Understand Stalin's Russia new edition

Understand Stalin's Russia new edition PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Teach Yourself
ISBN: 9781444157567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Understand Stalin's Russia is a compelling introduction to a man and a nation long enveloped in mystery. It covers all aspects of this fascinating history, from the shadows of Tsarism and the legacy of Lenin, to the implications of Stalin's rule - including the horrific effects of the five-year plans, and the heroic but costly triumph in the Great Patriotic War.

Understand Stalin's Russia new edition

Understand Stalin's Russia new edition PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Teach Yourself
ISBN: 9781444157567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understand Stalin's Russia is a compelling introduction to a man and a nation long enveloped in mystery. It covers all aspects of this fascinating history, from the shadows of Tsarism and the legacy of Lenin, to the implications of Stalin's rule - including the horrific effects of the five-year plans, and the heroic but costly triumph in the Great Patriotic War.

The Whisperers

The Whisperers PDF Author: Orlando Figes
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014180887X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 970

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Book Description
Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

Stalin's Russia: Teach Yourself Ebook

Stalin's Russia: Teach Yourself Ebook PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Teach Yourself
ISBN: 1444157582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Understand Stalin's Russia is a compelling introduction to a man and a nation long enveloped in mystery. It covers all aspects of this fascinating history, from the shadows of Tsarism and the legacy of Lenin, to the implications of Stalin's rule - including the horrific effects of the five-year plans, and the heroic but costly triumph in the Great Patriotic War.

The Commissar Vanishes

The Commissar Vanishes PDF Author: David King
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780805052954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."

Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926–1934

Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926–1934 PDF Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In his reexamination of the origins of the Stalinist state during the formative period of rapid industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, David R. Shearer argues that a centralized state-controlled economic system was the consciously conceived political creation of Stalinist leaders rather than the inevitable by-product of socialist industrialization. Focusing on the different economic and bureaucratic cultures within the industrial system, Shearer reconstructs the debates in 1928 and 1929 over administrative, financial, and commercial reform. He uses information from recently opened archives to show that attempts by the state's trading organizations to create a commercial economy enjoyed wide support, offering a model that combined planning and rapid industrialization with social democracy and economic prosperity. In an effort to crush the syndicate movement and establish tight political control over the economy, Stalinist leaders intervened with a program of radical reforms. Shearer demonstrates that professional engineers, planners and industrial administrators in many cases actively supported the creation of a powerful industrial state unhampered by domestic social and economic constraints. The paradoxical result, Shearer shows, was a loss of control. The overly centralized system that emerged during the first Five-Year Plan was rendered incoherent by periodic economic crises and the continuing influence of partially suppressed social and market forces.

Red Famine

Red Famine PDF Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385538863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Inside the Stalin Archives

Inside the Stalin Archives PDF Author: Jonathan Brent
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1921372826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
To most Westerners, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to confront its tortured past. In INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES, Jonathan Brent asks why this didn't happen. Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in the Moscow airport? Brent draws on fifteen years of access to high-level Soviet archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with BMWs. Stalin's spectre hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers, an unnerving prophecy of the world to come. Both cultural history and personal memoir, INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.

Engineers of the Soul

Engineers of the Soul PDF Author: Frank Westerman
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468305336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
A “fascinating” account of how Gorky, Pasternak, and other great writers were coerced to create propaganda for Stalin (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Sunday Times Best Travel Book of the Year In the Soviet Union, writers of renown, described by Stalin as “engineers of the soul,” were encouraged to sing the praises of canal and dam construction under titles such as Energy: The Hydraulic Power Station and Onward, Time! But their enthusiasm—spontaneous and idealistic at first—soon became obligatory, and as these colossal waterworks led to slavery and destruction, Soviet writers such as Maxim Gorky, Isaak Babel, Konstantin Paustovsky, and Boris Pasternak were forced to labor on in the service of a deluded totalitarian society. Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Engineers of the Soul is a journey through contemporary Russia and Soviet-era literature. Frank Westerman, a correspondent living in post-Communist Moscow, examines both the culture landscape under Stalin’s rule and the books—and lives—of writers caught in the wheels of the Soviet system as art and reality were bent to radically new purposes. “Engagingly written and extensively researched, the book covers compelling historical and literary ground.” —Financial Times “A detailed and enthralling account of his journey through Soviet literature including discovering the revolution’s best kept secrets while trying to appreciate the talented writers who created a web of deceit in the name of success.” —Publishers Weekly “A literary travelogue revealing a remarkable geography and a strange, fraught alliance when the pen was not as mighty as the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union . . . insightful.” —Kirkus Reviews

Stalin's War

Stalin's War PDF Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 818

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Book Description
A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.

Stalin's Russia

Stalin's Russia PDF Author: Chris Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9780340731512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is brilliantly captured in this book. Chris Ward conceptualizes the field in a clear and helpful way, offers a synthesis of the vast secondary literature in the area, and provides evaluation of the key issues at stake. This second edition includes the necessary updating, the provision of more maps, and a new chapter on foreign policy.