Saving Stalin

Author : John Kelly
Publisher : Hachette Books
ISBN 13 : 0306902761
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Saving Stalin written by John Kelly and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War II, the Allied leaders banded together, forged a great victory--and created a new and dangerous post-war world. In the summer of 1941, Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt's trusted advisor, arrived in Moscow to assess whether the US should send aid to Russia as it had to Britain. Unofficially, he was there to determine whether Josef Stalin--the man who had killed over six million Ukrainians during the 1930s--was worth saving. In this riveting and sweeping narrative, author John Kelly chronicles the turbulent wartime relationship between the great leaders--Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--and military commanders of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Faced with the greatest challenge of the century, the Allied leaders and their war managers struggled against a common enemy--and each other. The story behind how victory was forged is an epic story, rich in drama, passion and larger-than-life personalities. The Allies eventually triumphed, but at what cost? Using his trademark character-rich writing style and focusing on unique, unknown, and unexplored aspects of the story, Kelly offers a fresh perspective on the decision-making that changed the course of the war--and the course of history. Saving Stalin brings to vivid life the epic story of the century's greatest human catastrophe. It is an unforgettable master work in historical narrative.

Author : Steven Maddox
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253014891
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Saving Stalin's Imperial City written by Steven Maddox and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Succeeds in explaining how and why a war-ravaged city suffering acute shortages invested its scant resources in protecting and reconstructing monuments.” —Slavonic and East European Review Saving Stalin’s Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders’ determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city’s wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing. “A most welcome addition to the historiography of Europe’s bombed cities and their reconstruction after World War II.” —Journal of Modern History

Author : Chris Miller
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469630184
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy written by Chris Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play in the country's dissolution? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that Gorbachev and his allies tried to learn from the great success story of transitions from socialism to capitalism, Deng Xiaoping's China. Why, then, were efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism so much less successful than in China? Making use of never-before-studied documents from the Soviet politburo and other archives, Miller argues that the difference between the Soviet Union and China--and the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse--was not economics but politics. The Soviet government was divided by bitter conflict, and Gorbachev, the ostensible Soviet autocrat, was unable to outmaneuver the interest groups that were threatened by his economic reforms. Miller's analysis settles long-standing debates about the politics and economics of perestroika, transforming our understanding of the causes of the Soviet Union's rapid demise.

Author : Lewis E. Kaplan
Publisher : Algora Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0875864651
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God Bless You Joe Stalin written by Lewis E. Kaplan and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin has been accused of many things; add to the list his role as the father of modern-day economics. The author traces the evolution of the concept of the Almighty Dollar against the backdrop of the Cold War, demonstrates how individual decisions made.

Author : Stephen Kotkin
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 073522448X
Total Pages : 1249 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 1249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

Author : Timothy Snyder
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465032974
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jeff Eden
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190076291
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God Save the USSR written by Jeff Eden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, as the Soviet Red Army was locked in brutal combat against the Nazis, Joseph Stalin ended the state's violent, decades-long persecution of religion. In a stunning reversal, priests, imams, rabbis, and other religious elites--many of them newly-released from the Gulag--were tasked with rallying Soviet citizens to a "Holy War" against Hitler. To the delight of some citizens, and to the horror of others, Stalin's reversal encouraged a widespread perception that his "war on religion" was over. A revolution in Soviet religious life ensued: soldiers prayed on the battlefield, entire villages celebrated once-banned holidays, and state-backed religious leaders used their new positions not only to consolidate power over their communities, but also to petition for further religious freedoms. Offering a window on this wartime "religious revolution," God Save the USSR focuses on the Soviet Union's Muslims, using sources in several languages (including Russian, Tatar, Bashkir, Uzbek, and Persian). Drawing evidence from eyewitness accounts, interviews, soldiers' letters, frontline poetry, agents' reports, petitions, and the words of Soviet Muslim leaders, Jeff Eden argues that the religious revolution was fomented simultaneously by the state and by religious Soviet citizens: the state gave an inch, and many citizens took a mile, as atheist Soviet agents looked on in exasperation at the resurgence of unconcealed devotional life.

Author : Reagan Fancher
Publisher : Vernon Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Red Warrior: U.S. Perceptions of Stalin’s Strategic Role in the Allied Journey to Victory in The Second World War written by Reagan Fancher and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, American leaders sought to keep Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the field and fighting Adolf Hitler’s forces in the Second World War from 1941 forward. Delivered by the Anglo-American Arctic naval convoys, overland through the Iranian deserts and mountains, and through the skies from Alaska to Siberia, this much-needed material aid helped Stalin’s Red Army to continue fighting and thereby prevented a separate peace with Hitler’s Germany and a mechanized repeat of the First World War’s Brest-Litovsk fiasco. Yet Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, due to their severe underestimation of Stalin’s character and his rigid and fanatical devotion to exporting Communism at gunpoint, gambled incorrectly that they could win the Soviet premier’s heart and mind through several excessive wartime aid gestures, including the furnishing of atomic bomb materials to the Soviet regime. By 1945, American leaders had succeeded in their strategic goal of keeping Stalin and his Red Army in the war and hastening victory but failed in their efforts to purchase the Soviet premier’s goodwill and commitment to postwar peace, heralding the global Cold War, and setting the stage for later U.S. martial aid programs to those resisting aggression abroad. In addition to its primary focus on the American leadership’s perceptions of Stalin’s strategic importance to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, this work also includes a detailed assessment of Roosevelt’s Soviet Lend-Lease program alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s later support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas resisting Soviet occupation during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and a comparison of both martial aid programs with Washington’s recent revival of Lend-Lease aid for the Ukrainian war effort. It offers today’s American leaders and policymakers a chance to consult the lessons of history and apply them in the present.

Author : Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691202710
Total Pages : 912 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Ronald Grigor Suny and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--

Author : Leon Trotsky
Publisher : Haymarket Books
ISBN 13 : 1608467724
Total Pages : 1394 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Leon Trotsky and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 1394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.