Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941

Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941 PDF Author: James E. McSherry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941

Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941 PDF Author: James E. McSherry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 073522448X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1249

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Book Description
“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history 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 hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.

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, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941

Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The imbalance of power, 1939-1941 PDF Author: James E. McSherry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Leningrad

Leningrad PDF Author: Anna Reid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802778828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation. Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.

1941: The Year Germany Lost the War

1941: The Year Germany Lost the War PDF Author: Andrew Nagorski
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501181130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Bestselling historian Andrew Nagorski “brings keen psychological insights into the world leaders involved” (Booklist) during 1941, the critical year in World War II when Hitler’s miscalculations and policy of terror propelled Churchill, FDR, and Stalin into a powerful new alliance that defeated Nazi Germany. In early 1941, Hitler’s armies ruled most of Europe. Churchill’s Britain was an isolated holdout against the Nazi tide, but German bombers were attacking its cities and German U-boats were attacking its ships. Stalin was observing the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and Roosevelt was vowing to keep the United States out of the war. Hitler was confident that his aim of total victory was within reach. But by the end of 1941, all that changed. Hitler had repeatedly gambled on escalation and lost: by invading the Soviet Union and committing a series of disastrous military blunders; by making mass murder and terror his weapons of choice, and by rushing to declare war on the United States after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain emerged with two powerful new allies—Russia and the United States. By then, Germany was doomed to defeat. Nagorski illuminates the actions of the major characters of this pivotal year as never before. 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War is a stunning and “entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) examination of unbridled megalomania versus determined leadership. It also reveals how 1941 set the Holocaust in motion, and presaged the postwar division of Europe, triggering the Cold War. 1941 was “the year that shaped not only the conflict of the hour but the course of our lives—even now” (New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham).

Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945

Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945 PDF Author: Rolf-Dieter Müller
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571812933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Provides a guide to the extensive literature on the war in the East, including largely unknown Soviet writing on the subject. Sections on policy and strategy, the military campaign, the ideologically motivated war of annihilation in the East, the occupation, and coming to terms with the results of the war offer a wealth of bibliographic citations, and include introductions detailing history of the period and related issues. For military historians, and for scholars who approach this period in history from a socio-economic or cultural perspective. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Deadly Imbalances

Deadly Imbalances PDF Author: Randall L. Schweller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231110723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Scholars frequently portray the Second World War as an epic morality play driven by a villain (Hitler) and a sinner (Chamberlain). Deadly Imbalances offers a new approach, combining both the attributes of states and the structure of the international system to explain the origins and causes of the war. Central to Schweller's analysis is the argument that the structure of the international system was tripolar--with Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States as the three central powers--and that this needs to be considered in any examination of the antecedent causes and crucial events of the war.

Weaving the Iron Curtain, the Allies, and the Baltic States, 1939–1944

Weaving the Iron Curtain, the Allies, and the Baltic States, 1939–1944 PDF Author: Eero Medijainen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793609268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book analyzes public opinion, caricatures, propaganda, and international relations from 1939 to 1944. The author focuses on the coexistence of public opinion and Nazi propaganda in the Baltic states during the German occupation of 1941–1944. Interweaving the political concerns and narratives of the Western Allies, the author further examines how public opinion in the occupied Baltic states was shaped by propaganda and led to miscalculations in international relations.

Stalin's War

Stalin's War PDF Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 818

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Book Description
A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.