Stalin's Captive

Stalin's Captive PDF Author: Nikolaus Riehl
Publisher: Chemical Heritage Foundation
ISBN: 9780841233102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
After World War II, German scientist Nikolaus Riehl and his family were held captive in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1955. His story is uniquely interesting in part because of its historical content, in part because he was bilingual in German and Russian, having grown up in St. Petersburg as the son of a German father and a Russian mother, and as a result of his warm human interest in the Russian people. He tells his story in Ten Years in a Golden Cage. Frederick Seitz has written a detailed introduction that provides a historical context for his translation (from German) of Riehl's book.

Stalin's Captive

Stalin's Captive PDF Author: Nikolaus Riehl
Publisher: Chemical Heritage Foundation
ISBN: 9780841233102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
After World War II, German scientist Nikolaus Riehl and his family were held captive in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1955. His story is uniquely interesting in part because of its historical content, in part because he was bilingual in German and Russian, having grown up in St. Petersburg as the son of a German father and a Russian mother, and as a result of his warm human interest in the Russian people. He tells his story in Ten Years in a Golden Cage. Frederick Seitz has written a detailed introduction that provides a historical context for his translation (from German) of Riehl's book.

Stalin's Italian Prisoners of War

Stalin's Italian Prisoners of War PDF Author: Maria Teresa Giusti
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Stalin's Loyal Executioner

Stalin's Loyal Executioner PDF Author: Marc Jansen
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
ISBN: 0817929061
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.

Soviet Soft Power in Poland

Soviet Soft Power in Poland PDF Author: Patryk Babiracki
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.

Captivity

Captivity PDF Author: György Spiró
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1632060493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
This translation originally copyrighted in 2010.

A Prisoner of Stalin

A Prisoner of Stalin PDF Author: Christian Huber
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1526733226
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Leutnant Gerhard Ehlert was one of the few survivors of 2. Nachtaufklärungsstaffel, part of the Luftwaffe’s 6th Air Fleet, which operated on Eastern Front during the Second World War. Although he came from a family that spoke out against Hitler and the Nazi regime, he volunteered to join the Luftwaffe. He went on to undertake combat patrols under the most extreme circumstances. Facing hazardous weather conditions – often landing his aircraft ‘blind’ in heavy fog – and mountainous odds against Soviet air superiority, Ehlert completed twenty-two sorties before his Dornier Do 217M-1, coded K7+FK, was shot down on 14 June 1944. Despite strenuous efforts to escape the Soviets, along with his rear-gunner Feldwebel Wilhelm Burr, he was captured by the Red Army. What followed changed his life forever. Though interrogated repeatedly, Ehlert revealed nothing about his missions or duties. Then, during his transfer to a prisoner of war camp, he had to face a hostile crowd of Russian civilians who had suffered from the devastating effects of the Luftwaffe’s bombs. In the long journey eastwards across the bleak Russian steppes to the camp at Yelabuga, a town in the Republic of Tatarstan, Ehlert reflected on his early years and the road he took to the east and the horrifying situation he was in. But it was not the months he endured in the freezing prisoner of war camp which became his most haunting memory – it was when the war ended. The Russians announced that with peace came new rules. Now the prisoners must work and the food ration would be reduced. Their uniforms were removed, and all privileges of rank dismissed. To the Soviets they were no longer prisoners of war, they were mere criminals and were treated accordingly. Transferred to Bolshoy Bor in the north, day after day the men had to transport logs, even through the snow and ice of winter, with many of the prisoners dying of malnutrition and exposure. The Russians told them they were ‘to rebuild what they destroyed in the Soviet Union’. Ehlert’s suffering finally ended in 1949. He was able to return to his parental home, initially being treated as an unwelcome stranger. When he related his story to Christian Huber, Gerhard Ehlert was in his 90s, by then a happy father and grandfather, and undoubtedly a survivor.

True Believer

True Believer PDF Author: Kati Marton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476763763
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
'True Believer' is a suspenseful real-life spy thriller of danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery and pure evil with a plot twist worthy of John Le Carre.

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.

The Stalin Organ

The Stalin Organ PDF Author: Gert Ledig
Publisher: Granta Books (Uk)
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A powerful and sombre account of the horrific violence of World War II.