The Cold War After Stalin's Death

The Cold War After Stalin's Death PDF Author: Klaus Larres
Publisher: Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
After Stalin's death in March 1953, the Cold War changed almost overnight. The Soviet Union embarked on a course of reconciliation and greater openness. However, despite an end to the Korean War and progress on many other outstanding East-West questions, the Western world remained mistrustful of Soviet motives and policies and Soviet leaders remained suspicious of Western intentions. Less than a decade after Stalin's death the Berlin Wall was erected and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world close to nuclear annihilation. Was this development unavoidable? Was an opportunity missed to overcome and terminate the Cold War? Was there a possibility for the creation of a more stable, less threatening, and less costly world in both human and material terms? It is only now, after the end of the Cold War and based on recently declassified western documents and revelations from once-closed archives in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, that new light can be shed on the nature of international Cold War policies in the years after Stalin's death. The essays in this book offer a historical understanding of this crucial period of the Cold War, assessing both the possibilities for change and the obstacles to d tente. The book draws on the collective talents of an international group of scholars with a wide range of historical, geographical, and linguistic expertise. All of the essays are based on original research, many of them drawing from previously inaccessible archival documents from both the East and West. This book should be read by everyone interested in the final stage of the defining conflict that was the Cold War. Contributions by: Csaba B k s, G nter Bischof, Jeffrey Brooks, Ira Chernus, Jerald A. Combs, Lloyd Gardner, Jussi M. Hanhim ki, Hope M. Harrison, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Mark Kramer, Klaus Larres, Vojtech Mastny, Kenneth Osgood, Kathryn C. Statler, and Qiang Zhai

The Cold War After Stalin's Death

The Cold War After Stalin's Death PDF Author: Klaus Larres
Publisher: Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
After Stalin's death in March 1953, the Cold War changed almost overnight. The Soviet Union embarked on a course of reconciliation and greater openness. However, despite an end to the Korean War and progress on many other outstanding East-West questions, the Western world remained mistrustful of Soviet motives and policies and Soviet leaders remained suspicious of Western intentions. Less than a decade after Stalin's death the Berlin Wall was erected and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world close to nuclear annihilation. Was this development unavoidable? Was an opportunity missed to overcome and terminate the Cold War? Was there a possibility for the creation of a more stable, less threatening, and less costly world in both human and material terms? It is only now, after the end of the Cold War and based on recently declassified western documents and revelations from once-closed archives in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, that new light can be shed on the nature of international Cold War policies in the years after Stalin's death. The essays in this book offer a historical understanding of this crucial period of the Cold War, assessing both the possibilities for change and the obstacles to d tente. The book draws on the collective talents of an international group of scholars with a wide range of historical, geographical, and linguistic expertise. All of the essays are based on original research, many of them drawing from previously inaccessible archival documents from both the East and West. This book should be read by everyone interested in the final stage of the defining conflict that was the Cold War. Contributions by: Csaba B k s, G nter Bischof, Jeffrey Brooks, Ira Chernus, Jerald A. Combs, Lloyd Gardner, Jussi M. Hanhim ki, Hope M. Harrison, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Mark Kramer, Klaus Larres, Vojtech Mastny, Kenneth Osgood, Kathryn C. Statler, and Qiang Zhai

The Last Days of Stalin

The Last Days of Stalin PDF Author: Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300192223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.

Inside the Kremlin's Cold War

Inside the Kremlin's Cold War PDF Author: Vladislav Martinovich Zubok
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Using recently uncovered archival materials, personal interviews, and a broad familiarity with Russian history and culture, two young Russian historians have written a major interpretation of the Cold War as seen from the Soviet shore. Covering the volatile period from 1945 to 1962, Zubok and Pleshakov explore the personalities and motivations of the key people who directed Soviet political life and shaped Soviet foreign policy. They begin with the fearsome figure of Joseph Stalin, who was driven by the dual dream of a Communist revolution and a global empire. They reveal the scope and limits of Stalin's ambitions by taking us into the world of his closest subordinates, the ruthless and unimaginative foreign minister Molotov and the Party's chief propagandist, Zhdanov, a man brimming with hubris and missionary zeal. The authors expose the machinations of the much-feared secret police chief Beria and the party cadre manager Malenkov, who tried but failed to set Soviet policies on a different course after Stalin's death. Finally, they document the motives and actions of the self-made and self-confident Nikita Khrushchev, full of Russian pride and party dogma, who overturned many of Stalin's policies with bold strategizing on a global scale. The authors show how, despite such attempts to change Soviet diplomacy, Stalin's legacy continued to divide Germany and Europe, and led the Soviets to the split with Maoist China and to the Cuban missile crisis. Zubok and Pleshakov's groundbreaking work reveals how Soviet statesmen conceived and conducted their rivalry with the West within the context of their own domestic and global concerns and aspirations. The authors persuasively demonstrate thatthe Soviet leaders did not seek a conflict with the United States, yet failed to prevent it or bring it to conclusion. They also document why and how Kremlin policy-makers, cautious and scheming as they were, triggered the gravest crises of the Cold War in Korea, Berlin, and Cuba.

Molotov

Molotov PDF Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1574889451
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
More than a top Soviet bureaucrat

Stalin's Curse

Stalin's Curse PDF Author: Robert Gellately
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

Reconstructing the Cold War

Reconstructing the Cold War PDF Author: Ted Hopf
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199858489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This title explores how the early years of the Cold War were marked by contradictions and conflict. It looks at how the turn from Stalin's discourse of danger to the discourse of difference under his successors explains the abrupt changes in relations with Eastern Europe, China, the decolonizing world, and the West.

From Communism to Anti-Communism

From Communism to Anti-Communism PDF Author: Collectif
Publisher: Graduate Institute Publications
ISBN: 2940503974
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Boris Souvarine moved from communism, in the first years of the Soviet régime, to anti-communism by the 1930s and throughout the rest of his long life. This book gives us a new and original perspective on the period that runs from the Russian Revolution to the 1950s and allows us to better understand that era. The documents come from the Boris Souvarine Collection consisting of his working notes, press clippings, and documentation concerning East-West relations collected by Souvarine.

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era PDF Author: William Taubman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393324842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 929

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Book Description
Tells the life story of twentieth-century Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, featuring information from previously inaccessible Russian and Ukrainian archives.

State of Madness

State of Madness PDF Author: Rebecca Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609092333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Stalin and the Bomb

Stalin and the Bomb PDF Author: David Holloway
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300164459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.