Dissent on the Margins

Dissent on the Margins
Author: Emily B. Baran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190495499

Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses' international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, they faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states struggled to reconcile the proper limits on freedom of conscience with European norms and domestic concerns. Dissent on the Margins provides a new and important perspective on one of America's most understudied religious movements.

Stalin's Witnesses

Stalin's Witnesses
Author: Julius Wachtel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Espionage
ISBN: 9781908483393

Vilna, the Russian Empire, 1905. En route to deliver a secret pamphlet entrusted to him by his elder brothers, a young boy falls into the clutches of the Czar's secret police. Another decade will pass before the Crown gives way, not to liberally-minded revolutionaries like Vladimir Romm, the boy now a young man, but to the pitiless disciples of an embittered lawyer named Lenin. For the next three-quarters of a century, Marxism in its cruelest form will rule over Russia. Returning to Vilna during the winter of 1918 for the first time since his youth, Romm finds it occupied by Polish troops. He takes charge of a Communist militia and leads the Red Army to a small yet significant win for the fledgling Soviet state. As World War I yields to an uneasy peace, Romm joins Soviet intelligence. He is posted under various guises to Germany, France, Japan and Geneva. In 1934 Romm is named Izvestia's inaugural correspondent to Washington where he is given orders to bring key Americans to the Soviet side. But as his career reaches its zenith, Romm is suddenly recalled, arrested and forced to serve with four others as 'witnesses' at the notorious 1937 Moscow show trial. "Stalin's Witnesses" is a novel. While it sticks closely to the historical record, the witnesses speak in their own voices, guiding our journey through a tangle of fascinating events to tease out the underlying truths. It's their story, and it helped set the stage for our own.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides
Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400836069

The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Stalin's Soviet Justice

Stalin's Soviet Justice
Author: David M. Crowe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-06-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350083364

From the 'show' trials of the 1920s and 1930s to the London Conference, this book examines the Soviet role in the Nuremberg IMT trial through the prism of the ideas and practices of earlier Soviet legal history, detailing the evolution of Stalin's ideas about the trail of Nazi war criminals. Stalin believed that an international trial for Nazi war criminals was the best way to show the world the sacrifices his country had made to defeat Hitler, and he, together with his legal mouthpiece Andrei Vyshinsky, maintained tight control over Soviet representatives during talks leading up to the creation of the Nuremberg IMT trial in 1945, and the trial itself. But Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg were unable to deal comfortably with the complexities of an open, western-style legal proceeding, which undercut their effectiveness throughout the trial. However, they were able to present a significant body of evidence that underscored the brutal nature of Hitler's racial war in Russia from 1941-45, a theme which became central to Stalin's efforts to redefine international criminal law after the war. Stalin's Soviet Justice provides a nuanced analysis of the Soviet justice system at a crucial turning point in European history and it will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of the legal history of the Soviet Union, the history of war crimes and the aftermath of the Second World War.

The Last Days of Stalin

The Last Days of Stalin
Author: Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300192223

Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.

Last Witnesses

Last Witnesses
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0399588779

“A masterpiece” (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize–winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.” Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. Praise for Last Witnesses “There is a special sort of clear-eyed humility to [Alexievich’s] reporting.”—The Guardian “A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium. . . . Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses.”—The New Republic “A profound triumph.”—The Big Issue “[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities. . . . It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict.”—The Washington Post

Red Famine

Red Famine
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0385538863

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Conversations with Stalin

Conversations with Stalin
Author: Milovan Djilas
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1962
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780156225915

Content: Written from his experiences as a vice-president of Yugoslavia and aide to Tito, the author here records face to face meetingwith Stalin from 1944-1953. The author was imprisoned by the Yugoslav government from 1957-1961.

Stalin's Secret Pogrom

Stalin's Secret Pogrom
Author: Joshua Rubenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300084862

In 1952 15 Soviet Jews were secretly tried and convicted; many executions followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. This book presents an abridged version of the transcript of the trial revealing the Kremlin's machinery of destruction.

Bloodlands

Bloodlands
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2012-10-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465032974

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.