***Are you smart? Tell me about Stalin!***

feral

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Hello...


I am doing a paper for my second year english class. I've chosen to do mine on my favorite book '1984' by George Orwell. A lot of it is based on Stalin and the times in both Russia and Germany when Stalin and Hitler were in power. So...never been a history buff. What do you know about Stalin that might be interesting, or do you recommend any books, links, etc about Stalin?
 

brewmama

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feral said:
Hello...


I am doing a paper for my second year english class. I've chosen to do mine on my favorite book '1984' by George Orwell. A lot of it is based on Stalin and the times in both Russia and Germany when Stalin and Hitler were in power. So...never been a history buff. What do you know about Stalin that might be interesting, or do you recommend any books, links, etc about Stalin?
I just got a book on Ebay called "Twenty Letters to a Friend" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, (Stalin's daughter). I haven't read it yet, but it sounds fascinating.
She says, "Let the judging be done by those who come later, by men and women who didn't know the times and the people we know. Let it be left to new people to whom these years in Russia will be as remote and inexplicable, as terrible and strange, as the reign of Ivan the Terrible. But I do not think they'll call our era a 'progressive' one, or that they'll say it was for the 'good of Russia.' Hardly..."

There are numerous reports that have come out lately about the atrocities committed by Stalin, and how many millions upon millions were killed. I don't know a specific book, but I'm sure the info is available.

How about Solzhinitsyn?

And, as an aside, one of the best books I have ever read is about Communist China- "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang. It is the story of 3 generations of Chinese women, the grandmother, who was part of the last traditional generation, the mother, who was a Communist revolutionary, and the daughter, who tells the story, who broke free from the tyranny of communism and moved to England. Fascinating!
 
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brewmama

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Voegelin

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Original sources are best. Much of the history of the era written before Soviet Archives (and America's Venona transcripts) were declassified in the 1990s, is incorrect or misleading.


Lazar Kaganovich is a good place to start. He was Stalin's Himmler--responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million. Lazar was one of the few old Bolsheviks to survive all the purges, dying at the age of 91 in Moscow. If you can find it, this book of formerly top secret information gives an insight into the regime.

THE STALIN-KAGANOVICH CORRESPONDENCE, 1931–36

Co-Edited by R. W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevnyuk, E. A. Rees, Liudmila P. Kosheleva and Larisa A. Rogovaya Documents translated by Steven Shabad . Yale University Press
 
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Voegelin

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Pray4Isrel said:
I went to Russia a year ago to do missionary work.
.

You might enjoy the chapters dealing with religion and missionaries in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin

Missionaries gave the Soviets fits. For decades Soviet intelligence tried to stop them (by infiltrating western churches among other things) but never got a handle on it. More waves kept coming.
 
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Islander

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Hopefully this will post this time because I tried to post this and I got an error message AAAGGGGGHHHH!!!

Here's a true story that describes the mentality of Stalin and Stalin's henchmen. Stalin had made a nonaggression pact with Hitler which divided up east Europe. Japan wanted to keep the USSR in the Axis Powers but Hitler wanted to invade Russia and get its resources. The Soviet ambassador to Japan ran a spy ring and found out about the controversy between Japan and Germany. He even obtained specifics about Germany's invasion plans and sent them to the Soviet Union. Stalin trusted his pact with Germany and ignored the reports. Operation Barbarosa took the USSR by surprise and the Nazis won many easy victories at first for that reason. Stalin immediately called his ambassador back to Moscow telling him that the government needed him in Moscow instead of Japan so that he could organize the war effort. When the ambassador arrived he was executed. Stalin's advisors believed Stalin did the right thing in killing the faithful ambassador because if it got out that Stalin had been warned but failed to act then it would be too great of an embarrassment to the state.
 
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LadyBird

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Ohhh...I loved learning about Stalin...he is SO interesting...and so was Hitler even though they were brutal and evil LOL...but that didn't help you much. Mussolini was an interesting guy too... But anyways...history 12 was too long ago. I recommend you go to the Public library as well as the college Library and get books on him...biographies usually are good but so are war books that tell of the various operations that he took place during the wars. The cold war was really interesting too...you could go into SO much about that...so many events took place during the cold war that Stalin and the USSR was involved in...I wish I was writing this paper now as I LOVE history...omgsh. THe Library is your best bet...I will warn you about looking on the 'net as you may come across some freaky sites that may be very biased too. Also, history videos are helpful too.
 
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Alenci

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~*~tina~*~ said:
Also, history videos are helpful too.
It's funny that you said that. My orchestra at school is playing Shostakovich's 5th Symphony and my teacher sent me to the media center three days ago to get videos about the Soviet Union under Stalin. I don't know if they'd be helpful to you at all... one of them was from a series called "Red Empire," detailing the history of the Soviet Union, if I can remember, from the Russian Revolution to Gorbachev.

1984 is a great book... read it about two years ago ;)
 
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BigEd

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"1984" is one of my favorite books. A couple of important facts about Orwell. For a long time he was a socalist. He even fought in the spanish civil war ( he wrote a book about it "farewell to catalonia" , it is excellent). After his experience there as well as be being a BBC announcer , he grew increasingly disenchanted with the way socalism was heading. Orwell was dieing of turbuculois as he wrote 1984. he finished it only a few months before he died. I found out all this info in a biography about i read some years ago.
 
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InSearchOfAnswers

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I took AP Euro hist and got a 5 on the exam so here is what I remember from last year:

Stalin succeeded Lenin even though Trotskey should have. Stalin was good at making friends and scheming, and thus managed to make friends with the executives before Lenin died, and then banished Trotskey (later having him assasinated in mexico). Another user described his actions during WW2, but before WW2 is what was interesting. Stalin decided Russia's industry sucked, so he created 5 or 4, not sure) year plans that wanted to increase agricultural and industrial output by 300% each. He collectivized farms and killed over 10 million Russian peasants in the process. THe ultimate result was an agricultural crisis because all the farmers had been killed and the collectivization actually retarded growth instead of increase it. He ended up taking all the grain in Ukraine to feed Russia, causing a famine in ukraine which killed 3-5 million more poor people. Industrially, he was a great sucess and had his country's outdated production system modernized in less than 15 years while it had taken Britain and Germany almost 100 to do so.
Also look up the Purges if you want to see how paranoid this psycho could get. Too tired to type more, hope i helped.
 
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Paul12

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To gain insight into Stalin, you have to see his decisions militarily...from the decree that Stalingrad is defended to the last man, to have those fleeing in battle to be shot. Stalin is easily Hitler's equal in terms of killing and ruthlessness, which makes the non-aggression pact by Soviet Union and Germany (created in 1939; broken in 1941 when Germany invaded), all the more ironic.
 
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Voegelin

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~*~tina~*~ said:
Ohhh...I loved learning about Stalin...he is SO interesting...and so was Hitler even though they were brutal and evil LOL...but that didn't help you much. Mussolini was an interesting guy too... But anyways...history 12 was too long ago. I recommend you go to the Public library as well as the college Library and get books on him...

Important to remember that most of the books written before the fall of the Soviet Union are incomplete at best. Many are outright Soviet propaganda. Former KGB general Oleg Danilovich Kalugin spoke at the University of Delaware last spring and said:
“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary, our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology . . .We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S. . . .We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world . . ."

Kalugin stated that in 1981 alone, his KGB funded 70 books, 66 films, 100 television stations and nearly 5,000 magazine articles around the world. Well known writers such a I.F. Stone and Congressmen such as Samuel Dickstein (D-NY) were on the Soviet payroll. A whole lot of misinformation was dumped on the American people between 1917 and the fall of the USSR.

Yale's series of books on communism is doing a great deal to dispel the myths but many endure.
 
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Michael0701

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brewmama said:
I've been looking for a book I read that detailed a Russian woman's experiences as a forced laborer in Nazi Germany, and escaping the starvation carried out by Stalin against the Ukrainians. It was really good. I found this, and I'm not sure it's the same book, but it might be.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786400625/qid%3D1066691264/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/002-3870999-0924058



My mother could have written that book. Her life was the same, i.e. survived the "artificial famine" only to be thrown onto the back of a nazi truck to be used as a slave laborer (as a young teenager). :(
 
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marvin

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One of the greatest famines of all time occurred in the Ukraine in the early-mid thirties under Stalin. I did some serious research on this about 20 years ago and unfortunately my brain has atrophied a bit since then. I believe over 10 million died in just a couple years. There were no animals around (cats, dogs, etc.) since they had long been eaten as had the bark off the trees. This famine was planned by Stalin in an attempt to break the people.


Something else interesting: the NY Times reporter in Russia was Walter Duranty (actually awarded the Order of Lenin) who was nothing but a shill for Stalin. I can't post any links yet but if you go to the Weekly Standards website and do a search for Duranty you should come up with a June 12 article talking about how Duranty's work is being reexamined and exposed after 70 years. Quite interesting.
 
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jidujiao

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Don't know much about Stalin. Ask a librarian. That's what they're for. You'll probably want to check out "The Great Terror" by Robert Conquest.

The only book I've read recently that's mentioned Stalin is "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" but you won't find much there. All it says is that Mao liked Stalin and thought the Russians were traitorous for denouncing him after his death. Or something to that effect.
 
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