he was a loyal servant of Stalin and the controller of Philby, he was never a General in the KGB, never truly defected to the West after his 'flight' from the USSR, and remained a loyal Soviet agent until his death. The 'Orlov' story as it has been accepted until now was largely the invention of the KGB - and one perpetuated long after the end of the Cold War. In this meticulous new biography, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former Soviet intelligence officer, now tells the true story behind 'Orlov' for the first time. An intriguing tale of Russian espionage and deception, stretching from the time of Lenin to the Putin era, it is a story that many people in the world's intelligence agencies would almost definitely prefer you not to know about.

On Stalin's Team

On Stalin's Team PDF Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Explanatory Note -- Glossary -- The Team Emerges -- The Great Break -- In Power -- The Team on View -- The Great Purges -- Into War -- Postwar Hopes -- Aging Leader -- Without Stalin -- End of the Road -- Biographies

Trotsky

Trotsky PDF Author: Robert Service
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036154
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
This illuminating portrait of Leon Trotsky sets the record straight on the common misconceptions about the man and his legacy. Completing his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union, Service delivers an authoritative biography.

Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Edvard Radzinsky
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307754685
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
From the author of The Last Tsar, the first full-scale life of Stalin to have what no previous biography has fully obtained: the facts. Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion. As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide. As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.

Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Leon Trotsky
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1394

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Book Description
On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.

Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 073522448X
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.