The Stalin Years A Reader

by Read, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780333963432
• ISBN10: 0333963431
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-19
• Publisher: Red Globe Pr

Summary

Christopher Read takes students through the history of the Stalin years, covering the key points of his rule from the late 1920s to the postwar years, using post-Soviet articles which provide more balanced and scholarly assessments of the leader's time in power. Taken together with Read's own contributions, which include an up-to-date historiographic survey, they constitute a complex and dynamic history of the central features of a terrible era.

Author Biography

Christopher Read is Professor of History, University of Warwick.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	x
Glossary	xii
Notes on the Contributors	xvi
Stalin's Life and Times	xvii
I MAIN CURRENTS OF INTERPRETATION OF STALIN AND THE STALIN YEARS	1	(22)
During Stalin's Lifetime	1	(8)
Cold War, the Death of Stalin and the Rise of the Totalitarian Thesis	9	(4)
The Rise of Revisionism	13	(3)
Perestroika and After	16	(7)
II CULTURAL REVOLUTION	23	(43)
Social Modernization	23	(2)
`The Modernization of Russian Motherhood, 1917--37'	25	(16)
Elizabeth Waters
Towards the `New Soviet Person': the Assault on Religion	38	(3)
`The 1929 Congress of the Godless'	41	(25)
Daniel Peris
III INDUSTRIALIZATION AND COLLECTIVIZATION	66	(36)
The Drive to Industrialize	66	(4)
`Building the ``Soviet Detroit'': the Construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927--32'	70	(16)
Kurt S. Schultz
The Assault on the Peasantry	83	(3)
`Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932--3'	86	(16)
R. W. Davies
M. B. Tauger
S. G. Wheatcroft
IV THE GREAT TERROR	102	(43)
Why Did the Terror Take Place?	102	(2)
`The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937--87'	104	(17)
Oleg Khlevnyuk
The Purges in the Provinces	119	(2)
`How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces'	121	(24)
Sheila Fitzpatrick
V THE GREAT FATHERLAND WAR	145	(24)
`Soviet Women at War'	148	(21)
John Erickson
VI THE FINAL YEARS	169	(44)
The Cold War	169	(1)
`Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology and the Onset of the Cold War, 1947'	170	(22)
Geoffrey Roberts
Stalin's Dictatorship in the Final Years	189	(3)
`Stalin's Cabinet: the Politburo and Decision Making in the Postwar Years'	192	(21)
Yoram Gorlizki
VII SOME REFLECTIONS ON STALINISM	213	(12)
Stalinism as a Civilization	213	(1)
`Stalinism as a Civilization'	213	(12)
Stephen Kotkin
The Emerging Picture: Some Concluding Thoughts	225	(6)
Bibliography	231	(5)
Index	236