Stalinism At War

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Stalinism at War

Author : Mark Edele
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350153524
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalinism at War by : Mark Edele

Download or read book Stalinism at War written by Mark Edele and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Masterfully told and compellingly reinterpreted." The Moscow Times 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.

Stalinism at War

Author : Mark Edele
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350153532
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalinism at War by : Mark Edele

Download or read book Stalinism at War written by Mark Edele and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Stalin's War

Author : Sean McMeekin
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541672771
Total Pages : 818 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (416 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's War by : Sean McMeekin

Download or read book Stalin's War written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Guerrillas

Author : Kenneth Slepyan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's Guerrillas by : Kenneth Slepyan

Download or read book Stalin's Guerrillas written by Kenneth Slepyan and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Ghosts of War

Author : Franziska Exeler
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501762753
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghosts of War by : Franziska Exeler

Download or read book Ghosts of War written by Franziska Exeler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.

Red Famine

Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385538863
Total Pages : 586 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Red Famine by : Anne Applebaum

Download or read book Red Famine written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Stephen Kotkin
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 073522448X
Total Pages : 1249 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin by : Stephen Kotkin

Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 1249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.

The 1929 Sino-Soviet War

Author : Michael Walker
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700632603
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The 1929 Sino-Soviet War by : Michael Walker

Download or read book The 1929 Sino-Soviet War written by Michael Walker and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven weeks in 1929, the Republic of China and the Soviet Union battled in Manchuria over control of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. It was the largest military clash between China and a Western power ever fought on Chinese soil, involving more that a quarter million combatants. Michael M. Walker's The 1929 Sino-Soviet War is the first full account of what UPI's Moscow correspondent called "the war nobody knew"—a "limited modern war" that destabilized the region's balance of power, altered East Asian history, and sent grim reverberations through a global community giving lip service to demilitarizing in the wake of World War I. Walker locates the roots of the conflict in miscalculations by Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsueh-liang about the Soviets' political and military power—flawed assessments that prompted China's attempt to reassert full authority over the CER. The Soviets, on the other hand, were dominated by a Stalin eager to flex some military muscle and thoroughly convinced that war would win much more than petty negotiations. This was in fact, Walker shows, a watershed moment for Stalin, his regime, and his still young and untested military, disproving the assumption that the Red Army was incapable of fighting a modern war. By contrast, the outcome revealed how unprepared the Chinese military forces were to fight either the Red Army or the Imperial Japanese Army, their other primary regional competitor. And yet, while the Chinese commanders proved weak, Walker sees in the toughness of the overmatched infantry a hint of the rising nationalism that would transform China's troops from a mercenary army into a formidable professional force, with powerful implications for an overconfident Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. Using Russian, Chinese, and Japanese sources, as well as declassified US military reports, Walker deftly details the war from its onset through major military operations to its aftermath, giving the first clear and complete account of a little known but profoundly consequential clash of great powers between the World Wars.

Return to the Motherland

Author : Seth Bernstein
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501767402
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Return to the Motherland by : Seth Bernstein

Download or read book Return to the Motherland written by Seth Bernstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the Motherland follows those who were displaced to the Third Reich back to the Soviet Union after the victory over Germany. At the end of World War II, millions of people from Soviet lands were living as refugees outside the borders of the USSR. Most had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the Third Reich to work as racial inferiors in a crushing environment. Seth Bernstein reveals the secret history of repatriation, the details of the journey, and the new identities, prospects, and dangers for migrants that were created by the tumult of war. He uses official and personal sources from declassified holdings in post-Soviet archives, more than one hundred oral history interviews, and transnational archival material. Most notably, he makes extensive use of secret police files declassified only after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. The stories described in Return to the Motherland reveal not only how the USSR grappled with the aftermath of war but also the universality of Stalinism's refugee crisis. While arrest was not guaranteed, persecution was ubiquitous. Within Soviet society, returnees met with a cold reception that demanded hard labor as payment for perceived disloyalty, soldiers perpetrated rape against returning Soviet women, and ordinary people avoided contact with repatriates, fearing arrest as traitors and spies. As Bernstein describes, Soviet displacement presented a challenge to social order and the opportunity to rebuild the country as a great power after a devastating war.

The Soviet Myth of World War II

Author : Jonathan Brunstedt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108584888
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (85 download)

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Book Synopsis The Soviet Myth of World War II by : Jonathan Brunstedt

Download or read book The Soviet Myth of World War II written by Jonathan Brunstedt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a bold new interpretation of the Soviet myth of World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme myth of state under Brezhnev. Jonathan Brunstedt offers a timely historical investigation into the roots of the revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

Late Stalinism

Author : Evgeny Dobrenko
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300252846
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Late Stalinism by : Evgeny Dobrenko

Download or read book Late Stalinism written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The People's War

Author : Robert W. Thurston
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252026003
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis The People's War by : Robert W. Thurston

Download or read book The People's War written by Robert W. Thurston and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The People's War lifts the Stalinist veil of secrecy to probe an almost untold side of World War II: the experiences of the Soviet people themselves. Going beyond dry and faceless military accounts of the eastern front of the "Great Patriotic War" and the Soviet state's one-dimensional "heroic People," this volume explores how ordinary citizens responded to the war, Stalinist leadership, and Nazi invasion. Drawing on a wealth of archival and recently published material, contributors detail the calculated destruction of a Jewish town by the Germans and present a chilling picture of life in occupied Minsk. They look at the cultural developments of the war as well as the wartime experience of intellectuals, for whom the period was a time of relative freedom. They discuss women's myriad roles in combat and other spheres of activity. They also reassess the behavior and morale of ordinary Red Army troops and offer new conclusions about early crushing defeats at the hands of the Germans--defeats that were officially explained as cowardice on the part of high officers. A frank investigation of civilian life behind the front lines, The People's War provides a detailed, balanced picture of the Stalinist USSR by describing not only the command structure and repressive power of the state but also how people reacted to them, cooperated with or opposed them, and adapted or ignored central policy in their own ways. By putting the Soviet people back in their war, this volume helps restore the range and complexity of human experience to one of history's most savage periods.

Empire of Friends

Author : Rachel Applebaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501735586
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of Friends by : Rachel Applebaum

Download or read book Empire of Friends written by Rachel Applebaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Author : David L. Hoffmann
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000430294
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia by : David L. Hoffmann

Download or read book The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia written by David L. Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume showcases important new research on World War II memory, both in the Soviet Union and in Russia today. Through an examination of war remembrance in its various forms—official histories, school textbooks, museums, monuments, literature, films, and Victory Day parades—chapters illustrate how the heroic narrative of the war was established in Soviet times and how it continues to shape war memorialization under Putin. This war narrative resonates with the Russian population due to decades of Soviet commemoration, which continued virtually uninterrupted into the post-Soviet period. Major themes of the volume include the use of World War II memory for political legitimation and patriotic mobilization; the striking continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet commemorative practices; the place of Holocaust memorialization in contemporary Russia; Putin’s invocation of the war to bolster national pride and international prestige; and the relationship between individual memory and collective remembrance. Authored by an international group of distinguished specialists, this collection is ideal for scholars of Russia across a range of disciplines, including history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies.

Stalin's Genocides

Author : Norman M. Naimark
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400836069
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's Genocides by : Norman M. Naimark

Download or read book Stalin's Genocides written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity 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. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Stalin's Curse

Author : Robert Gellately
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307962350
Total Pages : 505 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's Curse by : Robert Gellately

Download or read book Stalin's Curse written by Robert Gellately and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

World War II Behind Closed Doors

Author : Laurence Rees
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307389626
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis World War II Behind Closed Doors by : Laurence Rees

Download or read book World War II Behind Closed Doors written by Laurence Rees and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revelatory chronicle of World War II, Laurence Rees documents the dramatic and secret deals that helped make the war possible and prompted some of the most crucial decisions made during the conflict. Drawing on material available only since the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as amazing new testimony from nearly a hundred separate witnesses from the period—Rees reexamines the key choices made by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and presents, in a compelling and fresh way, the reasons why the people of Poland, the Baltic states, and other European countries simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for another. Surprising, incisive, and endlessly intriguing, World War II Behind Closed Doors will change the way we think about the Second World War.