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"Soviet Union History 1925-1953."
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Stalinist society, 1928-1953
A fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation ruled over by Stalin and his henchmen from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, drawing on declassified archival materials, interviews with former Soviet citizens, old and new memoirs, and personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship.
eBook
Monuments for Posterity
Monuments for Posterity
challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments
were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function,
arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present
for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while
pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness
and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in
step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and
their undergirding cultural dynamics.
By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism,
and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival
material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation
of the Stalinist monument-building program from the perspective of
its goal to \"immortalize the memory\" of the era. He analyzes how
this objective affected the design and composition of Stalinist
monuments, what cultural factors prompted the sudden and powerful
yearning to be remembered, and most importantly, what the culture
of self-commemoration revealed about changing outlooks on the
future-both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders.
Monuments for Posterity shifts the perspective from
monuments' political-ideological content to the desire to be
remembered and prompts a much-needed reconsideration of the
supposed uniqueness of both Stalinist aesthetics and the temporal
culture that they expressed. Many Stalinist monuments still stand
prominently in postsocialist cityscapes and remain the subject of
continual heated political controversy. Kalashnikov makes manifest
monuments' intentional attempts to seduce us-the \"posterity\" for
whom they were built.
eBook
Gulag Voices
Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story.Gulag Voicesnow fills in the other half.
The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances-many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value-collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them.
A vital addition to the literature of this era,annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the Soviet Union,Gulag Voiceswill inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself.
eBook
Stalin's Empire of Memory
Based on declassified materials from eight Ukrainian and Russian archives,Stalin's Empire of Memory, offers a complex and vivid analysis of the politics of memory under Stalinism. Using the Ukrainian republic as a case study, Serhy Yekelchyk elucidates the intricate interaction between the Kremlin, non-Russian intellectuals, and their audiences.
Yekelchyk posits that contemporary representations of the past reflected the USSR's evolution into an empire with a complex hierarchy among its nations. In reality, he argues, the authorities never quite managed to control popular historical imagination or fully reconcile Russia's 'glorious past' with national mythologies of the non-Russian nationalities.
Combining archival research with an innovative methodology that links scholarly and political texts with the literary works and artistic images,Stalin's Empire of Memorypresents a lucid, readable text that will become a must-have for students, academics, and anyone interested in Russian history.
eBook
The industrialisation of Soviet Russia. Volume 7, The Soviet economy and the approach of war, 1937-1939
This text concludes 'The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia,' an authoritative account of the Soviet Union's industrial transformation between 1929 and 1939. The volume before this one covered the 'good years' (in economic terms) of 1934 to 1936. The present volume has a darker tone: beginning from the Great Terror, it ends with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During that time, Soviet society was repeatedly mobilised against internal and external enemies, and the economy provided one of the main arenas for the struggle. This was expressed in waves of repression, intensive rearmament, the increased regimentation of the workforce and the widespread use of forced labour.
Book
It was a long time ago, and it never happened anyway : Russia and the communist past
Russia today is haunted by deeds that have not been examined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the Communist experience has not been undertaken, and millions of victims of Soviet Communism are all but forgotten. In this book David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent and longtime writer on Russia and the Soviet Union, presents a striking new interpretation of Russia's great historical tragedy, locating its source in Russia's failure fully to appreciate the value of the individual in comparison with the objectives of the state.Satter explores the moral and spiritual crisis of Russian society. He shows how it is possible for a government to deny the inherent value of its citizens and for the population to agree, and why so many Russians actually mourn the passing of the Soviet regime that denied them fundamental rights. Through a wide-ranging consideration of attitudes toward the living and the dead, the past and the present, the state and the individual, Satter arrives at a distinctive and important new way of understanding the Russian experience.
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