Modern World History

Was Lenin a visionary whose ideas were subverted by his followers? Or was he a cynical misanthrope, even crueler than Stalin? This book, which contains newly released documents from the Lenin archive in Russia, lays bare Lenin the man and the politician, leaving little doubt that he was a ruthless and manipulative leader who used terror, subversion, and persecution to achieve his goals.

Following the Russian Revolution, the cultural and political landscape of Russia was strewn with contradictions. The dictatorship, censorship, and repression of the Communist party existed alongside private enterprise, the black market, and open debates on Socialism.

As a leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century. These clearly written essays offer an account of his life and times, a lively view of his personality, and a stimulating engagement with his ideas. Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche College and has written widely on radical movements.

The author analyzes newly released documents concerning Stalin's strategic design to conquer Europe and the reasons behind his controversial support for Nazi Germany.

Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
Compares all parts of life in both regimes.

Drawing on declassified material from Stalin's personal archive, this is the first systematic attempt to analyze how Stalin saw his world—both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Stalin rarely left his offices and viewed the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books. Analyzing these materials, Sarah Davies and James Harris provide a new understanding of Stalin's thought process and leadership style and explore not only his perceptions and misperceptions of the world but the consequences of these perceptions and misperceptions.

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The genocide issue -- The making of a genocidaire -- Dekulakization -- The Holodomor -- Removing nations -- The Great Terror -- The crimes of Stalin and Hitler -- Conclusions.

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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy--the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States--leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father's regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana's incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it's a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father's name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us

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The seats of Stalinist power -- The bulwarks of Stalin's power -- A world of reading and contemplation -- Trepidation in the inner circle -- Patient number 1 -- Family -- The dictatorship collapses -- The funeral.

Roughly ten million children were victims of political repression in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, scientists, physicians, and political leaders considered by the regime to be dangerous to the political order. Ten grown victims, who as children suffered banishment, starvation, disease, anti-Semitism, and trauma resulting from their parents' condemnation and arrest, now freely share their stories. The result is a powerful and moving oral history that will profoundly deepen the reader's understanding of life in the U.S.S.R. under the despotic reign of Joseph Stalin.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits thought her attempt to have her father record his life's story failed. But in 2004, three years after her father's death, she was going through his things and found a box of tapes—several years-worth—with his spectacular life, triumphs, and tragedies told one last time in his baritone voice. Nachman Libeskind's remarkable story is an odyssey through crucial events of the twentieth century. With an unshakable will and a few drops of luck, he survives a pre-war Polish prison; witnesses the 1939 Nazi invasion of Lodz and narrowly escapes; is imprisoned in a brutal Soviet gulag where he helps his fellow inmates survive, and upon regaining his freedom treks to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he finds and nearly loses the love of his life. Later, the crushing communist regime and a lingering postwar anti-Semitism in Poland drive Nachman and his young family to Israel, where he faces a new form of discrimination. Then, defiantly, Nachman turns a pocketful of change into a new life in New York City, where a heartbreaking promise leads to his unlikely success as a modernist painter that inspires others to pursue their dreams.

Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.

The' red files revealed. Examining the period from the early 1930s through Stalin's death in 1953—the height of the Stalinist regime—this enlightening book reveals what we have learned from the archives, what has surprised us, and what has confirmed what we already knew. Most of the authors have worked with these archives since they were opened.

Europe on Trial explores the history of collaboration, retribution, and resistance during World War II. These three themes are examined through the experiences of people and countries under German occupation, as well as Soviet, Italian, and other military rule. Those under foreign rule faced innumerable moral and ethical dilemmas, including the question of whether to cooperate with their occupiers, try to survive the war without any political involvement, or risk their lives by becoming resisters. Many chose all three, depending on wartime conditions. Following the brutal war, the author discusses the purges of real or alleged war criminals and collaborators, through various acts of violence, deportations, and judicial proceedings at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as well as in thousands of local courts. Europe on Trial helps us to understand the many moral consequences both during and immediately following World War II.

Drawing on recently released Soviet archival materials, Hunger and War investigates state food supply policy and its impact on Soviet society during World War II. It explores the role of the state in provisioning the urban population, particularly workers, with food; feeding the Red Army; the medicalization of hunger; hunger in blockaded Leningrad; and civilian mortality from hunger and malnutrition in other home front industrial regions. New research reported here challenges and complicates many of the narratives and counter-narratives about the war. The authors engage such difficult subjects as starvation mortality, bitterness over privation and inequalities in provisioning, and conflicts among state organizations. At the same time, they recognize the considerable role played by the Soviet state in organizing supplies of food to adequately support the military effort and defense production and in developing policies that promoted social stability amid upheaval.

Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews.

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers.

Policing Stalin's Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on an extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repressions during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive. It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.