|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of
revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against
Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates,
however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a
Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions
of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely
populated Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, she shows that the
anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early
1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular
support. Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in
both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the north
as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct
regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern
Government and its relations with the British and American forces
who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end
of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing
involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a
ferocious ""people's war"" until remaining White forces under
General Yevgeny Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.
In the Great Terror of 1937 38 more than a million Soviet citizens
were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit.
What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what
motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet
perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow
suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how
Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of
Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available
for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures
of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and
interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred
at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives,
agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting ""enemies of the
people"" even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls
back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to
reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in
Stalin-era crimes.
Return to the Motherland follows those who were displaced to the
Third Reich back to the Soviet Union after the victory over
Germany. At the end of World War II, millions of people from Soviet
lands were living as refugees outside the borders of the USSR. Most
had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the
Third Reich to work as racial inferiors in a crushing environment.
Seth Bernstein reveals the secret history of repatriation, the
details of the journey, and the new identities, prospects, and
dangers for migrants that were created by the tumult of war. He
uses official and personal sources from declassified holdings in
post-Soviet archives, more than one hundred oral history
interviews, and transnational archival material. Most notably, he
makes extensive use of secret police files declassified only after
the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. The stories described in
Return to the Motherland reveal not only how the USSR grappled with
the aftermath of war but also the universality of Stalinism's
refugee crisis. While arrest was not guaranteed, persecution was
ubiquitous. Within Soviet society, returnees met with a cold
reception that demanded hard labor as payment for perceived
disloyalty, soldiers perpetrated rape against returning Soviet
women, and ordinary people avoided contact with repatriates,
fearing arrest as traitors and spies. As Bernstein describes,
Soviet displacement presented a challenge to social order and the
opportunity to rebuild the country as a great power after a
devastating war.
In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin's regime
provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young
Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with
violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more
broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by
declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films,
memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin
explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were
the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential
soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might
undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet
revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian
activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass
organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state
repression even as Stalin's regime offered them the opportunity to
participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows
Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the
war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists,
Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture
as a core part of socialism. -- Cornell University Press
In the Great Terror of 1937-38 more than a million Soviet citizens
were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit.
What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what
motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet
perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow
suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how
Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of
Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available
for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures
of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and
interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred
at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives,
agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting "enemies of the
people" -even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls
back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to
reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in
Stalin-era crimes.
|
|