The Whisperers

The Whisperers

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  • Author: Orlando Figes
  • Publisher: Penguin UK
  • ISBN: 014180887X
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 970

Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.


Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941

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  • Author: Robert W. Thurston
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • ISBN: 9780300074420
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 338

Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.


Stalin's Russia

Stalin's Russia

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  • Author: Chris Ward
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • ISBN: 9780340731512
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304

The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is brilliantly captured in this book. Chris Ward conceptualizes the field in a clear and helpful way, offers a synthesis of the vast secondary literature in the area, and provides evaluation of the key issues at stake. This second edition includes the necessary updating, the provision of more maps, and a new chapter on foreign policy.


Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia

Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia

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  • Author: Sarah Rosemary Davies
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 9780521566766
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 262

Between 1934 and 1941 Stalin unleashed what came to be known as the 'Great Terror' against millions of Soviet citizens. The same period also saw the 'Great Retreat', the repudiation of many of the aspirations of the Russian Revolution. The response of ordinary Russians to the extraordinary events of this time has been obscure. Sarah Davies's study uses NKVD and party reports, letters and other evidence to show that, despite propaganda and repression, dissonant public opinion was not extinguished. The people continued to criticise Stalin and the Soviet regime, and complain about particular policies. The book examines many themes, including attitudes towards social and economic policy, the terror, and the leader cult, shedding light on a hugely important part of Russia's social, political, and cultural history.


Bitter Waters

Bitter Waters

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  • Author: Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov
  • Publisher: Westview Press
  • ISBN: 0813323746
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 226

Focusing on life and work after the author's release in 1935 from a Soviet labor camp, his story is told chronologically, and begins with his difficulties finding a job in the Russian provinces. This memoir may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society and economy and the indomitable creativity with which ordinary people sustained both their lives.


Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia

Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia

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  • Author: Denis Skopin
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1000547221
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 222

This book is devoted to the phenomenon of removal of people declared "public enemies" from group photographs in Stalin’s Russia. The book is based on long-term empirical research in Russian archives and includes 57 photographs that are exceptional in terms of historical interest: all these images bear traces of editing in the form of various marks, such as blacking-out, excisions or scratches. The illustrative materials also include a group of photographs with inscriptions left by officers of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. To approach this extensive visual material, Denis Skopin draws on a wealth of Stalin-era written sources: memoirs, diaries and official documents. He argues that this kind of political iconoclasm cannot be confused with censorship nor vandalism. The practice in question is more harrowing and morally twisted, for in most cases the photos were defaced by those who were part of victim’s intimate circle: his/her colleagues, friends or even close family members. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, visual culture, Russian studies and Russian history and politics.


The Forsaken

The Forsaken

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  • Author: Tim Tzouliadis
  • Publisher: Hachette UK
  • ISBN: 0748130314
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 582

Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.


The Commissar Vanishes

The Commissar Vanishes

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  • Author: David King
  • Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
  • ISBN: 9780805052954
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 192

A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."


Stalin's Peasants

Stalin's Peasants

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  • Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • ISBN: 9780195104592
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 420

Drawing on Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, this work analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village


Breaking Stalin's Nose

Breaking Stalin's Nose

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  • Author: Eugene Yelchin
  • Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
  • ISBN: 1429949953
  • Category : Juvenile Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 162

A Newbery Honor Book. Sasha Zaichik has known the laws of the Soviet Young Pioneers since the age of six: The Young Pioneer is devoted to Comrade Stalin, the Communist Party, and Communism. A Young Pioneer is a reliable comrade and always acts according to conscience. A Young Pioneer has a right to criticize shortcomings. But now that it is finally time to join the Young Pioneers, the day Sasha has awaited for so long, everything seems to go awry. He breaks a classmate's glasses with a snowball. He accidentally damages a bust of Stalin in the school hallway. And worst of all, his father, the best Communist he knows, was arrested just last night. This moving story of a ten-year-old boy's world shattering is masterful in its simplicity, powerful in its message, and heartbreaking in its plausibility. One of Horn Book's Best Fiction Books of 2011