Joshua Rubenstein's riveting account takes us back to the second half of 1952 when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin's murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected U.S. ...President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force, and was also broadening a vicious campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin's sudden collapse and death in March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in the twentieth century. A The Last Days of Stalin is an engaging, briskly told account of the dictator's final active months, the vigil at his deathbed, and the unfolding of Soviet and international events in the months after his death. Rubenstein throws fresh light onthe devious plotting of Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and other "comrades in arms" who well understood the significance of the dictator's impending death;the witness-documented events of his death as compared to official published versions;Stalin's rumored plans to forcibly exile Soviet Jews;the responses of Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles to the Kremlin's conciliatory gestures after Stalin's death; andthe momentous repercussions when Stalin's regime of terror was cut short.
Drawing on recently declassified material from Stalin's personal archive in Moscow, this is the first attempt by scholars to systematically analyze the way Stalin interpreted and envisioned his ...world-both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Since Stalin rarely left his offices and perceived the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books, a comprehensive analysis of these materials provides a unique and valuable opportunity to study his way of thinking and his interaction with the outside world.Comparing the materials that Stalin read from week to week with the decisions that he subsequently shaped, Sarah Davies and James Harris show not only how Stalin perceived the world but also how hemisperceived it. After considering the often far-reaching consequences of those misperceptions, they investigate Stalin's contribution to the production and regulation of official verbal discourse in a system in which huge political importance was attached to the correct use of words and phrases..
InNot According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya's revisionist account ...of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a "mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda" and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors.
The Stalinist party-state, despite explicit intent and grandiose plans to build a "Soviet Hollywood" that would release a thousand features per year, failed to construct even a modest mass propaganda cinema. Belodubrovskaya's wealth of evidence shows that the regime's desire to disseminate propaganda on a vast scale was consistently at odds with its compulsion to control quality and with Stalin's intolerance of imperfection.Not According to Planis a landmark in Soviet cultural history and the global history of cinema.
The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature ...and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An expos of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.
This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape ...played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet culture. In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin.
From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and sold as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls a cartography of power -- an organization of the entire country into a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness, with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central.
Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.
Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.
Stalinist city planning DeHaan, Heather
Stalinist city planning,
c2013, 20130228, 2013, 2013-02-28, 20130101
eBook
By examining how planners and other urban inhabitants experienced, lived, and struggled with socialism and Stalinism, DeHaan offers readers a much broader, more complex picture of planning and ...planners than has been revealed to date.
Today the 80-mile-long Moscow Canal is a source of leisure for Muscovites, a conduit for tourists and provides the city with more than 60 percent of its potable water. Yet the past looms heavy over ...these quotidian activities: the canal was built by Gulag inmates at the height of Stalinism and thousands died in the process. In this wide-ranging book, Cynthia Ruder argues that the construction of the canal physically manifests Stalinist ideology and that the vertical, horizontal, underwater, ideological, artistic and metaphorical spaces created by it resonate with the desire of the state to dominate all space within and outside the Soviet Union. Ruder draws on theoretical constructs from cultural geography and spatial studies to interpret and contextualize a variety of structural and cultural products dedicated to, and in praise of, this signature Stalinist construction project. Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources, personal interviews and contemporary documentary materials, this is essential reading for all scholars working on the all-pervasive nature of Stalinism and its complex afterlife in Russia today.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin's vision of a total "transformation of nature." Intended to increase agricultural yields ...dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europe, captivating political elites and war-fatigued publics alike. By the time of Stalin's death, however, these attempts at "transformation"-which relied upon ideologically corrupted and pseudoscientific theories-had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume follows the history of such projects in three communist states-Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia-and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
Born in 1879 in Georgia, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. These edited papers reassess the deeds, policies and legacy of a ...man who was responsible for innumerable deaths and untold human misery.
