Good Stalin

Good Stalin
Author: Victor Erofeyev
Publisher:
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781782671114

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"Erofeev's autobiographical novel provides both a child's and an adult's perspective on several decades of Soviet history. The book documents not only the emergence of a prominent writer, but also looks at the evolution of the Soviet dissident movement amongst the nomenklatura"--Publisher's website.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides
Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400836069

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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.

Art Under Stalin

Art Under Stalin
Author: Matthew Cullerne Bown
Publisher: Holmes & Meier Publishers
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1991
Genre: Art
ISBN:

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Shostakovich and Stalin

Shostakovich and Stalin
Author: Solomon Volkov
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307427722

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“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

Stalin's Great Science

Stalin's Great Science
Author: A. B. Kozhevnikov
Publisher: Imperial College Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2004
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781860944208

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World-class science and technology developed in the Soviet Union during Stalin's dictatorial rule under conditions of political violence, lack of international contacts, and severe restrictions on the freedom of information. Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists is an invaluable book that investigates this paradoxical success by following the lives and work of Soviet scientists ? including Nobel Prize-winning physicists Kapitza, Landau, and others ? throughout the turmoil of wars, revolutions, and repression that characterized the first half of Russia's twentieth century.The book examines how scientists operated within the Soviet political order, communicated with Stalinist politicians, built a new system of research institutions, and conducted groundbreaking research under extraordinary circumstances. Some of their novel scientific ideas and theories reflected the influence of Soviet ideology and worldview and have since become accepted universally as fundamental concepts of contemporary science. In the process of making sense of the achievements of Soviet science, the book dismantles standard assumptions about the interaction between science, politics, and ideology, as well as many dominant stereotypes ? mostly inherited from the Cold War ? about Soviet history in general. Science and technology were not only granted unprecedented importance in Soviet society, but they also exerted a crucial formative influence on the Soviet political system itself. Unlike most previous studies, Stalin's Great Science recognizes the status of science as an essential element of the Soviet polity and explores the nature of a special relationship between experts (scientists and engineers) and communist politicians that enabled the initial rise of the Soviet state and its mature accomplishments, until the pact eroded in later years, undermining the communist regime from within.

Conversations with Stalin

Conversations with Stalin
Author: Milovan Djilas
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1962
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780156225915

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Content: Written from his experiences as a vice-president of Yugoslavia and aide to Tito, the author here records face to face meetingwith Stalin from 1944-1953. The author was imprisoned by the Yugoslav government from 1957-1961.

Bloodlands

Bloodlands
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2012-10-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465032974

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From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

The Year I Was Peter the Great

The Year I Was Peter the Great
Author: Marvin Kalb
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0815731620

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" A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia—and molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called “the year of the thaw”—a time when Stalin’s dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a “genius,” a wizard of communism—Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a “madman” whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year’s end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship. "

Stalin's Wine Cellar

Stalin's Wine Cellar
Author: John Baker
Publisher: Random House Australia
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Georgia (Republic)
ISBN: 1761043668

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The adventure of a lifetime to buy Stalin's secret multimillion dollar wine cellar located in Georgia; it is the Raiders of the Lost Ark of wine. In the late 1990s, John Baker was known as a purveyor of quality rare and old wines. He was the perfect person for an occasional business partner to approach with a mysterious wine list that was different to anything John, or his second-in-command, Kevin Hopko, had ever come across. The list was discovered to be a comprehensive catalogue of the wine collection of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. The wine had become the property of the state after the Russian Revolution of 1918, during which Nicholas and his entire family were executed. Now owned by Stalin, the wine was discreetly removed to a remote Georgian winery when Stalin was concerned the advancing Nazi army might overrun Russia. Half a century later, the wine was rumoured to be hidden underground and off any known map. John and Kevin embarked on an audacious, colourful and potentially dangerous journey to Georgia to discover if the wines actually existed; if the bottles were authentic and whether the entire collection could be bought and transported to a major London auction house for sale. Stalin's Wine Cellar is a wild, sometimes rough ride through the glamorous world of high-end wine.

Assured Victory

Assured Victory
Author: Albert L. Weeks
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0313391661

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This book documents dictator Joseph Stalin's brilliant tactics as well as missteps in taking preemptive actions that guaranteed ultimate victory over the German invaders. It also covers the policies implemented after the war that made the Soviet Union a menace to world peace and led to collapse of Soviet rule. A detailed reexamination of historical facts indicates that Stalin could deserve to be regarded as a "great leader." Yet Stalin clearly failed as his nation's leader in a post-World War II milieu, where he delivered the Cold War instead of rapid progress and global cooperation. It is the proof of both Stalin's brilliance and blunders that makes him such a fascinating figure in modern history. Today, most of the Russian population acknowledges that Stalin achieved "greatness." The Soviet dictator's honored place in history is largely due to Stalin successfully attending to the Soviet Union's defense needs in the 1930s and 1940s, and leading the USSR to victory in the war on the Eastern Front against Nazi Germany and its allies. This book provides an overdue critical investigation of how the Soviet leader's domestic and foreign policies actually helped produce this victory, and above all, how Stalin's timely support of a wartime alliance with the Western capitalist democracies assured the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945.