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Stalin's Curse - Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Paperback)
Loot Price: R511
Discovery Miles 5 110
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Stalin's Curse - Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Paperback)
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Loot Price R511
Discovery Miles 5 110
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The Second World War almost destroyed Stalin's Soviet Union. But
victory over Nazi Germany provided the dictator with his great
opportunity: to expand Soviet power way beyond the borders of the
Soviet state. Well before the shooting stopped in 1945, the Soviet
leader methodically set about the unprecedented task of creating a
Red Empire that would soon stretch into the heart of Europe and
Asia, displaying a supreme realism and ruthlessness that
Machiavelli would surely have envied. By the time of his death in
1953, his new imperium was firmly in place, defining the contours
of a Cold War world that was seemingly permanent and indestructible
- and would last until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But
what were Stalin's motives in this spectacular power grab? Was he
no more than a latter-day Russian tsar, for whom Communist ideology
was little more than a smoke-screen? Or was he simply a
psychopathic killer? In Stalin's Curse, best-selling historian
Robert Gellately firmly rejects both these simplifications of the
man and his motives. Using a wealth of previously unavailable
documentation, Gellately shows instead how Stalin's crimes are more
accurately understood as the deeds of a ruthless and life-long
Leninist revolutionary. Far from being a latter day 'Red Tsar'
intent simply upon imperial expansion for its own sake, Stalin was
in fact deeply inspired by the rhetoric of the Russian revolution
and what Lenin had accomplished during the Great War. As Gellately
convincingly shows, Stalin remained throughout these years
steadfastly committed to a 'boundless faith' in Communism - and saw
the Second World War as his chance to take up once again the old
revolutionary mission to carry the Red Flag to the world.
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