This thought-provoking collection of essays analyses the complex, multi-faceted, and even contradictory nature of Stalinism and its representations. Stalinism was an extraordinarily repressive and violent political model, and yet it was led by ideologues committed to a vision of socialism and international harmony. The essays in this volume stress the complex, multi-faceted, and often contradictory nature of Stalin, Stalinism, and Stalinist-style leadership, and. explore the complex picture that emerges. Broadly speaking, three important areas of debate are examined, united by a focus on political leadership: * The key controversies surrounding Stalin's leadership role * A reconsideration of Stalin and the Cold War * New perspectives on the cult of personality Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism is a crucial volume for all students and scholars of Stalin's Russia and Cold War Europe.

Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives—economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel—Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.

Conversations with Milosevic is a firsthand portrayal of the so-called Butcher of the Balkans, the Serbian president whose ambitions sparked the Bosnian conflict. At its heart the book is a portrait of an autocrat who rode the tiger of nationalism to serve his own ends and to promote those who furthered his agenda. The architect of ethnic cleansing in modern Europe, Slobodan Milosevic created and sponsored two Frankenstein's monsters, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, who were also indicted for war crimes. Through these personalities, diplomat and political advisor Ivor Roberts analyzes the unfolding of the Kosovo conflict, which directly sowed the seeds of radicalization in Europe today. He contends that this conflict later provided a false template for the Bush/Blair administrations' illegal invasion of Iraq: regime change under the guise of a humanitarian war. He further investigates how international recognition of Kosovoin the years after the conflict in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions set a disastrous precedent for the Russian annexation of Crimea.

We live in a time where old orders are collapsing: from the postcolonial nation states of the Middle East, to the EU and the American election. Through it all, tech savvy and extremist groups rip up political certainties. Amidst this, a generation of young men find themselves burning with resentment, without the money, power and sex they think they deserve. This crisis of masculinity leads them into an online world of fantasy, violence and reality. The Believers Are But Brothers is based on Alipoor's experiences of working with young people, and research he conducted online. The original show was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and transferred to the Bush Theatre, London. The show envelops its audience in this digital realm, weaving us into the webs of resentment, violence and power networks that are eating away at the structures of the twentieth century. This bold one-man show explores the smoke and mirrors world of online extremism, anonymity and hate speech.

Ante Pavelic was the leader of the fascist party of Croatia (the Ustase), who, on Adolf Hitler's instruction, became the leader of Croatia after the Nazi invasion of 1941. Pavelic was an extreme Croatian nationalist who believed that the Serbian people were an inferior race - he would preside over a genocide that ultimately killed an estimated 390,000 Serbs during World War II. Croatia under Ante Pavelic provides the full history of this period, with a special focus on the United States' role in the post-war settlement. Drawing on previously unpublished documents, Robert McCormick argues that President Harry S. Truman's Cold War priorities meant that Pavelic was never made to answer for his crimes. Today, the Ustase remains difficult legacy within Croatian society, partly as a result of Pavelic' political life in exile in South America. This is a new account of US foreign policy towards one of the Second World War's most brutal dictators and is an essential contribution to Croatian war-time history.

A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror In a shocking new study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag, historian Golfo Alexopoulos suggests that Soviet forced labor camps were driven by brutal exploitation and often administered as death camps. The first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.

In the midst of the political upheavals that engulfed Myanmar from 2010 to 2011, international attention was fixed upon the military regime and its dissident opponents. But away from the cameras, a very different set of struggles were unfolding across the country. These struggles were manifested not as violent clashes, but as everyday interactions involving taxi drivers, community organizers, farmers, heads of domestic NGOs, and many more. A product of five years' research, during which the author conducted over five hundred ethnographic interviews across the country, Pathways that Changed Myanmar provides a voice for those ordinary Burmese whose trials and aspirations went unheard and unnoticed during this pivotal moment in the nation's history.

To the Threshold of Power is the first volume of a two-part work that seeks to explain the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. It lays a foundation for understanding the Nazi and Fascist regimes - from their respective seizures of power in 1922 and 1933 to global war, genocide, and common ruin - through parallel investigations of Italian and German society, institutions, and national myths; the supreme test of the First World War; and the post-1918 struggles from which the Fascist and National Socialist movements emerged. It emphasizes two principal sources of movement: the nationalist mythology of the intellectuals and the institutional culture and agendas of the two armies, especially the Imperial German Army and its Reichswehr successor. The book's climax is the cataclysm of 1914-18 and the rise and triumph of militarily organized radical nationalist movements - Mussolini's Fasci di combattimento and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party - dedicated to the perpetuation of the war and the overthrow of the post-1918 world order.

Why do some autocratic leaders pursue aggressive or expansionist foreign policies, while others are much more cautious in their use of military force? The first book to focus systematically on the foreign policy of different types of authoritarian regimes, Dictators at War and Peace breaks new ground in our understanding of the international behavior of dictators.

Jessica L. P. Weeks explains why certain kinds of regimes are less likely to resort to war than others, why some are more likely to win the wars they start, and why some authoritarian leaders face domestic punishment for foreign policy failures whereas others can weather all but the most serious military defeat. Using novel cross-national data, Weeks looks at various nondemocratic regimes, including those of Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin; the Argentine junta at the time of the Falklands War, the military government in Japan before and during World War II, and the North Vietnamese communist regime. She finds that the differences in the conflict behavior of distinct kinds of autocracies are as great as those between democracies and dictatorships. Indeed, some types of autocracies are no more belligerent or reckless than democracies, casting doubt on the common view that democracies are more selective about war than autocracies.

Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of "los desaparecidos," "the disappeared," has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. "The Reappeared" is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Cordoba, which organized in 2007. Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. "The Reappeared" challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable--and lifelong--suffering.

Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of "los desaparecidos," "the disappeared," has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. "The Reappeared" is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Cordoba, which organized in 2007. Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. "The Reappeared" challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable--and lifelong--suffering.

"Dictators and Dictatorships" is a qualitative enquiry into the politics of authoritarian regimes. It argues that political outcomes in dictatorships are largely a product of leader-elite relations. Differences in the internal structure of dictatorships affect the dynamics of this relationship. This book shows how dictatorships differ from one another and the implications of these differences for political outcomes. In particular, it examines political processes in personalist, military, single-party, monarchic, and hybrid regimes.The aim of the book is to provide a clear definition of what dictatorship means, how authoritarian politics works, and what the political consequences of dictatorship are. It discusses how authoritarianism influences a range of political outcomes, such as economic performance, international conflict, and leader and regime durability.Numerous case studies from around the world support the theory and research presented to foster a better understanding of the inner workings of authoritarian regimes. By combining theory with concrete political situations, the book will appeal to undergraduate students in comparative politics, international relations, authoritarian politics, and democratization.

The victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election left specialists of American politics perplexed and concerned about the future of US democracy. Because no populist leader had occupied the White House in 150 years, there were many questions about what to expect. Marshaling the long-standing expertise of leading specialists of populism elsewhere in the world, this book provides the first systematic, comparative analysis of the prospects for US democracy under Trump, considering the two regions - Europe and Latin America - that have had the most ample recent experiences with populist chief executives. Chapters analyze the conditions under which populism slides into illiberal or authoritarian rule and in so doing derive well-grounded insights and scenarios for the US case, as well as a more general cross-national framework. The book makes an original argument about the likely resilience of US democracy and its institutions.

Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

In this volume Europe's leading modern historians offer new insights into two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that have profoundly affected world history--Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Until now historians have paid more attention to the similarities between these two regimes than to their differences. "Stalinism and Nazism" explores the difficult relationship between the history and memory of the traumas inflicted by Nazi and Soviet occupation in several Eastern European countries in the twentieth century. The first part of the volume explores the origins, nature, and organization of Hitler's and Stalin's dictatorial power, the manipulation of violence by the state systems, and the comparative power of the dictator's personal will and the encompassing totalitarian system. The second part examines the legacies of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern European countries that experienced both. "Stalinism and Nazism" features the latest critical perspectives on two of the most influential and deadly political regimes in modern history.

Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe brings together well-known comparative political scientists to define and explore the effects of authoritarian rule in post-authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe, the Southern Cone, and Brazil. Contributors to this volume use the research of historians, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to formulate their conceptualizations of legacies. Their analysis is also sensitive to the experiences of those who live with the consequences of authoritarian regimes. Each chapter offers a multi-case comparison either from within Latin America or between Latin America and Southern Europe. Among the challenges for democracies in Latin America and Southern Europe are weakened political parties, politicized militaries, compromised judiciaries, corrupt police forces, and widespread citizen distrust. Utilizing a historical-sociological methodology that incorporates both the formal-legal and cultural dimensions of legacies, these essayists offer a fruitful examination of the political structures and institutions bequeathed by authoritarian regimes. They look at such core institutions as political parties, executives, legislatures, constitutions, and interest groups as well as symbolic-discursive dimensions related to individual and collective memories, citizenship, public perception, and trust. They also suggest policy directions to eradicate authoritarian legacies from democratic institutions and praxis. Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe encourages comparativists to consider more systematically the many manifestations of authoritarian legacies as challenges to democracy.This volume will appeal to all students and scholars interested in comparative politics, Latin America, Southern Europe, and democratization.