Stalin’s genocides Naimark, Norman M; Naimark, Norman M
2010., 20100719, 2010, 2010-07-19, 20100101, Letnik:
12
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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.
Hiroshima Minear, Richard
2018., 20180605, 2018, 1990
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"I'll search you out, put my lips to your tender ear, and tell you. . . . I'll tell you the real story--I swear I will."--from Little One by Toge Sankichi Three Japanese authors of note--Hara Tamiki, ...Ota Yoko, and Toge Sankichi--survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only to shoulder an appalling burden: bearing witness to ultimate horror. Between 1945 and 1952, in prose and in poetry, they published the premier first-person accounts of the atomic holocaust. Forty-five years have passed since August 6, 1945, yet this volume contains the first complete English translation of Hara's Summer Flowers, the first English translation of Ota's City of Corpses, and a new translation of Toge's Poems of the Atomic Bomb. No reader will emerge unchanged from reading these works. Different from each other in their politics, their writing, and their styles of life and death, Hara, Ota, and Toge were alike in feeling compelled to set down in writing what they experienced. Within forty-eight hours of August 6, before fleeing the city for shelter in the hills west of Hiroshima, Hara jotted down this note: "Miraculously unhurt; must be Heaven's will that I survive and report what happened." Ota recorded her own remarks to her half-sister as they walked down a street littered with corpses: "I'm looking with two sets of eyesthe eyes of a human being and the eyes of a writer." And the memorable words of Toge quoted above come from a poem addressed to a child whose father was killed in the South Pacific and whose mother died on August 6th--who would tell of that day? The works of these three authors convey as much of the "real story" as can be put into words.
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and ...completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.
The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.
In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 ...revolution to Stalin's death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government's bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture. A Social History of Soviet Trade explores the relationship of trade--official and unofficial--to the cyclical pattern of crisis and normalization that resulted from these tensions. It also provides a singularly detailed look at private shops during the years of the New Economic Policy, and at the remnants of private trade, mostly concentrated at the outdoor bazaars, in subsequent years. Drawing on newly opened archives in Moscow and several provinces, this richly documented work offers a new perspective on the social, economic, and political history of the formative decades of the USSR.
On Stalin's Team Fitzpatrick, Sheila
2015, 2015., 20150915, 2015-09-15
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Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing.On Stalin's ...Teamoverturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years,On Stalin's Teampaints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu-one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.
Making sense of war Weiner, Amir
2001., 20120116, 2012, 2000, c2001., 2001-01-01
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In Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation ...that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.
Patriots' Games offers a microhistory of Fan Xudong's Yongli Chemical Industries from its founding in 1917 to nationalization in 1953, revealing hitherto hidden processes and dilemmas confronting ...private capital in modern China.
Sergei Prozorov critically analyses Stalinism as a distinct strain of political theory, showing how it was oriented towards transforming, not protecting, life in accordance with the communist ideal. ...He engages with the theories of Foucault, Agamben, Esposito, Meillassoux, Henry and Malabou to critique conventional approaches to biopolitics.
It can seem as though the Cold War division of Europe was inevitable. But Stalin was more open to a settlement on the continent than is assumed. In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order, ...Norman Naimark returns to the four years after WWII to illuminate European leaders' efforts to secure national sovereignty amid dominating powers.
