Stalin's Wars

Stalin's Wars PDF

Author: Geoffrey Roberts

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780300112047

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This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.

Stalin's War

Stalin's War PDF

Author: Sean McMeekin

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 818

ISBN-13: 1541672771

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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.

Stalin's War on Japan

Stalin's War on Japan PDF

Author: Charles Stephenson

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2021-06-09

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1526785951

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This WWII military study examines the critical yet overlooked Soviet offensive on Japan’s puppet state and its influence on winning the Pacific War. Did Japan surrender in 1945 because the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or because of the crushing defeat inflicted by the Soviet Union in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in north-east China? In Stalin’s War on Japan, Charles Stephenson describes the Soviet offensive from the top-level decision-making and early planning stages to its decisive outcome on the ground. He also considers to what extent Japan’s capitulation is attributable to the atomic bomb or the stunningly successful entry of the Soviet Union into the conflict. Stephenson combines a vividly detailed narrative of the invasion itself with an absorbing account of the political and diplomatic process that gave rise to the offensive—with particular focus on the Yalta conference. There, Stalin allowed the Americans to persuade him to join the war in the east; a conflict he was determined on entering anyway. Stalin’s War on Japan sheds new light on the last act of the Second World War.

Stalin's War Against the Jews

Stalin's War Against the Jews PDF

Author: Louis Rapoport

Publisher: First Glance Books

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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In 1952 nine Kremlin doctors, all Jews, were seized and accused of plotting to poison the Soviet leaders. Rapoport's account of the final 14 months of Stalin's life reveals that the so-called "Doctors' Plot" was a culminating step in the dictator's lifelong war against the Jews, and argues that only Stalin's sudden death in 1953 prevented the unfolding of his own solution to the "Jewish problem" in the Soviet Union. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Stalin's Guerrillas

Stalin's Guerrillas PDF

Author: Kenneth Slepyan

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13:

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A detailed study of the operations, politics, culture, and autonomy of Soviet partisans (or guerrillas) who fought the German army in WWII. Blending military, political, social, and cultural history, Slepyan also provides a prism for viewing relations between the suffocating Stalinist state and its independent partisan warriors.

Red Famine

Red Famine PDF

Author: Anne Applebaum

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 0385538863

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Stalin's Secret War

Stalin's Secret War PDF

Author: Robert W. Stephan

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13:

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An animated adaptation of the story of the same title by Maurice Sendak in which a small boy makes a visit to the land of the wild things. Tells how he tames the creatures and returns home. For primary grades.

White Eagle, Red Star

White Eagle, Red Star PDF

Author: Norman Davies

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-04-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1446466868

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Surprisingly little known, the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20 was to change the course of twentieth-century history. In White Eagle, Red Star, Norman Davies gives a full account of the War, with its dramatic climax in August 1920 when the Red Army - sure of victory and pledged to carry the Revolution across Europe to 'water our horses on the Rhine' - was crushed by a devastating Polish attack. Since known as the 'miracle on the Vistula', it remains one of the most decisive battles of the Western world. Drawing on both Polish and Russian sources, Norman Davies illustrates the narrative with documentary material which hitherto has not been readily available and shows how the War was far more an 'episode' in East European affairs, but largely determined the course of European history for the next twenty years or more.

Stalin's Library

Stalin's Library PDF

Author: Geoffrey Roberts

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0300179049

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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

Stalin's Niños

Stalin's Niños PDF

Author: Karl D. Qualls

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1487518293

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Stalin’s Niños examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly three thousand child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs uncovers a little-known story that describes the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and reveals the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviours. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, comradery, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others. Throughout their fourteen-year existence and even during the horrific relocation to the Soviet interior during the Second World War, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – transformed displaced niños into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and in some cases valuable resources helping to rebuild Cuba after the revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity.