A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s


Book Description

The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled. Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories to computerized data bases.




Soviet Union


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The Russia Reader


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An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the worlds largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today.




Passage Through Armageddon


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Invaded by foreign armies and threatened by the terrors of civil strife, Russia's leaders mobilized more than fifteen million fighting men between 1914 and 1918 only to find that at least a quarter of them had no boots, rifles, or ammunition. With field casualties soaring into the millions, scourges of starvation and disease joined the enemy's guns to double and treble Russia's human losses. Never in modern history had war so devastated a nation. Recounting the tale of the Russians' passage through the shattering experience of the First World War and the revolutions of 1917, W. Bruce Lincoln offers a profoundly intelligent and detailed chronology of the watershed events and devastating hardships that led to the Bolshevik Revolution. Mining an abundance of resources, including letters, diaries, memoirs, government reports, military dispatches, and testimony given to the revolution's first Supreme Commission of Inquiry, he allows the reader to step directly into army headquarters, state council chambers, boudoirs, trenches, and underground revolutionary hideaways of the men and women who shaped the events of this crucial era.




Inhuman Land


Book Description

A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself. In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles—men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished—were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish Army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army’s commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving the Poles arriving for military training; gathering accounts of what their fates had been; organizing education, culture, and news for the soldiers; and, most important, investigating the disappearance of thousands of missing Polish officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940 many officers had been shot dead in Katyn forest, a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility. Czapski’s account of the years following his release from the camp and the formation of the Polish Army, and its arduous trek through Central Asia and the Middle East to fight on the Italian front offers a stark depiction of Stalin’s Russia at war and of the suffering, stoicism, and bravery of his fellow Poles. A work of clear observation and deep compassion, Inhuman Land is one of the twentieth century’s indispensable acts of literary witness.







The Soviet Airborne Experience


Book Description

Contents: The Prewar Experience; Evolution of Airborne Forces During World War II; Operational Employment: Vyaz'ma, January-February 1942; Operational Employment: Vyaz'ma, February-June 1942; Operational Employment: On the Dnepr, September 1943; Tactical Employment; The Postwar Years.




Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation


Book Description

The breakthrough bestseller by a German academic (and longtime researcher with the German military archives) that documented Stalin's murderous war against the German army and the German people to today's German public. Based on the late Joachim Hoffmann's lifelong study of German and Russian military records, Stalin's War of Extermination not only reveals--as never before--the Red Army's grisly record of atrocities against soldiers and civilians, but establishes beyond cavil that torture, murder, and rape of the captive and the helpless was official Soviet policy, as ordered by Comrade J.V. Stalin. In detail: Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to invade Western Europe in order to initiate the "World Revolution." The outbreak of war between Germany and the Western Allies in 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to prepare an attack against Europe which was unparalleled in history both in terms of Stalin's far-reaching goals as well as in terms of the amount of troops and armaments amassed at the Soviet border. Of course, Stalin's aggressive intentions did not escape Germany's notice who in turn planned a preventive strike against the Red Army. However, the Germans obviously underestimated both the strength of the Red Army and the determination of its leaders. What unfolded in June 1941 was undoubtedly the most-cruel war in history. Dr. Hoffmann's book shows in detail how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their unwilling soldiers to fight against the Germans who were anticipated as liberators from Stalinist oppression by most Russians. Stalin ordered not only to kill all German POWs, but also to kill Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands alive, because they failed to fight to their death. Dr. Hoffmann also explains how Soviet propagandists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers, dehumanized by Soviet propaganda and brutality, finally reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder befell East Germany. After reading this book, the world should thank the German Army that they prevented Stalin from succeeding with his plans of World Revolution, despite all the wrongdoings the Germans committed themselves. An indispensable book for all students of World War II as it actually happened, as well as a revisionist classic that has shaken anti-German propagandists to the marrow.




Lenin's Tomb


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.