Author: R. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113736257X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Based on extensive research in formerly secret archives, this volume examines the progress of Soviet industrialisation against the background of the rising threat of aggression from Germany, Japan and Italy, and the consolidation of Stalin's power.
Author: R. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113736257X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Based on extensive research in formerly secret archives, this volume examines the progress of Soviet industrialisation against the background of the rising threat of aggression from Germany, Japan and Italy, and the consolidation of Stalin's power.
Author: R. Davies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333586853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Based on extensive research in formerly secret archives, this volume examines the progress of Soviet industrialisation against the background of the rising threat of aggression from Germany, Japan and Italy, and the consolidation of Stalin's power.
Author: R. W. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137362383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457
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Book Description
This book concludes The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, an authoritative account of the Soviet Union’s industrial transformation between 1929 and 1939. The volume before this one covered the ‘good years’ (in economic terms) of 1934 to 1936. The present volume has a darker tone: beginning from the Great Terror, it ends with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During that time, Soviet society was repeatedly mobilised against internal and external enemies, and the economy provided one of the main arenas for the struggle. This was expressed in waves of repression, intensive rearmament, the increased regimentation of the workforce and the widespread use of forced labour.
Author: Lara Douds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
Author: R. W. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349059358
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 629
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Book Description
The profound economic crisis of 1931-33 undermined the process of industrialisation and the stability of the regime. In spite of feverish efforts to achieve the over ambitious first five-year plan, the great industrial projects lagged far behind schedule. These were years of inflation, economic disorder and of terrible famine in 1933. In response to the crisis, policies and systems changed significantly. Greater realism prevailed: more moderate plans, reduced investment, strict monetary controls, and more emphasis on economic incentives and the role of the market. The reforms failed to prevent the terrible famine of 1933, in which millions of peasants died. But the last months of 1933 saw the first signs of an industrial boom, the outcome of the huge investments of previous years. Using the previously secret archives of the Politburo and the Council of People's Commissars, the author shows how during these formative years the economic system acquired the shape which it retained until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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.
Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000955443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
Stalin and War, 1918-1953 is the first book to examine the patterns of radicalized internal violence that characterized the Stalinist regime across the whole of the dictator’s rule, and it is one of the only works to connect patterns of internal violence to the dictator’s perceptions of war and foreign threat. Discussion focuses on the crisis years 1928-1932, 1936-1939, the Great Fatherland War, and the last war crisis period, 1947-1953. Violent repressions under Stalin were cyclical. They peaked and ebbed but, in each case, they were linked to Stalin’s expectation of war and invasion, to his perceived need for urgent internal mobilization, and to intense foreign policy activity. Stalin’s behavior in each of these perceived war crises followed a pattern established during the dictator's experience as a military commander in the Russian revolutionary wars, and especially during the Polish war in 1919 and 1920. Together, these chapters trace a consistent and interconnected logic of war and repression throughout Stalin’s political life. This book will be of interest to professional scholars of Soviet history, twentieth-century history, and World War II history, and it is approachable enough to be appreciated by general readers.
Author: Olga Velikanova
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319784439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
This book is the first full-length study of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, exploring Soviet citizens’ views of constitutional democratic principles and their problematic relationship to the reality of Stalinism. Drawing on archival materials, the book offers an insight into the mass political culture of the mid-1930s in the USSR and thus contributes to wider research on Russian political culture. Popular comments about the constitution show how liberal, democratic and conciliatory discourse co-existed in society with illiberal, confrontational and intolerant views. The study also covers the government’s goals for the constitution’s revision and the national discussion, and its disappointment with the results. Outcomes of the discussion convinced Stalin that society was not sufficiently Sovietized. Stalin's re-evaluation of society's condition is a new element in the historical picture explaining why politics shifted from the relaxation of 1933-36 to the Great Terror, and why repressions expanded from former oppositionists to the officials and finally to the wider population.
Author: R. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230273971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582
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Book Description
This book examines the Soviet agricultural crisis of 1931-1933 which culminated in the major famine of 1933. It is the first volume in English to make extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian central and local archives to assess the extent and causes of the famine. It reaches new conclusions on how far the famine was 'organized' or 'artificial', and compares it with other Russian and Soviet famines and with major twentieth century famines elsewhere. Against this background, it discusses the emergence of collective farming as an economic and social system.
