Wartime Missions of Harry L. Hopkins Review
Wartime Missions of Harry L.Hopkins describes two missions to see Churchill and two missions to seeStalin.¿ There are two unique features ofthis book.¿ It highlights the close,personal relationship between Hopkins and Churchill, which all too often hasbeen overlooked and it examines the declining relationship that Hopkins hadwith Stalin which began with such high hopes.
Stalin: A Political Biography (Galaxy Books) Review
Firmly established as the standard Stalin biography, Deutscher's volume clearly demonstrates the forces that shaped this leader and the political scene of his time.
Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator Review
“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 War Through the Eyes of His Commanders: Through the Eyes of His Commanders Review
Basing its treatment on his interviews with 30 of the Stalin's surviving generals, this text sets out to demonstrate his performance as a military commander facing the biggest threat to his nation since the days of Napolean.
The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-36 (Annals of Communism Series) Review
From 1931 to 1936, Stalin vacationed at his Black Sea residence for two to three months each year. While away from Moscow, he relied on correspondence with his subordinates to receive information, watch over the work of the Politburo and the government, give orders, and express his opinions. This volume publishes translations of 180 handwritten letters and coded telegrams exchanged during this period between Stalin and his most highly trusted deputy, Lazar Kaganovich. The collection of letters - all previously classified top secret - provides an account of the mainsprings of Soviet policy while Stalin was consolidating his position as personal dictator. The correspondence records his positions on major internal and foreign affairs decisions and reveals his opinions about fellow members of the Politburo and other senior figures. Written during the years of agricultural collectivization, forced industrialization, famine, repression, and Soviet rearmament in the face of threats from Germany and Japan, these letters should be a useful historical resource for all students of the Stalin regime and Soviet history.
Stalin: An Unknown Portrait Review
This volume of oral history contains new information about Joseph Stalin's actual and political 'family', the political Mafia and the clans that surrounded him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era, including officials of the KGB and the Komsomol and people who had personal contact with the dictator as secretaries or interpreters. The author's expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. This volume also contains a fascinating selection of photographs from a private collection. This collection includes photographs pf Stalin, his family members, as well as various political actors of the period.
Stalin: Russia's Man of Steel (Puffin story books) Review
An account of the life of the man who shaped the Soviet Union, from pre-revolutionary Russia to its evolution as a superpower and the descent of the "Iron Curtain."
Inside Stalin's Kremlin : An Eyewitness Account of Brutality, Duplicity, Intrigue and Murder of Joseph Stalin Review
Hitler/Stalin Palgrave Macmillan Sales Bundle: Stalin and Stalinism (Lancaster Pamphlets) Review
Joseph Stalin's 25-year dictatorship is without doubt one of the most controversial periods in the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin and Stalinism examines Stalin's ambiguous personal and political legacy, his achievements, and his crimes - all now the subject of major reappraisal both in the West and in the former Soviet Union.
The second edition of this best-selling pamphlet is fully updated to take in new debates and controversies which have emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and considers the ways in which Stalin's legacy still affects attitudes in and towards post-Soviet Russia.
The Rise and Fall of Stalin Review
