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• "The Party Will Demand a Full Reckoning": Korablev and the
• Vinnitsa NKVD / Valeriy Vasylyev and Roman Podkur
• "The Party Makes Mistakes, the NKVD
• Never": The NKVD in Odessa / Andrei Savin and Aleksei Tepliakov
• "A Sacrificial Offering": Karamyshev and the Nikolaev NKVD / Marc Junge
• Vadym Zolotar'ov, "Enemies Within": Pertsov and the NKVD in
• Kharkov and Odessa / Vadym Zolotar'ov
• "Under the Dictation of Fleishman": The NKVD in Skvira / Lynne Viola
• "The Situation at the Time": The NKVD in Zhitomir / Serhii Kokin
• "This is How You Interrogate and Secure Testimony": Kocherginskii and the Northern Donetsk Railway NKVD / Jeffrey J. Rossman

Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin's Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR halted mass operations in repression in November 1938, large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete were released. At the same time, hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror were scapegoated and arrested. Drawing on materials from the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police, this collection of essays by an international team of researchers illuminates the previously opaque world of the NKVD perpetrator. It uncovers the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level by examining the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives from across Ukraine. The result offers new perspectives on both Stalin's central role in the architecture of the terror and NKVD perpetrators' agency in implementing one of the most horrific episodes of twentieth-century mass violence.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Frontmatter
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: The Paradox of Power
• PART I. PREPARING FOR WAR
• 1. Mobilization and Repression at the Centre
• 2. Mobilization and Purges on the Peripheries
• PART II. FIGHTING THE WAR
• 3. Forging the Sinews of War
• 4. The Scientific and Technical Intelligentsia
• 5. On the Cultural Front
• PART III. WINNING THE PEACE
• 6. A Pyrrhic Victory?
• Epilogue: Remembering the War
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

An authoritative account of Stalin as a wartime leader-showing how his paradoxical policies of mass mobilization and repression affected all aspects of Soviet society The Second World War was the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. With Stalin at the helm, it emerged victorious at a huge economic and human cost. But even before the fighting had ended, Stalin began to turn against the architects of success. In this original and comprehensive study, Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership cultivated a legacy that was to burden the Soviet Union and Russia to the present day.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

An authoritative account of Stalin as a wartime leader-showing how his paradoxical policies of mass mobilization and repression affected all aspects of Soviet society The Second World War was the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. With Stalin at the helm, it emerged victorious at a huge economic and human cost. But even before the fighting had ended, Stalin began to turn against the architects of success. In this original and comprehensive study, Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership cultivated a legacy that was to burden the Soviet Union and Russia to the present day.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Turkey in the Targets of Soviet Pressure: Eastern Provinces and Straits
• 3 Stalin's Expansionist Strategy in Iranian Azerbaijan: Between Oil and Territories
• 4 Iranian Azerbaijan: The First Test Site of the Cold War
• 5 Stalin's Adventure in Eastern Turkestan: Game With China
• 6 Conclusion Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Immediately after the Allied WW2 victory in Europe, claims were made by the Soviet Union over the eastern regions of Turkey, to secure direct control over the Bosporus, Dardanelles, and Turkish Straits. The detailed study of the international components of these events, featuring the veiled complexities of Stalin's anti-Turkish diplomacy, provides a key to understanding crucial aspects of these Soviet territorial claims. Iranian Azerbaijan became another hotspot of post-war confrontation between the western Allies and the USSR: Soviet policy towards Iran manifested in the desire to access their oil resources. A further direction emerging within Soviet post-war strategy was the Kurdish issue in the Near and Middle East. At the conjunction of Turkish and Iranian events, Soviet secret service bodies and diplomatic institutions exploited their strengths and toyed with Kurdish minorities in the region. Their decisions placed the bordering regions of China, Turkey, and Iran squarely in the shadowy reaches of Moscow's policy. This research uses newly discovered archive material to illustrate the underlying intrigue behind Soviet ambition and intimately tracks how the Soviet Union was defeated in the first Cold War confrontation over its southern borders. It also links events of this period with the critical issue of Uyghur assimilation, and further contemporary developments highlighting Putin's policies, making it invaluable for both academic and general readers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Tables and Charts Acknowledgements Introduction: Stalinism at War, 1937-49
• 1. Preparing for War
• 2. The War begins in the East, 1937-39
• 3. War in the West, 1939-40
• 4. Armageddon, 1941-42
• 5. Recovery, 1941-42
• 6. Triumph, 1943-45
• 7. War of Ideologies
• 8. The War after the War, 1944-49
• 9. Impact and Aftermath Appendix: Maps Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Stalinism at War tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two. Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens - Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime - to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan. In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the Utopia they wanted, and while Hitler's creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time. Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers of the Red Army and Wehrmacht, civilians who suffered during the conflict, and those who knew both men personally, bestselling historian Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a masterwork from one of our finest historians.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. Victory over the Revolution: A Transformed War
• 2. From Metaphor to Metonymy: The Political Tropology of Historicism
• 3. Three Resolutions about Beauty: Ideological Conscientiousness as Device
• 4. Meta-Stalinism: The Dialectics of Party-Mindedness and the Party-Mindedness of Dialectics
• 5. Realästhetik: Populism Instead of Music
• 6. Gesamtwissenschaftswerk: Romantic Naturalism and Life in Its Revolutionary Development
• 7. The Power of Grammar and the Grammar of Power: Linguistic Realism
• 8. Socialist Surrealism: Representing Life in the Forms of Life Itself
• 9. Gesamtkriegswerk: Cold War Hall of Mirrors in the Ministry of Truth
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

How the last years of Stalin's rule led to the formation ofan imperial Soviet consciousness In this nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period-beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953-Evgeny Dobrenko analyzes key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that, he argues, still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A Soviet journalist with the gift of total recall. A psychologist seeking to rehabilitate herself. A government censor with a secret past. Over two decades their fates become entwined as victims and collaborators in Stalin's campaign to rewrite public memory. Long before 'fake news' was an Internet meme, it was called propaganda. And in the Soviet Union, circa 1938, it was the grease that kept Stalin's machinery of terror in motion. By taking us to this world, where justice is arbitrary and freedom as we think of it does not exist, Memoirs of a Forgotten Man forces the audience to consider the fragility of democracy in an era when facts are fungible and history is whatever Dear Leader says it is

• Introduction / David M. Crowe
• Late Imperial and Soviet "show" trials, 1878-1938 / David M. Crowe
• Traitors or war criminals : collaboration on trial in Soviet courts in the 1940s / Alexander V. Prusin
• Nikto ne zabyt : the politicization of Soviet war dead / Thomas Earl Porter
• The human face of Soviet justice? : Aron Trainin and the origins of the Soviet doctrine of international criminal law / Valentyna Polunina
• "May justice be done!" : the Soviet Union and the London Conference (1945) / Irina Schulmeister-André and David M. Crowe
• The Soviet Union at the Palace of Justice : law, intrigue, and international rivalry in the Nuremberg trials / Francine Hirsch
• Soviet journalists at Nuremberg : establishing the Soviet war narrative / Jeremy Hicks
• From Geneva to Nuremberg to New York : Andrey Vyshinsky, Raphaël Lemkin, and the struggle to outlaw revolutionary violence, state terror, and genocide / Douglas Irvin-Erickson

From the 'show' trials of the 1920s and 1930s to the London Conference, this book examines the Soviet role in the Nuremberg IMT trial through the prism of the ideas and practices of earlier Soviet legal history, detailing the evolution of Stalin's ideas about the trail of Nazi war criminals. Stalin believed that an international trial for Nazi war criminals was the best way to show the world the sacrifices his country had made to defeat Hitler, and he, together with his legal mouthpiece Andrei Vyshinsky, maintained tight control over Soviet representatives during talks leading up to the creation of the Nuremberg IMT trial in 1945, and the trial itself. But Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg were unable to deal comfortably with the complexities of an open, western-style legal proceeding, which undercut their effectiveness throughout the trial. However, they were able to present a significant body of evidence that underscored the brutal nature of Hitler's racial war in Russia from 1941-45, a theme which became central to Stalin's efforts to redefine international criminal law after the war. Stalin's Soviet Justice provides a nuanced analysis of the Soviet justice system at a crucial turning point in European history and it will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of the legal history of the Soviet Union, the history of war crimes and the aftermath of the Second World War.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A look at the Stalinist purges and the musical response Dmitri Shostakovich made through his symphonies Four to Nine, which he called "tombstones."

This book is about a region on the fringes of empire, which neither Tsarist Russia, nor the Soviet Union, nor in fact the Russian Federation, ever really managed to control. Starting with the nineteenth century, it analyses the state's various strategies to establish its rule over populations highly resilient to change imposed from outside, who frequently resorted to arms to resist interference in their religious practices and beliefs, traditional customs, and ways of life. Jeronim Perovic offers a major contribution to our knowledge of the early Soviet era, a crucial yet overlooked period in this region's troubled history. During the 1920s and 1930s, the various peoples of this predominantly Muslim region came into contact for the first time with a modernising state, demanding not only unconditional loyalty but active participation in the project of 'socialist transformation'. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian archives, Perovic investigates the changes wrought by Russian policy and explains why, from Moscow's perspective, these modernisation attempts failed, ultimately prompting the Stalinist leadership to forcefully exile the Chechens and other North Caucasians to Central Asia in 1943-4.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Chapter 1: Cadres Decide Everything
• Chapter 2: The Irony of the Inferno
• Chapter 3: The Great Reawakening
• Chapter 4: The Last Puritan
• Chapter 5: A More Perfect Union.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This work offers new ways of conceptualizing the decision-making paradigm of the Soviet party-state that was defined by the persistent shortage of qualified manpower that afflicted the Russian elite. The traditional Russian problems of under administration, combined with the unique features of the Soviet political system, resulted in a dichotomy between practical and ideological demands. The WWII era, examined in this book, provides a microcosm of pressures facing the Kremlin and illustrates the cyclical nature of policy formation forced on it by the paradoxes of the system. As the party's responsibilities expanded into specialized economic and military areas, political experts increasingly depended on the specialized professionals. These trends grew increased drastically during the war. An unexpected consequence of the party's expansion into economic or military professions was the discovery that cooptation worked both ways and many party members become managers rather than ideological overseers. Throughout the existential crisis of the system--the war and its aftermath--the party would find itself in a fundamental conflict over its identity, challenged over its role both vis-a-vis the state and its own priorities. After an abortive attempt to reverse the wartime trends, a new paradigm was articulated by the party during the last five years of Stalin's reign. This resulted in the emergence of a new elite consensus which envisioned the party as integral and invasive economic actor. This shift in the party's identity was the price of maintaining centralized political power and came at the expense of the focus on ideological purity. In the long term, however, the diminished role of ideology robbed the party of its core value system and steadily eroded its legitimizing and self-energizing power. Over time, the new consensus would undermine the very foundations of the party-state construct. Yet if the USSR was to survive as a modern, industrialized state, the accommodation with the technocrats was necessary. The contradiction between ideological and pragmatic aims was inherent to the system, and demanded an eventual choice between the long-term health of the state and that of the party.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Chapter 1: Introduction.-
• Chapter 2: Politics and Diplomacy.-
• Chapter 3: Crisis-management, Censorship, Control.-
• Chapter 4: Signals from Stalin.-
• Chapter 5: Life in Leningrad.-
• Chapter 6: Silencing the Past.-
• Chapter 7: Conclusion.- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book offers an illuminating bridge between the political and social dimensions of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40. The conflict represented a significant crisis for the Soviet Union, inspiring international condemnation and a significant loss of face for its supporters, both at home and abroad. The focus of this study is not upon the military dynamics of the war, but upon its ability to influence events, interpretations and interactions between agents and institutions within the Soviet Union and the wider international communist movement. Through original archival research, this book considers the ways in which the Soviet leadership reacted to the crisis, the tools at its disposal, and the effectiveness with which it managed to manipulate and control the spread of information through official and unofficial channels. It contributes to a more complete and complex picture of the inter-related nature of Soviet politics, propaganda and mass media in this period.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Between Science and Propaganda: Institutional Development of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics, 1927-1953
• Chapter 2: An Academic Institute under Totalitarian Control? The Internal and External Operation of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics, 1927-1947
• Chapter 3: Combining Marxism and W. E. Mitchell's Business Cycle Theory: The Theoretical Basis of the Varga Group, 1927-1953
• Chapter 4: "A Concrete-Historical Analysis": The Varga Group's Discourse on World Economy and Its Crisis, 1927-1953
• Chapter 5: "Too Old, Too Foreign": Rethinking the Varga Controversy and the End of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics, 1941-1953Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Soviet foreign policy in the Stalin era is commonly assumed to have been a direct product of either Marxist ideology or the leader's whims. Both assumptions, however, oversimplify the complex and subtle factors involved in its creation and implementation. Kyung-Deok Roh provides an alternative, more nuanced, explanation and demonstrates the key role played by Stalin's economic advisors. The so-called 'Varga Institute' , a 'think tank' led by Evgenii Varga, developed a unique scholarly discourse on the capitalist economy and international politics, based on an amalgam of Marxist economics and, notably, the work of American economist W. E. Mitchell. The institute's scholarship, which suggested the resilience, adaptability and stability of the capitalist economy, created the discursive space within which decisions were made, and influenced Stalin to move increasingly from aggressive strategies towards more cautious international policies. Roh's account, the first comprehensive study of this pivotal group, demonstrates the many complex ways that Soviet foreign policy was created and sheds new light onto the controversial relationship between Soviet academia and the party. Based on extensive archival research into previously untouched material, Stalin's Economic Advisors is essential reading for all researchers seeking to add nuance to their conception of Stalinist foreign policy, economic thought and politics.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

It is a commonplace wisdom that from the authoritarian roots of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew the gulags and the police state of the Stalinist epoch. The Dictator, the Revolution, The Machine overturns that perspective once and for all by showing how October was inspired by a profound mass movement comprised of urban workers and rural poor -- a movement that went on to forge a state capable of channelling its political will in and through the most overwhelming form of grass-roots democracy history has ever known. It was a single, precarious experiment whose life was tragically brief. In a context of civil war and foreign invasion the fledgling democracy was eradicated and the Bolshevik party was denuded of its social basis -- the working classes. While the party survived, its centrist elements came to the fore as the power of the bureaucracy asserted itself. From the ashes of human freedom there arose a zombified, sclerotic administration in which state functionaries took precedence over elected representatives. One man came to embody the inverted logic of this bureaucratic machine, its remorseless brutality and its parasitic drive for power. Joseph Stalin was its highest expression, accruing to himself state powers as he made his murderous, heady rise to dictator. This book examines his historical profile, its roots in Georgian medievalism, and shows why Stalin was destined to play the role he did. In broader strokes Tony McKenna raises the conflict between the revolutionary movement and the bureaucracy to the level of a literary tragedy played out on the stage of world history, showing how Stalinisms victory would pave the way for the Midnight of the Century.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface xiAcknowledgments xvii1 En RouteI Anticipation 31 The Swamp 52 The Preachers 233 The Faith 73II Fulfillment 1194 The Real Day 1215 The Last Battle 1586 The New City 1807 The Great Disappointment 2208 The Party Line 2722 At HomeIII The Second Coming 3159 The Eternal House 31710 The New Tenants 37711 The Economic Foundations 40812 The Virgin Lands 42113 The Ideological Substance 454IV The Reign of the Saints 47914 The New Life 48115 The Days Off 50816 The Houses of Rest 53517 The Next of Kin 55218 The Center of the World 58219 The Pettiness of Existence 61020 The Thought of Death 62321 The Happy Childhood 64522 The New Men 6653 On TrialV The Last Judgment 69723 The Telephone Call 69924 The Admission of Guilt 71525 The Valley of the Dead 75326 The Knock on the Door 77327 The Good People 81328 The Supreme Penalty 840VI The Afterlife 87129 The End of Childhood 87330 The Persistence of Happiness 88731 The Coming of War 91232 The Return 92433 The End 946Epilogue: The House on the Embankment 961Appendix: Partial List of Leaseholders 983Notes 995Index 1083.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface Chronology
• * From Djugashvili to Stalin
• * The Grey Blur - Stalin in Revolution and Civil War
• * Filling Lenin's Shoes
• * Storming Fortresses
• * Nine Circles of Hell
• * Stalin, the Soviet Union and the World in the 1930s
• * The Tenth Circle of Hell: Invasion, Occupation, Victory - War without limits]
• * World Stage, Final Act
• * Stalin's Afterlife - an Inconclusive Conclusion
• Further Reading Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This new biography of Stalin offers an accessible and up-to-date representation of one of the twentieth century's defining figures, as well as new insights, analysis and illumination to deepen our understanding of his actions, intentions, and the nature of the power that he wielded. Christopher Read examines Stalin's contribution to and impact on Russian and world events in the first half of the twentieth century. The biography brings together the avalanche of sources and scholarship which followed the collapse of the system Stalin constructed, including the often neglected writings and speeches of Stalin himself. In addition to a detailed narrative and analysis of Stalin's rule, chapters also cover his early years and humble beginnings in a small town at a remote outpost of the Russian Empire, his role in the revolution, his relationships with Lenin, Trotsky and others in the 1920s, and his rise to become one of the most powerful figures in human history. The book closes with an account of Stalin's afterlife and legacy, both in the immediate aftermath of his death and in the decades since. This concise account of Stalin's life is the perfect introduction for students of modern Russian history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Triumph of the will
• Apocalypse
• Terrorism
• A great power
• On a bluff
• Enemies hunting enemies
• "What went on in No. 1's brain?"
• Missing piece
• Hammer
• Pact
• Smashed pig
• Greed
• Fear
• Soviet administrative structure.