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The 1934 murder of the charismatic politician Sergei Kirov sparked Stalin's brutal purges, and speculation about it still fascinates the Russians. Who killed Kirov, and why? In Russia, conspiracy theories about Kirov have abounded, and scholars throughout the world have tackled various pieces of the story -- but definitive evidence has eluded them. Now Amy Knight has combed the recently opened Russian archives to reconstruct this fascinating crime and analyze its effect on the Russian people. The result is at once an intriguing murder mystery and a major piece of scholarship that sheds new light on the terrors of Stalin.
Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937–1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions about Stalin’s involvement in the assassination.
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On December 1, 1934, a lone gunman shot and killed Sergei Kirov, Secretary of the Central and Leningrad Party Organization, member of the Moscow Politburo, and heir apparent to Joseph Stalin. This assassination was arguably one of the most significant crimes of the century. Not only did it seal the fate of thousands of people only superficially connected to the killer, it eliminated the second most powerful man in Russia, giving Stalin free rein to dominate Soviet policy. Stalin and the Kirov Murder, written by the much acclaimed author of Harvest of Sorrow, is the first authoritative examination of the case. Based on all the available evidence, including official documents as well as the reports of numerous Russian defectors, Conquest's book provides a fascinating and, at times, chilling account of the murder and its aftermath. He convincingly demonstrates what has long been rumored--that Stalin sanctioned Kirov's assassination.
"The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Provides accounts of on everything form the three great 'Moscow Trials' to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of thew first edition, it is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence." --
Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.
“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.
A woman’s true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: “Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it.”—The New York Times Book Review In the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin’s reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With sharp detail and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts her arrest and the eighteen harrowing years she endured in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including two in solitary confinement. Her memoir is “a compelling personal narrative of survival” (The New York Times Book Review)—and one of the most important documents of Stalin’s brutal regime. “Deeply significant…intensely personal and passionately felt.”—Time “Probably the best account that has ever been published of…the prison and camp empire of the Stalin era.”—Book World Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward
This is a study of the structure of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s. Based upon archival and published sources, the work describes the events in the Bolshevik Party leading up to the Great Purges of 1937-1938. Professor Getty concludes that the party bureaucracy was chaotic rather than totalitarian, and that local officials had relative autonomy within a considerably fragmented political system. The Moscow leadership, of which Stalin was the most authoritarian actor, reacted to social and political processes as much as instigating them. Because of disputes, confusion, and inefficiency, they often promoted contradictory policies. Avoiding the usual concentration on Stalin's personality, the author puts forward the controversial hypothesis that the Great Purges occurred not as the end product of a careful Stalin plan, but rather as the bloody but ad hoc result of Moscow's incremental attempts to centralise political power.
The Siege of Leningrad is the most powerful testimony to the immeasurable cruelty and horror of World War II. From 1941-1945, the Eastern Front was the site of some of the bloodiest atrocities of the war and the city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, proved to be a decisive point in the conflict. German policy was resolutely determined to redraw the map of Europe, annihilate the Soviet Union and give large areas of territory to Finland. Through Hitler's ambition to completely eradicate the city and its entire population, it was decided that the most efficient method of invasion was to encircle and bombard the city into submission. After 872 days of aggression, one and a half million people lost their lives, mostly from starvation. As the sole British correspondent to have been in Leningrad during the blockade, Alexander Werth's eyewitness account presents a harrowing perspective on the savagery and destruction wrought by the Nazis against the civilian population of the city. His writing evokes compelling images of terror - the oil bombing of children's hospitals, mass starvation and cannibalism - with rich and sophisticated commentary on the internal politics of Soviet party chiefs, soldiers and civilian resistance fighters. Both an authoritative historical document and a journalistic re-telling of the overwhelming sadness, grief and futility of 20th century warfare, this is an invaluable look at one of the greatest losses of human life in recorded history.