Stephen Kotkin
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world's largest peasant economy into "socialist modernity," otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
In his biography of Stalin, Kotkin rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin's psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin's near paranoia was fundamentally political and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution's structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin posits the impossibility of understanding Stalin's momentous decisions...
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pub. Date
2001.
Language
English
Description
Featuring extensive revisions to the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue—bringing the book completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse—this compact, original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the great historical events of the last fifty years.
Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative,...
Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative,...
Author
Series
Modern Library chronicles volume 32
Publisher
Modern Library
Language
English
Description
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In one of history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded--not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two scholars of Eastern European and Soviet affairs revisit what happened, in this fresh, incisive look at communism's collapse.