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Debates on Stalinism introduces major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. Did 'Stalinism' form a system in its own right or was it a mere stage in the overall development of Soviet society? Was it an aberration from Leninism or the logical conclusion of Marxism? Was its violence the revenge of the Russian past or the result of a revolutionary mindset? Was Stalinism the work of a madman or the product of social forces beyond his control? The book shows the complexities of historiographical debates, where evidence, politics, personality, and biography are strongly entangled. Debates on Stalinism allows readers to better understand not only the history of history writing, but also contemporary controversies and conflicts in the successor states of the Soviet Union, in particular Russia and Ukraine.
The first systematic study of the phenomenon of frontline surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union's 'Great Patriotic War' against the Nazis in 1941-1945, showing that while people were disgruntled with Stalin's rule, most attempts to cross the frontline stemmed from a wish to survive this war, rather than a desire to support Hitler's regime.
In February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a fellow East Slav state with much shared history. Mark Edele, a world authority on the history of the Soviet Union, explains why and how this conflict came about. He considers competing historical claims and arguments with authority and lucidity. His primary focus, however, is on the different paths taken by these two former members of the Soviet Union. Since the implosion of that state in 1991, Ukraine has developed a vibrant, if often troubled, democracy. For an increasingly dictatorial Russian political elite, including but not limited to Vladimir Putin, Ukraine has appeared more and more threatening. Humiliated by the degradation of Russia's international standing, feeling betrayed by an expanding NATO and anxious about democratic revolutions in the former Soviet space, Putin and his allies have increasingly retreated into a resentful ultra-nationalism. Dreams of past imperial glory stand in place of any attempt to solve the problems of the present.
Preparing for war -- The war begins in the East, 1937-39 -- War in the West, 1939-40 -- Armageddon, 1941-42 -- Recovery, 1941-42 -- Triumph, 1943-45 -- War of ideologies -- The war after the war, 1944-49 -- Impact and aftermath.
Debates on Stalinism introduces major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. It introduces major debates and major historians of the Soviet Union during the brutal reign of Stalin. Readers will better understand not only the history of our current understanding of Stalinism but also contemporary debates in Russia and Ukraine.
Stalinist Society offers a fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation ruled over by Stalin and his henchmen from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Drawing on declassified archival materials, interviews with former Soviet citizens, old and new memoirs, and personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship, this book offers a non-reductionist account of social upheaval and social cohesion in a society marred by violence. Combining the perspectives from above and from below, the book integrates recent writing on everyday life, culture and entertainment, ideology and politics, terror and welfare, consumption and economics. Utilizing the latest archival research on the evolution of Soviet society during and after World War II, this study also integrates the entire history of Stalinism from the late 1920s to the dictator's death in 1953. Breaking radically with current scholarly consensus, Mark Edele shows that it was not ideology, terror, or state control which held this society together, but the harsh realities of making a living in a chaotic economy which the rulers claimed to plan and control, but which in fact they could only manage haphazardly.
In February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a fellow East Slav state with much shared history. Mark Edele, a world authority on the history of the Soviet Union, explains why and how this conflict came about. He considers competing historical claims and arguments with authority and lucidity. His primary focus, however, is on the different paths taken by these two former members of the Soviet Union. Since the implosion of that state in 1991, Ukraine has developed a vibrant, if often troubled, democracy. For an increasingly dictatorial Russian political elite, including but not limited to Vladimir Putin, Ukraine has appeared more and more threatening. Humiliated by the degradation of Russia's international standing, feeling betrayed by an expanding NATO and anxious about democratic revolutions in the former Soviet space, Putin and his allies have increasingly retreated into a resentful ultra-nationalism. Dreams of past imperial glory stand in place of any attempt to solve the problems of the present.
On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter White...
These essays rethink the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. They offer a new understanding of the intertwined trajectories of socialism and nationalism in European and global history.
This pioneering volume will interest scholars of eastern European history and Holocaust studies, as well as those with an interest in refugee and migration issues.