Drawing from Hoover Institution archival documents, Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the tragic story of Stalin's most prominent victims: Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and his wife, Anna Larina.

During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.

One of the most successful dictators of the twentieth century, Stalin transformed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into one of the world’s leading political parties. Stalin and Stalinism explores how he ammassed, retained and deployed power to dominate, not only his close associates, but the population of the Soviet Union and Soviet Empire. Moving from leader to autocrat and finally despot, Stalin played a key role in shaping the first half of the twentieth century with, at one time, around one-third of the planet adopting his system. His influence lives on – despite turning their backs on Stalin’s anti-capitalism in the later twentieth century, countries such as China and Vietnam retain his political model – the unbridled power of the Communist Party. First published in 1983, Stalin and Stalinism has established itself as one of the most popular textbooks for those who want to understand the Stalin phenomenon. This updated fourth edition draws on a wealth of new publications, and includes increased discussion on culture, religion and the new society that Stalin fashioned as well as more on spying, Stalin's legacy, and his character as well as his actions. Supported by a chronology of key events, Who’s Who and Guide to Further Reading, this concise assessment of one of the major figures of the twentieth-century world history remains an essential read for students of the subject.

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 outside of the context of the history of imperial Russia.

Explanatory Note -- Glossary -- The Team Emerges -- The Great Break -- In Power -- The Team on View -- The Great Purges -- Into War -- Postwar Hopes -- Aging Leader -- Without Stalin -- End of the Road -- Biographies

Communism was destroyed not from without, but from within-by a persistent failure to make its economic theories work in practice. But what exactly did go wrong with its central planning? Until the last moment, top western economists claimed that Communism was superior to western models. Even now, centralized Marxist planning retains its admirers, especially among the young. With the benefit of new archival research, we can finally grasp how falsified and manipulated statistics blindfolded Communist governments and confused western leaders, leading to staggering errors of judgement. Both sides believed that East Germany had a stronger economy than West Germany; that North Korea would overtake South Korea; that Mao's China was a paradise for its starving peasants. Those who warned that a dearth of reliable economic data would condemn central planning to irrational misallocation of investment and labor were ignored or belittled. But, ultimately, they were vindicated. Jasper Becker answers the big question: what accounts for the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, China and everywhere else? And why don't present debates acknowledge that failure? This unconventional history of Communism and the Cold War explains why the same old clash of theories is continuing to shape the world today.

This book brings new facts, evidences and records which show that poisoning to second prime minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri was happened in Tashkent. Mysterious death of Shastri was a state crime not only for India but also for USSR, Pakistan, US, UK and China especially who were directly or indirectly involved in Tashkent Summit. They are silent assassins. We should know: How J F Kennedy's assassination cleared the way for the death of Shastri. Everybody has read arrest of only one Kremlin chief Cook Ahmet Sattarov. This is half truth. There was the arrest of Ahmet and other members of his team who raised finger on the arrested Indian cook for poisoning. Who was that Indian cook? Was he an employee of Indian Embassy in Mascow ? Where he went to hide himself? More questions and answeres are in this book. NOTE: Toxic politics: The seceret history of Russian poison supply by ISI to contract killers ( Supari Killers) Russian & Indian cook for poising Lal Bahadur Shastri in food at Taskent and now the same happened to Sunanda Puskar as claimed by Swamy.

Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. Far from Moscow, Western Siberia was a key area for evacuated factories and for production in support of the war effort. Wilson T. Bell explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices such as black markets, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war. The region's camps were never prioritized, and faced a constant struggle to mobilize for the war. Prisoners in these camps, however, engaged in such activities as sewing Red Army uniforms, manufacturing artillery shells, and constructing and working in major defense factories. The myriad responses of prisoners and personnel to the war reveal the Gulag as a complex system, but one that was closely tied to the local, regional, and national war effort, to the point where prisoners and non-prisoners frequently interacted. At non-priority camps, moreover, the area's many forced labour camps and colonies saw catastrophic death rates, often far exceeding official Gulag averages. Ultimately, prisoners played a tangible role in Soviet victory, but the cost was incredibly high, both in terms of the health and lives of the prisoners themselves, and in terms of Stalin's commitment to total, often violent, mobilization to achieve the goals of the Soviet state.

While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this book examines the ways that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalin period in order to advance their own political objectives. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin’s rule, especially his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing the concepts of “preventive” and “complex” co-optation, this book analyzes how elites in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that espouse alternative narratives, while promoting message-friendly groups that are in line with the Kremlin’s agenda. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as the symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of great achievements, despite great cost, enabling favorably portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh but effective rulers in Russian history, such as Peter the Great. This strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism in Russia today.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. What Was Stalinism? -- 2. Imperial Spaces of Violence -- 3. Pyrrhic Victories -- 4. Subjugation -- 5. Dictatorship of Dread -- 6. Wars -- 7. Stalin's Heirs -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z