Witnessing Stalin’s Justice

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350338206
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Witnessing Stalin’s Justice by : Kelly J. Evans

Download or read book Witnessing Stalin’s Justice written by Kelly J. Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing Stalin's Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin's Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union's Great Purge.

Khrushchev's Cold Summer

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Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 080145851X
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Khrushchev's Cold Summer by : Miriam Dobson

Download or read book Khrushchev's Cold Summer written by Miriam Dobson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

Stalin's Soviet Justice

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350083364
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's Soviet Justice by : David M. Crowe

Download or read book Stalin's Soviet Justice written by David M. Crowe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Stalin's Soviet Justice

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350196916
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin's Soviet Justice by : David M. Crowe

Download or read book Stalin's Soviet Justice written by David M. Crowe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 147428549X
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Life in Stalin's Soviet Union by : Kees Boterbloem

Download or read book Life in Stalin's Soviet Union written by Kees Boterbloem and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on 'Food, Health and Leisure', the 'Lived Experience' and 'Religion and Ideology', the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: * Food * Health and Housing * Sex and Gender * Education * Religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) * Sport and Leisure * Festivals There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalin's Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalin's Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship.

Communities of Memory

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Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801444364
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (443 download)

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Book Synopsis Communities of Memory by : William James Booth

Download or read book Communities of Memory written by William James Booth and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Memory has fueled merciless, violent strife, and it has been at the core of reconciliation and reconstruction. It has been used to justify great crimes, and yet it is central to the pursuit of justice. In these and more everyday ways, we live surrounded by memory, individual and social: in our habits, our names, the places where we live, street names, libraries, archives, and our citizenship, institutions, and laws. Still, we wonder what to make of memory and its gifts, though sometimes we are hardly even certain that they are gifts. Of the many chambers in this vast palace, I mean to ask particularly after the place of memory in politics, in the identity of political communities, and in their practices of doing justice."--from the Preface W. James Booth seeks to understand the place of memory in the identity, ethics, and practices of justice of political communities. Identity is, he believes, a particular kind of continuity across time, one central to the possibility of agency and responsibility, and memory plays a central role in grounding that continuity. Memory-identity takes two forms: a habitlike form, the deep presence of the past that is part of a life-led-in-common; and a more fragile, vulnerable form in which memory struggles to preserve identity through time--notably in bearing witness--a form of memory work deeply bound up with the identity of political communities. Booth argues that memory holds a defining place in determining how justice is administered. Memory is tied to the very possibility of an ethical community, one responsible for its own past, able to make commitments for the future, and driven to seek justice. "Underneath (and motivating) the politics of memory, understood as contests over the writing of history, over memorials, museums, and canons," he writes, "there lies an intertwining of memory, identity, and justice." Communities of Memory both argues for and maps out that intertwining.

Justice in Conflict

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191082945
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Justice in Conflict by : Mark Kersten

Download or read book Justice in Conflict written by Mark Kersten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when the international community simultaneously pursues peace and justice in response to ongoing conflicts? What are the effects of interventions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the wars in which the institution intervenes? Is holding perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable a help or hindrance to conflict resolution? This book offers an in-depth examination of the effects of interventions by the ICC on peace, justice and conflict processes. The 'peace versus justice' debate, wherein it is argued that the ICC has either positive or negative effects on 'peace', has spawned in response to the Court's propensity to intervene in conflicts as they still rage. This book is a response to, and a critical engagement with, this debate. Building on theoretical and analytical insights from the fields of conflict and peace studies, conflict resolution, and negotiation theory, the book develops a novel analytical framework to study the Court's effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. This framework is applied to two cases: Libya and northern Uganda. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the core of the book examines the empirical effects of the ICC on each case. The book also examines why the ICC has the effects that it does, delineating the relationship between the interests of states that refer situations to the Court and the ICC's institutional interests, arguing that the negotiation of these interests determines which side of a conflict the ICC targets and thus its effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. While the effects of the ICC's interventions are ultimately and inevitably mixed, the book makes a unique contribution to the empirical record on ICC interventions and presents a novel and sophisticated means of studying, analyzing, and understanding the effects of the Court's interventions in Libya, northern Uganda - and beyond.

This I Cannot Forget

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393312348
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (123 download)

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Book Synopsis This I Cannot Forget by : Anna Larina

Download or read book This I Cannot Forget written by Anna Larina and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1993 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sensation when published in Moscow and a bestseller in Europe, the memoirs of this remarkable woman--the widow of the charismatic Bolshevik leader Nikolai I. Bukharin--offer a new dimension to our understanding of Soviet history.

Witness

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1621573761
Total Pages : 446 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (215 download)

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Book Synopsis Witness by : Whittaker Chambers

Download or read book Witness written by Whittaker Chambers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestseller for 13 consecutive weeks! "As long as humanity speaks of virtue and dreams of freedom, the life and writings of Whittaker Chambers will ennoble and inspire." - PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN "One of the dozen or so indispensable books of the century..." - GEORGE F. WILL "Witness changed my worldview, my philosophical perceptions, and, without exaggeration, my life." - ROBERT D. NOVAK, from his Foreward "Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies. When some future Plutarch writes his American Live, he will find in Chambers penetrating and terrible insights into America in the early twentieth century." - ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR. "Chambers had a gift for language....to call Chambers an activist or Witness a political event is to say Dostoevsky was a criminologist or Crime and Punishment a morality tract." - WASHINGTON POST "Chambers was not just the witness against Alger Hiss, but was also one of th articulators of the modern conservative philosophy, a philosophy that has something to do with restoring the spiritual values of politics." - SAM TANENHAUS, author of Whittaker Chambers "One of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American - and one of the best written, too." - HILTON KRAMER, The New Criterion First published in 1952, Witness is the true story of Soviet spies in America and the trial that captivated a nation. Part literary effort, part philosophical treatise, this intriguing autobiography recounts the famous Alger Hiss case and reveals much more. Chambers' worldview and his belief that "man without mysticism is a monster" went on to help make political conservatism a national force. Regnery History's Cold War Classics edition is the most comprehensive version of Witness ever published, featuring forewords collected from all previous editions, including discussions from luminaries William F. Buckley Jr., Robert D. Novak, Milton Hindus, and Alfred S. Regnery.

Stalinism at War

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Author :
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.

Witnessing Stalin’s Justice

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1350338184
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Witnessing Stalin’s Justice by : Kelly J. Evans

Download or read book Witnessing Stalin’s Justice written by Kelly J. Evans and published by . This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing Stalin's Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin's Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union's Great Purge.

Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789176017777
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (177 download)

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Book Synopsis Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union by : A. S. Kotli︠a︡rchuk

Download or read book Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union written by A. S. Kotli︠a︡rchuk and published by . This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents studies of Stalinism in the ethnic and religious bor-derlands of the Soviet Union. The authors not only cover hitherto less researched geographical areas, but have also addressed new questions and added new source material. Most of the contributors to this anthology use a micro-his-torical approach. With this approach, it is not the entire area of the country, with millions of separate individuals that are in focus but rather particular and cohesive ethnic and religious communities. Micro-history does not mean ignoring a macro-historical perspective. What happened on the local level had an all-Union context, and communism was a European-wide phenomenon. This means that the history of minorities in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule cannot be grasped outside the national and international context; aspects which are also considered in this volume. The chapters of the book are case studies on various minority groups, both ethnic and religious. In this way, the book gives a more complex picture of the causes and effects of the state-run mass violence during Stalinism. The publication is the outcome of a multidisciplinary international research network lead by Andrej Kotljarchuk (SOdertOrn University, Sweden) and Olle SundstrOm (UmeA University, Sweden) and consisting of specialists from Estonia, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and the United States. These scholars represent various disciplines: Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History and the History of Religions.

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

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Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300245300
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by : Alexandra Popoff

Download or read book Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century written by Alexandra Popoff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman’s powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman’s major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff’s authoritative biography illuminates Grossman’s life and legacy.

An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520351088
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia by : Zara Witkin

Download or read book An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia written by Zara Witkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1932 Zara Witkin, a prominent American engineer, set off for the Soviet Union with two goals: to help build a society more just and rational than the bankrupt capitalist system at home, and to seek out the beautiful film star Emma Tsesarskaia. His memoirs offer a detailed view of Stalin's bureaucracy—entrenched planners who snubbed new methods; construction bosses whose cover-ups led to terrible disasters; engineers who plagiarized Witkin's work; workers whose pride was defeated. Punctuating this document is the tale of Witkin's passion for Tsesarskaia and the record of his friendships with journalist Eugene Lyons, planner Ernst May, and others. Witkin felt beaten in the end by the lethargy and corruption choking the greatest social experiment in history, and by a pervasive evil—the suppression of human rights and dignity by a relentless dictatorship. Finally breaking his spirit was the dissolution of his romance with Emma, his "Dark Goddess." In his lively introduction, Michael Gelb provides the historical context of Witkin's experience, details of his personal life, and insights offered by Emma Tsesarskaia in an interview in 1989.

Crime, Shame and Reintegration

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521356688
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (566 download)

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Book Synopsis Crime, Shame and Reintegration by : John Braithwaite

Download or read book Crime, Shame and Reintegration written by John Braithwaite and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-03-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a contribution to general criminological theory. Its approach is as relevant to professional burglary as to episodic delinquency or white collar crime. Braithwaite argues that some societies have higher crime rates than others because of their different processes of shaming wrongdoing. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be an extraordinarily powerful, efficient and just form of social control. Braithwaite identifies the social conditions for such successful shaming. If his theory is right, radically different criminal justice policies are needed - a shift away from punitive social control toward greater emphasis on moralizing social control. This book will be of interest not only to criminologists and sociologists, but to those in law, public administration and politics who are concerned with social policy and social issues.

Witnessing Stalin's Justice

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781350341562
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (415 download)

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Book Synopsis Witnessing Stalin's Justice by : Kelly J. Evans (author)

Download or read book Witnessing Stalin's Justice written by Kelly J. Evans (author) and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing Stalin's Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin's Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union's Great Purge.

Assignment in Utopia

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Author :
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781412817608
Total Pages : 696 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Assignment in Utopia by : Eugene Lyons

Download or read book Assignment in Utopia written by Eugene Lyons and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of belief, disillusionment and atonement. Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was there as Stalin consolidated his power, through collectivization and its consequences, as the cultural and technical intelligentsia succumbed to the secret police, and as the mechanisms of terror were honed. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this edition, "It was this murderous reality that Stalin's censors worked so assiduously to camouflage, corralling foreign correspondents as their often willing allies." Lyons was one of those allies. Assignment in "Utopia "describes why he refused to see the obvious, the forces that kept him from writing the truth, and the tortuous path he traveled in liberating himself. His story helps us understand how so many who were in a position to know were so silent for so long. In addition, it is a document, by an on-the-scene journalist, of major events in the critical period of the first Five-Year Plan. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this new edition, Assignment in "Utopia "is particularly timely. The system it dissects in such devastating detail is in the process of being rejected throughout Eastern Europe and is under challenge in the Soviet Union itself. The book lends insight into the "political pilgrim" phenomenon described by Paul Hollander, in which visitors celebrate terrorist regimes, seemingly oblivious to their destructive force. The book is valuable for those interested in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, those interested in radical regimes and political change, as well as those interested in better understanding current events in Europe. It will also be useful for the tough questions it poses about journalistic ethics.