Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

Discussions on all aspects of the USSR, from the Russian Civil War till the end of the Great Patriotic War and the war against Japan. Hosted by Art.
User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#16

Post by Haven » 08 Oct 2015, 22:18

Image

The Russian Revolution
Sheila Fitzpatrick
OUP Oxford,
Feb 28, 2008

The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the twentieth century. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it has become possible to step back and see the full picture. This fully updated new edition of Sheila Fitzpatrick's classic short history of the Russian Revolution takes into account the new archival and other evidence that has come to light since then, incorporating material that was previously inaccessible not only to Western but also to Soviet historians Starting with an overview of the roots of the revolution, Fitzpatrick takes the story from 1917, through Stalin's 'revolution from above', to the great purges of the 1930s. She tells a gripping story of a Marxist revolution that was intended to transform the world, visited enormous suffering on the Russian people, and, like the French Revolution before it, ended up by devouring its own children.

PDF Link: http://mrreynoldsclasses.weebly.com/upl ... atrick.pdf

User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#17

Post by Haven » 10 Oct 2015, 01:08

Image

Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life
Joshua Rubenstein
Yale University Press
2013

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meagre foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler's triumph would mean disaster for his fellow European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed. Here, Trotsky emerges as a brilliant yet flawed man. Rubenstein offers us a Trotsky who is mentally acute and impatient with others, one of the finest students of contemporary politics who refused to engage in the nitty-gritty of party organization in the 1920s, when Stalin was manoeuvering, inexorably, toward Trotsky's own political oblivion. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, "Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics". In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky's life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

PDF Link to Introduction: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/exce ... xcerpt.pdf


User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#18

Post by Haven » 10 Oct 2015, 23:18

Image

Politics & the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History
Sarah Badcock
Cambridge University Press
2011

After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, Russia was subject to an eight month experiment in democracy. Sarah Badcock studies its failure through an exploration of the experiences and motivations of ordinary men and women, urban and rural, military and civilian. Using previously neglected documents from regional archives, this text offers a history of the revolution as experienced in the two Volga provinces of Nizhegorod and Kazan. Badcock exposes the confusions and contradictions between political elites and ordinary people and emphasises the role of the latter as political actors. By looking beyond Petersburg and Moscow, she shows how local concerns, conditions and interests were foremost in shaping how the revolution was received and understood. She also reveals the ways in which the small group of intellectuals who dominated the high political scene of 1917 had their political alternatives circumscribed by the desires and demands of ordinary people.

*A major contribution to the rewriting of the Russian Revolution through provincial perspectives
*Based on previously neglected documents from regional archives
*Will appeal to scholars of the Russian Revolution and twentieth-century Russia across history and Slavic Studies

PDF File: http://library.atgti.az/categories/hist ... Russia.pdf

User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#19

Post by Haven » 11 Oct 2015, 23:12

Image

Young Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore
2008

Based on ten years' astonishing new research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic, dangerous boy became a student priest, romantic poet, gangster mastermind, prolific lover, murderous revolutionary, and the merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image: How Stalin became Stalin.

PDF File: http://m.friendfeed-media.com/7c3ddfa3f ... 4f9c322f34

It will download as soon as it's clicked. -- Haven

BOOK REVIEWS

The Dictator as a Young Poet-Thug
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: October 19, 2007

For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, “a gray blur,” a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him. History, in this case, was written by the losers, notably Leon Trotsky, who never could accept that he had been bested by a pockmarked thug from Georgia with shaky intellectual credentials.

In “Young Stalin,” Simon Sebag Montefiore’s meticulously researched, authoritative biography of Stalin’s early years, the blur comes into sharp focus. Building on the revisionist studies of Robert Service and Richard Overy, Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution. No one, henceforth, need ever wonder how it was that Stalin found his way into Lenin’s inner circle, or took his place in the ruling troika that assumed power after the storming of the Winter Palace.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/books ... .html?_r=0

Young Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, pp496

Should the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-century's monsters, be quite so entertaining? In this prequel to Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin is an almost amiable rogue, a professional twister and trickster whose venal malevolence is masked by his poems about budding roses, soaring larks and silvery full moons. The book ends before Stalin's institutionalised terror begins, so Montefiore is free to marvel at the man's 'Bedouin informality', his lack of scruple and his nimble skill at outwitting the police. If we didn't know what he became when he gained control of Russia and its empire, we might think him a beguiling, comic scapegrace, a younger, leaner Falstaff, his allure a little damaged by his chronic acne.

A Bolshevik colleague once denounced Stalin as an 'individualist': to remain autonomous and idiosyncratic in a society dedicated to the collective good counted as treason. Montefiore shows Stalin to be a compound of many individuals. He had as many selves as he had aliases and Montefiore lists dozens of these phony identities, from 'Oddball Osip' and 'Pockmarked Oska' to the baleful-sounding 'Organez Totomiants', which he adopted and discarded at will before finally settling on the identity of Stalin, the self-allegorised man of steel, impervious to the tender human feeling. Already in his childhood, he was a contradictory creature, living 'a Jekyll and Hyde existence: choirboy-cum-streetfighter, half-overdressed mummy's boy, half-urchin'.

More: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/m ... y.features
Last edited by Haven on 11 Oct 2015, 23:46, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#20

Post by Haven » 11 Oct 2015, 23:41

Image

Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression & Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953
David R. Shearer
2009

Policing Stalin’s Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin’s Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive.

It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.

Audio Interview with the author: http://newbooksinhistory.com/2010/12/10 ... 1924-1953/

BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed by Wendy Goldman (Carnegie Mellon University)
Published on H-Russia (October, 2010)
Commissioned by Teddy J. Uldricks
Police, Purges, and Social Order

David R. Shearer’s magisterial history of the political and civil police in the Soviet Union provides a stunning narrative of social upheaval, repressive policies, and institutional development. It is no mere bureaucratic history of the police, but rather a sweeping study of the relationship between repression and social transformation. The book provides a deeply researched history of policing in the context of the state’s desperate attempt to manage the social consequences of civil war, collectivization, industrialization, and urbanization. Shearer provides a new and far-reaching explanation of the “Great Terror,” setting Joseph Stalin’s mass repressions of 1937-38 within a set of policing techniques that became progressively more extreme in their intent to remove entire social and national categories. His interpretation forces us to enlarge a narrower view of Stalinist repression, which focused primarily on victims, such as former political oppositionists, industrial managers, and local and regional party leaders. The book is gracefully written and well organized, and brings clarity to tangled and complex policies. Its melding of social and institutional history to reinterpret the phenomenon of Stalinist repression demonstrates great mastery of a dauntingly complex period.

More: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31443

User avatar
Haven
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 07:27
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#21

Post by Haven » 12 Oct 2015, 01:09

Image

The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
S. A. Smith
2002

The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction provides an analytical narrative of the main events and developments in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1936. What impact did the revolution have on society as a whole—on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, and youth? How was it that one structure of domination was replaced by another? Political developments during this tumultuous period sit firmly in the context of massive economic, social, and cultural change. Since the fall of Communism there has been much reflection on the significance of the Russian Revolution. Is there an alternative interpretation to the currently influential, liberal one, one that sees the revolution as rooted in the contradictions of a backward society that sought modernization and enlightenment and ended in political tyranny? Less

PDF File: http://www.myextrahelpteacher.com/books ... lution.pdf

JD
Member
Posts: 97
Joined: 18 Nov 2004, 07:10
Location: Australia

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#22

Post by JD » 23 Jun 2016, 09:34

Image

Whatever the author's flaws, this is a pretty good account of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution (there were actually three in a 12 year period) and the subsequent Civil War. Figes starts with the famine of 1891 and finishes with the death of Lenin. At 800-odd pages, not including references, it is a significant and voluminous book but while it falls for a few old myths, the author doesn't get bogged down facile things like Rasputin myths or whether or not all the Romanovs died (they did). Instead he focuses on the issues of the rural revolution, the bread riots, the Kronstadt sailors, the abandonment of WWI and the descent into civil war - including why the Reds won. Far more important issues, in my book. It's a pretty comprehensive book in some ways but at the end, the sheer scale of the Revolution makes you realise you've only just scratched the surface.

Good to have in your library if you want to understand the back story of the Soviet Union. 4/5

Just for the record, we in the West misuse the word "soviet". It has become a word for people who live in the USSR, from the basic worker to the leadership. "Soviet" simply means "council".

User avatar
Der Alte Fritz
Member
Posts: 2171
Joined: 13 Dec 2007, 22:43
Location: Kent United Kingdom
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#23

Post by Der Alte Fritz » 23 Jun 2016, 10:58

The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR
Naum Jasny

Publisher Stanford University Press, 1949
ISBN 0804704015, 9780804704014
Length 837 pages

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/ ... edir_esc=y

JASNY, NAUM (1883–1967), economist. Born in Kharkov, Ukraine, Jasny obtained a doctorate in law in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). Jasny practiced law for a short time, and then became director of a flour mill in Kharkov, an experience which aroused his interest in economics. After the Russian Revolution he worked on designing food policies for the Soviet government, for which he later undertook economic research in Germany. While there he joined the Business Cycle Research Institute and in 1933, with the coming of Hitler, he moved to the United States where he was appointed senior economist with the Department of Agriculture. From 1939 he was with the Food Research Institute of Stanford University where he prepared forecasts of food availability in allied and enemy countries. After World War II, he worked with the Stanford Soviet Economic Group. Jasny's main interests were agricultural statistics and economics. His estimates of grain harvests in the U.S.S.R. served for many years as the basis for the investigations into the Soviet military potential. Among Jasny's major works are The Socialized Agriculture of the U.S.S.R. (1949); The Wheats of Classical Antiquity (1944); Soviet Industrialization 1928–52 (1961); Soviet Planning (1964), edited by J.T. Degras and A. Nove; and Khrushchev's Crop Policy (1965). His memoirs were being prepared for publication at the time of his death.

South
Member
Posts: 3590
Joined: 06 Sep 2007, 10:01
Location: USA

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#24

Post by South » 23 Jun 2016, 11:44

Good morning Haven,

A quality book in the Soviet socio-economic category is:

"Soviet Style in Management" by Nathan Leites, 1985, ISBN: 0-8448-1490-3, The RAND Corporation.

As an aside, Leites also wrote "Soviet Style in War".


Warm regards,

Bob

JD
Member
Posts: 97
Joined: 18 Nov 2004, 07:10
Location: Australia

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#25

Post by JD » 23 Jun 2016, 16:50

I'm waiting on a copy of this:

Image

I have high hopes for it but it's late...

I have to admit to being a bit cynical of the way Russian/Soviet history is presented in the West. The main difficulty I have with it is that everyone treats the USSR as an homogeneous state which, from my reading, it simply was not. This has some very important implications for the conclusions we draw and the decision making processes. It makes me wonder how much we really understand.

if anyone can point me at something - preferably by an author from one of the former Soviet states and written since 1991 - I'd like to know about it.

BarKokhba
Member
Posts: 104
Joined: 28 Jan 2017, 03:11
Location: USA

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#26

Post by BarKokhba » 10 Mar 2017, 05:38

Can anyone recommend books about the military aspects of the Russian Civil War 1919-1923?
BTW, what is that war called in Russia today?

GregSingh
Member
Posts: 3877
Joined: 21 Jun 2012, 02:11
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#27

Post by GregSingh » 10 Mar 2017, 10:00

BarKokhba wrote:BTW, what is that war called in Russia today?
Гражданская война в России

South
Member
Posts: 3590
Joined: 06 Sep 2007, 10:01
Location: USA

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#28

Post by South » 10 Mar 2017, 13:55

Good morning Bar Kokhba,

SIDEBAR: Just saw your post at Lounge re swastika discussion. I didn't have anything else to offer to discussion.

.........

My favorite book re your question is:

THE IGNORANT ARMIES, E.M.Halliday, 1958, Lib of Congress Cat Nr: 60-7526. The forward is by Gen S.L.A. Marshall.

Book discusses the US expeditionary force to destroy the Bolhsh.....er....to protect some warehouses.

The expedition commander was Gen Robert Graves. When he was getting briefed for the mission, the Secretary of War told him "You will be walking on eggshells filled with dynamite".


~ Bob

eastern Virginia

User avatar
Der Alte Fritz
Member
Posts: 2171
Joined: 13 Dec 2007, 22:43
Location: Kent United Kingdom
Contact:

Re: Cultural, Historical & Socio-Economic Books on the Soviets

#29

Post by Der Alte Fritz » 10 Mar 2017, 16:30

See this list of books about the Intervention:
http://www.worldwarbooks.net/downloads/ ... alogue.pdf

Post Reply

Return to “The Soviet Union at War 1917-1945”