Stalin and the Fate of Europe

Stalin and the Fate of Europe PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 067423877X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
It can seem as though the Cold War division of Europe was inevitable. But Stalin was more open to a settlement on the continent than is assumed. In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order, Norman Naimark returns to the four years after WWII to illuminate European leaders' efforts to secure national sovereignty amid dominating powers.

Stalin and the Fate of Europe

Stalin and the Fate of Europe PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 067423877X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
It can seem as though the Cold War division of Europe was inevitable. But Stalin was more open to a settlement on the continent than is assumed. In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order, Norman Naimark returns to the four years after WWII to illuminate European leaders' efforts to secure national sovereignty amid dominating powers.

Stalin and Europe

Stalin and Europe PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199945586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Soviet Union was the largest state in the twentieth-century world, but its repressive power and terrible ambition were most clearly on display in Europe. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union transformed itself and then all of the European countries with which it came into contact. This volume considers each aspect of the encounter of Stalin with Europe: the attempt to create a kind of European state by accelerating the European model of industrial development in the USSR; mass murder in anticipation of a war against European powers; the actual contact with Europe's greatest power, Nazi Germany, first as ally and then as enemy; four years of war fought chiefly on Soviet territory and bringing untold millions of deaths, including much of the Holocaust; and finally the reestablishment of the Soviet system, not just in prewar territory of the USSR, but in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany.

Stalin and the Cold War in Europe

Stalin and the Cold War in Europe PDF Author: Gerhard Wettig
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742555426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Cold War was a unique international conflict partly because Josef Stalin sought socialist transformation of other countries rather than simply the traditional objectives. This intriguing book, based on recently accessible Soviet primary sources, is the first to explain the emergence of the Cold War and its development in Stalin's lifetime from the perspective of Soviet policy-making. The book pays particular attention to the often-neglected "societal" dimension of Soviet foreign policy as a crucial element of the genesis and development of the Cold War. It is also the first to put German postwar development into the context of Soviet Cold War policy. Stalin vainly tried to mobilize the Germans with slogans of national unity and then to discredit the West among the Germans by forcing the surrender of Berlin. Further attempts to prevail deadlocked him into a confrontation with the newly united Western powers. Comparing Stalin's internal statements with Soviet actions, Gerhard Wettig draws original conclusions about Stalin's meta-plans for the regions of Germany and Eastern Europe. This fascinating look at Soviet politics during the Cold War provides readers with new insights into Stalin's willingness to initiate crisis with the West while still avoiding military conflict.

Bloodlands

Bloodlands PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465032974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
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.

Stalin and Europe

Stalin and Europe PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199945578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The Soviet Union was the largest state in the twentieth-century world, but its repressive power and terrible ambition were most clearly on display in Europe. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union transformed itself and then all of the European countries with which it came into contact. This volume considers each aspect of the encounter of Stalin with Europe: the attempt to create a kind of European state by accelerating the European model of industrial development in the USSR; mass murder in anticipation of a war against European powers; the actual contact with Europe's greatest power, Nazi Germany, first as ally and then as enemy; four years of war fought chiefly on Soviet territory and bringing untold millions of deaths, including much of the Holocaust; and finally the reestablishment of the Soviet system, not just in prewar territory of the USSR, but in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany.

In the Name of the Great Work

In the Name of the Great Work PDF Author: Doubravka Olšáková
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785332538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” Intended to increase agricultural yields dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europe, captivating political elites and war-fatigued publics alike. By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation”—which relied upon ideologically corrupted and pseudoscientific theories—had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.

Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain PDF Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
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.

Stalin and the Fate of Europe

Stalin and the Fate of Europe PDF Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.

Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe

Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe PDF Author: Remi A. Nadeau
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The division of Europe between East and West, born during World War II, not only denied independence to more than 100 million East Europeans, but upset the balance of global power, putting Stalin in a position to threaten Western Europe and planting the seeds of the Cold War and the arms race. This book probes the questions and facts surrounding the division of Europe and offers new insight into how it might have been prevented. Looking beyond the conventional assumption that Stalin simply took over Eastern Europe in the postwar years, Remi Nadeau demonstrates how the Soviet leader, having gained power in Eastern Europe through Red Army occupation, was unrestrained by any prior Allied agreements. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, which is commonly believed to have occurred in the immediate postwar years, actually came about during the war as the Allies failed to limit Stalin. Nadeau shows how the British, who recognized the Soviet threat, repeatedly tried to block it and how Roosevelt, with a different foreign policy approach, did not support them. But, as the author states in his preface, this is not a story of American wrongdoing, but of American innocence. Well researched and thorough in its arguments, this book demonstrates how Roosevelt's failure to throw U.S. strength into the political balance was not confined to the Yalta Conference in 1945, but was a consistent U.S. policy in East-West encounters throughout the war. Nadeau shows that Roosevelt did not understand Stalin's intentions and repeatedly failed to support Churchill's attempts to block Stalin with diplomatic bargaining and military preemption. Written in a highly readable style and full of little-known historical detail, this book will appeal to any student of World War II, Eastern Europe, or European history.

Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era

Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era PDF Author: Anders Åman
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Since 1978, Anders Åman has been researching, photographing, and documenting the architectural style known as Socialist Realism. In the midst of the current statue toppling, this book records in over 200 illustrations the government-planned buildings, cities, parks, and monuments from the Stalinist postwar period in Eastern Europe, providing a valuable record and analysis of the relation between architecture and the state in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and former East Germany. Very little has been written on architecture and politics during the Cold War period for any country, and next to nothing is known about the architecture, or about state policies reflected in the architecture, of Eastern Europe. Åman not only illuminates these issues but also reveals the influence they had on the course of architectural history in the West. Following an overview of the Stalinist era and the ideological spread of Socialist Realism, Åman investigates several buildings in detail monumental structures such as the Palace of Culture in Warsaw and Stalinallee in East Berlin - and the socialist cities of Stalinstadt, Nowa Huta, Szt & a ́linv & a ́ros, and Dimitrovgrad. Sketching the lives of eight selected architects, he illuminates how their profession was affected by Socialist Realism. Åman also takes up such political works of art as the influential Polish painting "Pass me a brick!" and the Stalin monuments in Budapest and Prague, noting that even as history is being obliterated, Socialist Realism remains a key to understanding pictorial art and the built environment in Eastern Europe. He concludes with a discussion of how architecture is related to political ideologies. Anders Åman is Professor of the History and Theory of Art at Ume & a ́ University, Sweden. An Architectural History Foundation Book