Stalin's Masterpiece
Author: Joel Carmichael
Publisher: London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Lanterna Rally
eBook PDF Download Digital Library
This Thing of Darkness
Author: Joan Neuberger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-03-15
Total Pages: 507
ISBN-13: 1501732781
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger's engrossing production history of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a major contribution to the study of Eisenstein and thus informs the history and theory of cinema and the study of Soviet culture and politics. Neuberger's ability to mine, interpret, and connect Eisenstein's voluminous, intriguingly digressive writings makes this book exceptional.— Karla Oeler, Stanford University Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.
Stalin's Library
Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 0300179049
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics, told through his personal library. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
An Impeccable Spy
Author: Owen Matthews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-03-21
Total Pages: 451
ISBN-13: 1408857804
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →SHORTLISTED FOR THE PUSHKIN HOUSE PRIZE 'The most formidable spy in history' IAN FLEMING 'His work was impeccable' KIM PHILBY 'The spy to end spies' JOHN LE CARRÉ Born of a German father and a Russian mother, Richard Sorge moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War, he became a fanatical communist – and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Combining charm with ruthless manipulation, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society. His intelligence proved pivotal to the Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war itself. Drawing on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives, this is a major biography of one of the greatest spies who ever lived.
Stalin's Meteorologist
Author: Olivier Rolin
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-12-11
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1640091572
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Winner of the 2014 Prix du Style "Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century." —Nature In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and sentenced to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other "political prisoners" in a camp on Solovetsky Island, under vast northern skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937—a fact kept from his family for nearly twenty years. Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexei's story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world that Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution, maintaining that he'd been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him. His stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long. Stalin’s Meteorologist is a fascinating work that casts light on the devastating consequences of politically inspired paranoia and the mindlessness and trauma of totalitarianism—relevant revelations for our time.
Stalin's War
Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-04-20
Total Pages: 818
ISBN-13: 1541672771
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.
The Whisperers
Author: Orlando Figes
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-11-25
Total Pages: 788
ISBN-13: 9780312428037
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →History.
Stalin's Scribe
Author: Brian Boeck
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2019-02-05
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1681779390
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A masterful and definitive biography of one of the most misunderstood and controversial writers in Russian literature. Mikhail Sholokhov is arguably one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in history. As a young man, Sholokhov’s epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success. Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures. Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death. Stalin's Scribe is remarkable biography that both reinforces and clashes with our understanding of the Soviet system. It reveals a Sholokhov who is bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic—and reconciles him with the vindictive and mean-spirited man described in so many accounts of late Soviet history. Shockingly, at the height of the terror, which claimed over a million lives, Sholokhov became a member of the most minuscule subset of the Soviet Union’s population—the handful of individuals whom Stalin personally intervened to save.
Man of Steel: Joseph Stalin
Author: Jules Archer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-02-07
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 1510707026
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Early in life, Joseph Stalin became convinced of the inevitability of social revolution. And in it, he was determined to play a prominent role. He carefully masked his great personal ambition during his long climb to power and devoted all this energies to furthering the cause of Lenin and Bolshevism. Only after Lenin’s death, with the Bolshevik takeover of Russia accomplished, did Stalin’s comrades in leadership find themselves forced to bow to Stalin’s will—or be eliminated. His rise to power was bloody and ruthless, yet under his twenty-nine-year leadership, Russia became a mighty industrial nation. Illiteracy was banished, interest in the arts began to flourish, and Russia moved toward amazing scientific triumphs. Man of Steel is the story of Joseph Stalin, the man who rose to become absolute master of Soviet Russia and who cast his shadow over the entire globe.
Joseph Stalin's Life and Political Power. The Man and the Symbol
Author: Michael Gorman
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Published: 2016-06-02
Total Pages: 16
ISBN-13: 3668232296
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Essay from the year 2015 in the subject History of Europe - Ages of World Wars, grade: 92.0, Westminster College, language: English, abstract: It is proposed that Joseph Stalin, the man as well as the symbol, be analyzed in order to reveal the man behind the icon. This research will include details of Stalin's everyday life and his vacations on the Black Sea, the “Great Terror,” World War II, and the terrifying decades of his supreme power. It will also go into detail about the suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya, and how it affected him for the rest of his life, what kind of man he was as a father, as well as the lives of the members of his inner circle and their fall from grace. From a historical context Joseph Stalin comes off as being psychotic, merciless, killer, and a brutal dictator. This research will attempt to reveal that this dictator of a nuclear capable world super-power, merges as being, although a bit paranoid, surprisingly normal and quite human.
