Stalin A Biography In Facts

Author : Schnehen, Gerhard
Publisher : Algora Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1628943882
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin, A Biography in Facts written by Schnehen, Gerhard and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin is commonly considered the quintessential "vicious dictator," an iconic figure of tyranny. But almost none of his many biographers has drawn on primary sources, eye witness accounts, Stalin’s own writings and speeches, or what those people who met him had to say about him. This assiduously researched book is an attempt to get a little closer to the truth. It is based on first-hand observations from every stage of his life, and it evaluates numerous shocking tropes that were circulated by Stalin's rivals and made into our received view of his rule.

Author : Robert Service
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674016972
Total Pages : 772 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Robert Service and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years.

Author : Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 030016694X
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Oleg V. Khlevniuk and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others. Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin’s policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin’s favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin’s childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book’s conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era. “This brilliant, authoritative, opinionated biography ranks as the best on Stalin in any language.”—Martin McCauley East-West Review “A historiographical and literary masterpiece.”—Mark Edele, Australian Book Review “A very digestible biography, yet one packed with revelations.”—Paul E. Richardson, Russian Life Magazine

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 : Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher : Arcturus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1848589514
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Nigel Cawthorne and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.' Joseph Stalin Worshipped by the Russians as a great leader, Stalin was one of modern history's greatest tyrants, rivalling Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. But he probably had more blood on his hands than any of them. Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, Stalin studied to be a priest while secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics soon became his religion and, under his ruthless rule, up to 60 million people perished. Peasants who resisted Stalin's policy of collectivisation were denounced as Kulaks, arrested and shot, exiled or worked to death in his ever-expanding network of concentration camps, the Gulag. Nobody was safe, not even his friends, his family or his political allies. This is the story of a man who never let up for a second in his pursuit of absolute power.

Author : Edvard Radzinsky
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307754685
Total Pages : 638 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Edvard Radzinsky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Last Tsar, the first full-scale life of Stalin to have what no previous biography has fully obtained: the facts. Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion. As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide. As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.

Author : Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307427935
Total Pages : 850 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From the bestselling author of The Romanovs. “The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.

Author : Stephen Kotkin
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698170105
Total Pages : 978 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. While still building his power base within the Bolshevik dictatorship, he embarks upon the greatest gamble of his political life and the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the collectivization of all agriculture and industry across one sixth of the earth. Millions will die, and many more millions will suffer, but the man will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts. Where did such power come from? In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin offers a biography that, at long last, is equal to this shrewd, sociopathic, charismatic dictator in all his dimensions. The character of Stalin emerges as both astute and blinkered, cynical and true believing, people oriented and vicious, canny enough to see through people but prone to nonsensical beliefs. We see a man inclined to despotism who could be utterly charming, a pragmatic ideologue, a leader who obsessed over slights yet was a precocious geostrategic thinker—unique among Bolsheviks—and yet who made egregious strategic blunders. Through it all, we see Stalin’s unflinching persistence, his sheer force of will—perhaps the ultimate key to understanding his indelible mark on history. Stalin gives an intimate view of the Bolshevik regime’s inner geography of power, bringing to the fore fresh materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. Kotkin rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin’s psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin’s near paranoia was fundamentally political, and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution’s structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin demonstrates the impossibility of understanding Stalin’s momentous decisions outside of the context of the tragic history of imperial Russia. The product of a decade of intrepid research, Stalin is a landmark achievement, a work that recasts the way we think about the Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will be published by Penguin Press in October 2017

Author : Robert Service
Publisher : Pan
ISBN 13 : 1743036590
Total Pages : 793 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin written by Robert Service and published by Pan. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of unexplored material - available for the first time since the collapse of the former Soviet Union - Robert Service's biography of Stalin is the most authoritative yet published. It concentrates not simply on Stalin as dedicated bureaucrat or serial political killer, but on a fuller assessment of his formative interactions in Georgia, his youthful revolutionary activism, his relationship with Lenin, with his family, and with his party members. 'This is effectively the first full biography since perestroika to encompass the economic, political, diplomatic, military, administrative and, above all, ideological dimensions, as well as the personal aspects of Stalin's colossal life ... Gritty and unshowy, but enlightened by Service's compelling characterisation, magisterial analysis and dry wit, this outstanding biography of lightly worn authority, wide research and superb intuition will be read for decades' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of STALIN: The Court of the Red Tsar Sunday Times

Author : Linda Cernak
Publisher : ABDO
ISBN 13 : 1629699985
Total Pages : 115 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Joseph Stalin: Dictator of the Soviet Union written by Linda Cernak and published by ABDO. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography examines the life of Joseph Stalin using easy-to-read, compelling text. Through striking historical and contemporary images and photographs and informative sidebars, readers will learn about Stalin's family background, childhood, education, and his time as dictator of the Soviet Union. Informative sidebars enhance and support the text. Features include a table of contents, timeline, facts page, glossary, bibliography, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.