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Stalin's life is one of the most extraordinary of the modern era, both to the man himself and to the world which he dominated and ruined. This second volume is the story of the 'mature' dictator - a figure who had no precedent in ability to shape the USSR and its people. Kotkin's book places Stalin in the context of his day-to-day life in the Kremlin and in the far wider Communist world of which he was the apex. The terror state, the industrial state and the ideological state were all brought together by Stalin in this account of the inter-war world. It finishes when the 'waiting for Hitler' finally came to an end, transforming the nature of the threat faced by both Stalin and the whole society he had shaped.
"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ru...
The Second World War almost destroyed Stalin's Soviet Union. But victory over Nazi Germany provided the dictator with his great opportunity: to expand Soviet power way beyond the borders of the Soviet state. Well before the shooting stopped in 1945, the Soviet leader methodically set about the unprecedented task of creating a Red Empire that would soon stretch into the heart of Europe and Asia, displaying a supreme realism and ruthlessness that Machiavelli would surely have envied. By the time of his death in 1953, his new imperium was firmly in place, defining the contours of a Cold War world that was seemingly permanent and indestructible - and would last until the collapse of the Berlin W...
'A superb work of scholarship, full of riveting detail' Sunday Times A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944. In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, due to deliberate policies unrelated to combat. Here, Timothy...
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...
This book explores events in Georgia in the years following Stalin’s death in March 1953, especially the demonstrations of March 1956 and their brutal suppression, in order to illuminate the tensions in Georgia between veneration of the memory of Stalin, a Georgian, together with the associated respect for the Soviet system that he had created, and growing nationalism. The book considers how not just Stalin but also his wider circle of Georgians were at the heart of the Soviet system, outlines how greatly Stalin was revered in Georgia, and charts the rise of Khrushchev and his denunciation of Stalin. It goes on to examine the different strands of the rising Georgian nationalist movements, discusses the repressive measures taken against demonstrators, and concludes by showing how the repressions transformed a situation where Georgian nationalism, the honouring of Stalin’s memory and the Soviet system were all aligned together into a situation where an increasingly assertive nationalist movement was firmly at odds with the Soviet Union.
Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, ‘ladies’ man’ (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, father and hunted victim, Trotsky lived a brilliant life in extraordinary times. Robert Service draws on hitherto unexamined archives and on his profound understanding of Russian history to draw a portrait of the man and his legacy, revealing that though his followers have represented Trotsky as a pure revolutionary soul and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin and his henchmen. The reality is very different, as this masterful and compelling biography reveals.
"During his reign, Joseph Stalin oversaw the forced resettlement of people by the millions - a maniacal passion that he used for social engineering. Six million people were resettled before Stalin's death. This volume is the first attempt to comprehensively examine the history of forced and semi-voluntary population movements within or organized by the Soviet Union. Contents range from the early 1920s to the rehabilitation of repressed nationalities in the 1990s, dealing with internal (kulaks, ethnic and political deportations) and international forced migrations (German internees and occupied territories)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.
"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ru...