Author : A. Kemp-Welch
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 37,36 MB
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 9780312226442
Between the Nazi occupation and the anti-Communist revolution of 1956, Poland underwent twelve years of Stalinist rule. Using recently-opened archives, historians and social scientists from four countries give the first analysis of the rise and fall of this system. They show the strengths and weaknesses of the Stalinist project for Poland and explore its ambiguous reception by society.
Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 803 pages
File Size : 28,54 MB
Release : 2012-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0385536437
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Author : A. Kemp-Welch
Publisher : Springer
Page : 165 pages
File Size : 19,77 MB
Release : 1999-12-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1349276804
Between the Nazi occupation and the anti-communist revolution of 1956, Poland underwent twelve years of Stalinist rule. Using recently-opened archives, historians and social scientists from four countries give the first analysis of the rise and fall of this system. The book is organised in three parts: Construction (external and domestic), Conflicts (above all, communists against the Church and peasantry) and Collapse (during 1956). An Epilogue reviews the whole period in the light of contemporary political debates.
Author : A. Kemp-Welch
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 38,52 MB
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 9780312226442
Between the Nazi occupation and the anti-Communist revolution of 1956, Poland underwent twelve years of Stalinist rule. Using recently-opened archives, historians and social scientists from four countries give the first analysis of the rise and fall of this system. They show the strengths and weaknesses of the Stalinist project for Poland and explore its ambiguous reception by society.
Author : Andrea Mason
Publisher : Springer
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 49,14 MB
Release : 2018-11-19
Category : History
ISBN : 3319942417
This book examines the outcome of the British commitment to reconstitute a sovereign Polish state and establish a democratic Polish government after the Second World War. It analyses the wartime origins of Churchill’s commitment to Poland, and assesses the reasons for the collapse of British efforts to support the leader of the Polish opposition, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, in countering the attempt by the Polish communist party to establish one-party rule after the war. This examination of Anglo-Polish relations is set within the broader context of emerging early Cold War tensions. It addresses the shift in British foreign policy after 1945 towards the US, the Soviet Union and Europe, as British leaders and policymakers adjusted both to the new post-war international circumstances, and to the domestic constraints which increasingly limited British policy options. This work analyses the reasons for Ernest Bevin’s decision to disengage from Poland, helping to advance the debate on the larger question of Bevin’s vision of Britain’s place within the newly reconfigured international system. The final chapter surveys British policy towards Poland from the period of Sovietisation in the late 1940s up to the October 1956 revolution, arguing that Poland’s process of liberalisation in the mid-1950s served as the catalyst for limited British reengagement in Eastern Europe.
Author : Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher : Central European University Press
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 45,46 MB
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789639776630
Stalinism Revisited brings together representatives of multiple generations to create a rich examination of the study and practice of Stalinism. While the articles are uniformly excellent, the book's signal contribution is to bring recent research from Eastern European scholars to an English-speaking audience. Thus the volume is not just a "state of the discipline" collection, in which articles are collected to reflect that current situation of scholarship in a given field; instead, this one includes cutting edge scholarship that will prompt more of the same from other scholars in other fields/subfields. I would recommend this book highly to anyone interested in understanding the technology of Stalinism in both thought and practice. Nick Miller Boise State University The Sovietization of post-1945 East-Central Europe---marked by the forceful imposition of the Soviet-type society in the region---was a process of massive socio-political and cultural transformation. Despite its paramount importance for understanding the nature of the communist regime and its legacy, the communist take-over in East Central European countries has remained largely under-researched. Two decades after the collapse of the communist system, Stalinism Revisited brings together a remarkable international team of established and younger scholars, engaging them in a critical re-evaluation of the institutionalization of communist regimes in East-Central Europe and of the period of "high Stalinism." Sovietization is approached not as a fully pre-determined, homogeneous, and monolithic transformation, but as a set of trans-national, multifaceted, and inter-related processes of large-scale institutional and ideological transfers, made up of multiple "takeovers" in various fields. Theoretically minded and empirically sound, the collection adds key elements to our comparative understanding of Stalinist regimes in their various historical permutations. The richness of the source material employed and its comparative scope recommend Stalinism Revisited as a major, synthetic contribution to the study of East-Central Europe's Sovietization. Constantin lordachi Central European University, Budapest
Author : Joanna Wawrzyniak
Publisher :
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 26,17 MB
Release : 2015-12-15
Category : Veterans
ISBN : 9783631640494
In the vast literature on how the Second World War has been remembered in Europe, research into what happened in communist Poland, a country most affected by the war, is surprisingly scarce. The long gestation of Polish narratives of heroism and sacrifice, explored in this book, might help to understand why the country still finds itself in a -mnemonic standoff- with Western Europe, which tends to favour imagining the war in a civil, post-Holocaust, human rights-oriented way. The specific focus of this book is the organized movement of war veterans and former prisoners of Nazi camps from the 1940s until the end of the 1960s, when the core narratives of war became well established."
Author : Stanislaw Mikolajczyk
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
Page : 549 pages
File Size : 25,32 MB
Release : 2017-06-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1787205797
First published in 1948, this is the inside story by the former head of the Polish Government in Exile, and more recently head of the Peasants’ Party in Poland, which tried to find a way to co-operate with the Soviets. “A raging question in Poland has become, ‘How long will it take them to communize us completely?’ “To my mind, however, the question is badly framed. I am convinced that human beings cannot be converted to communism if that conversion is attempted while the country concerned is under Communist rule. Under Communist dictatorship the majority become slaves—but men born in freedom, though they may be coerced, can never be convinced. Communism is an evil which is embraced only by fools and idealists not under the actual heel of such rule. “The question should be phrased: How long can a nation under Communist rule survive the erosion of its soul?”—Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Preface
Author : Constantin Iordachi
Publisher : Central European University Press
Page : 571 pages
File Size : 28,30 MB
Release : 2014-03-31
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 615522563X
ÿThis book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.
Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 738 pages
File Size : 15,20 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0307426122
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.
