Author: James Klugmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Author: Dan La Botz
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
ISBN: 1647187397
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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In this counter-historical novel, Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, survived the assassination attempt of August 1940. To prevent another such attempt, his protector, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, had him moved to the small, isolated border town of Tijuana. There Trotsky, continues to write political analyses and books and attempts to lead his worldwide revolutionary organization, the Fourth International, though he is frustrated by his isolation from the center of developments in Europe. Watching over Trotsky, among others, are his bodyguard Ralph Bucek, a young leftist and baseball fan from Chicago, and the French-educated Mexican Army officer Colonel de la Fuente. Through them Trotsky learns about his new home, Tijuana, a surprisingly cosmopolitan town. Living with his wife Natalia and his grandson Sieva, served by secretaries and protected by bodyguards, Trotsky’s domestic circle is small and his life narrow. He is growing old and losing his sight. Then along come the Broadway theatrical agent Morrie Gold and his friend the stand-up comedienne Rachel Silberstein. Trotsky’s wife, Natalia, worried about his psychological well-being insists that he see the famous Freudian (and one-time Reichian) psychoanalyst Dr. David Bergman. While we observe Trotsky in exile, we also see Stalin in power, in his “Little Corner” in the Kremlin, in his dachas, with members of the Central Committee and with his daughter Svetlana. We see him planning the failed assassination of Trotsky in August 1940. In his reveries, we learn of his difficult life as a young man, his great love, his first child, his experiences in prison. We see Stalin carrying out the purges, executing the industrialization of Russia, dealing with Adolf Hitler, heading the Soviet Union in war. We watch as Stalin’s anti-Semitism drives the prosecution of Rudolf Slánsky for the supposed Tito-Trotsky plot in Czechoslovakia of as he goes after the Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union. As time goes on Trotsky is surprised that that his predictions for the post-war period don't seem to be working out. One day, Étienne, the Eastern European who worked for Trotsky’s International in Paris and who some believe may have murdered Trotsky’s son, appears in Tijuana, offering to serve as his Russian secretary. And Trotsky’s erstwhile ally Victor Serge visits and asks Trotsky to join him in an attempt to build a new socialist movement in post-war Europe. Meanwhile, Trotsky’s brilliant former secretary, the mathematician Jan van Heijenoort, has sworn to murder Stalin, but the odds are not good. With the coming of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy calls on Trotsky to testify before his committee. Was it a coincidence that Stalin and Trotsky died on the same day on the same day, March 5, 1953? Through all of this we see just what sort of a man Trotsky was.

Author: Will Podmore
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1503531104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book traces the history of revolutions and counterrevolutions since 1917, in Russia, Korea, Vietnam, China, the countries of Eastern Europe, and Cuba. I present the evidence of their achievements and describe the wars they were forced to fight in self-defence. We can learn from the efforts and the errors of the pioneers, even though their conditions of being pre-industrial and dependent societies were very different from Britains today. The hope is that this book will provoke thought about the future of our nation in order to help us to decide what we need to do, not to copy but to create.

Author: Geoffrey Swain
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317812786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Supporters of Stalin saw Trotsky as a traitor and renegade. Trotsky’s own supporters saw him as the only true Leninist. In Trotsky and the Russian Revolution, Geoffrey Swain restores Trotsky to his real and central role in the Russian Revolution. In this succinct and comprehensive study, Swain contests that: In the years between 1903 and 1917, it was the ideas of Trotsky, rather than Lenin, which shaped the nascent Bolshevik Party and prepared it for the overthrow of the Tsar. During the autumn of 1917 workers supported Trotsky’s idea of an insurrection carried out by the soviet, rather than Lenin’s demand for a party orchestrated coup d’etat. During the Russian Civil War, Trotsky persuaded a sceptical Lenin that the only way to victory was through the employment of officers trained in the Tsar’s army. As well as examining Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s, this seminar reader probes deeper to explore the ideas which drove Trotsky forward during his years of influence over Russia’s revolutionary politics, exploring such key concepts as how to construct a revolutionary party, how to stage a successful insurrection, how to fight a revolutionary war, and how to build a socialist state.

Author: Paul Le Blanc
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004389288
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence: Uneven and Combined Development is the third of a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky’s confrontation with Stalinism in the global Communist movement. Spanning 1954 to 1965, this volume surveys the Cold War era, the civil rights and black liberation movements, the 'third wave' of feminism, and other social and cultural developments of the 1950s and 1960s. Documenting responses to a variety of anti-colonial and revolutionary insurgencies, the volume also surveys the crisis and decline of Stalinism. Attention is given to internal debates and splits, but also to the partial reunification of the international Trotskyist movement (the Fourth International), as well as substantial contributions to the study of history and the development of Marxist theory. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.

Author: Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin
Publisher: Mehring Books
ISBN: 1893638049
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic. Through a meticulous examination of original sources, including archival documents only made available for research in the 1990s, Professor Vadim Rogovin argues that the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Far from Trotsky being a politically isolated figure, as both Stalinist and anti-communist historians have claimed, there was substantial sympathy for his criticism of the Stalin regime in the ranks and even in the leadership of the CPSU, and support for his demands for inner-party democracy, greater social equality and an international orientation to the Bolshevik goal of world revolution. It was this political fact, as Rogovin demonstrates, that accounts for the purge reaching so deeply into the party apparatus, the military, the Komsomol youth movement, and the broader layers of the population. Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts. He documents the reaction of different social layers to the purges, including workers, peasants, non-party intellectuals and the CPSU rank-and-file. This book includes rarely published photographs of the prison camps, documenting the lives of those labeled by Stalin;enemies of the people. Chronologically, this volume takes up where its predecessor, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror , left off, with the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee that followed the purging of the Soviet military command and the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. It analyzes such critical events as the Bukharin-Rykov trial, last of the infamous show trials; the massacre of Trotskyists in the Vorkuta slave-labor camp; and the assassination by Stalinist agents of Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and other oppositionists outside the Soviet Union. It concludes with an examination of how the purges transformed the CPSU and Soviet society as a whole.

Author: Geoff Swain
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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In this, the first post-communist biography of Tito, the renowned historian Geoffrey Swain paints a new picture of this famous figure. Swain explores not only Tito's relationship with Stalin, but also his earlier relationship with the Comintern and his long engagement with Khrushchev and the de-Stalinisation process. --Book Jacket.

Author: Richard West
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571281109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Few figures have dominated a nation's destiny as much as Marshal Tito of former Yugoslavia. For nearly thirty years he held together mutually hostile religious groups in a deeply divided country, but his death in 1980 rekindled centuries-old hatreds and by 1992 Yugoslavia ceased to exist. In this revealing biography, Richard West questions the full impact of Tito's reign of power and his implicit responsibility for the ensuing violent, bloody war in Bosnia. 'Excellent ... I recommend his book for those who already know about Yugoslavia and want food for thought about the future.' David Owen, Sunday Times 'Admirable ... Carefully researched and extremely readable.' Literary Review 'A passionate book, in which West's historical sense is interlaced with his own very intimate knowledge of Yugoslavia from the late 1940s on and of the poignancy of [subsequent] events.' Fergus Pyle, Irish Times 'Masterly'. Glasgow Herald

Author: Geoff Eley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198021407
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
Democracy in Europe has been a recent phenomenon. Only in the wake of World War II were democratic frameworks secured, and, even then, it was decades before democracy truly blanketed the continent. Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve organically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came to form the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together. Geoff Eley has given us the first truly comprehensive history of the European Left--its successes and failures; its high watermarks and its low tides; its accomplishments, insufficiencies, and excesses; and, most importantly, its formative, lasting influence on the European political landscape. At a time when the Left's influence and legitimacy are frequently called into question, Forging Democracy passionately upholds its vital contribution.

Author: Geoff Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857726145
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and others, Klugmann was the man who manipulated promising recruits deemed ripe for conversion to the communist cause. This perception of him was reinforced following the release of his MI5 file and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence files in Moscow, which revealed he played the key part in the recruitment of John Cairncross, the 'fifth man', as well as his pivotal war-time role in the Special Operations Executive in shifting Churchill and the allies to support Tito and the communist partisans in Yugoslavia. In this book, Geoff Andrews reveals Klugmann's story in full for the first time, uncovering the motivations, conflicts and illusions of those drawn into the world of communism and the sacrifices they made on its behalf.