Stalins Guerrillas

A detailed study of the operations, politics, culture, and autonomy of Soviet partisans (or guerrillas) who fought the German army in WWII. Blending military, political, social, and cultural history, Slepyan also provides a prism for viewing relations between the suffocating Stalinist state and its independent partisan warriors.

The first book to document the peasant rebellion against Soviet collectivization, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin retrieves a crucial lost chapter from the history of Stalinist Russia. The peasant revolt against collectivization, as reconstructed by author Lynne Viola, was the most violent and sustained resistance to the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. Conservative estimates suggest that over the course of the 1020s and early 1930s, more than 1,100 people were assassinated, more than 13,000 villages rioted, and over 2.5 million people participated in this active struggle of resistance. This book is about the men and women who tried to preserve their families, communities, and beliefs from the depredations of Stalinism. Their acts were often heroic, but these heroes were homespun, ordinary people who were driven to acts of desperation by cruel and brutal state policies. This is a study of peasant community, culture, and politics through the prism of resistance. Based on newly declassified Soviet archives, including previously inaccessible OGPU (secret police) reports, Viola's work documents the manifestation in Stalin's Russia of universal strategies of peasant resistance in what amounted to a virtual civil war between state and peasantry. This book is must reading for scholars of Soviet history, Stalinism, popular resistance, and Russian peasant culture.

A history of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, in the light of archival material. It challenges the view that Stalin was about to invade Germany when Hitler made a pre-emptive strike, arguing that Stalin was actually negotiating for peace in order to redress the European balance of power.

At the height of World War II, a large number of Soviet partisans fought on the Eastern Front against the Axis occupation. In this book, Alexander Gogun looks at the forces operating in Ukraine. The Nazi atrocities were often matched by partisan brutality. The author examines the indiscriminate use of scorched-earth tactics by the partisans, the destruction of their own villages, partisan-generated Nazi reprisals against civilians, and the daily incidents of robbery, drunkenness, rape and bloody internal conflicts that were reported to be widespread amongst the red partisans. Gogun also analyses allegations of the use of bacteriological weapons and even instances of cannibalism. He shows that all these practices were not a product of the culture of warfare nor a spontaneous 'people's response' to the unremitting brutality of Nazi rule but a specific feature of Stalin's total war strategy.

Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War -- "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front" -- "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948 -- "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb -- "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics -- "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950 -- "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism -- Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.

An authoritative account of Stalin as a wartime leader--showing how his paradoxical policies of mass mobilization and repression affected all aspects of Soviet society "A superb new history. . . . Rieber analyses with clarity the impact of the war."--Wendy Slater, Times Literary Supplement The Second World War was the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. With Stalin at the helm, it emerged victorious at a huge economic and human cost. But even before the fighting had ended, Stalin began to turn against the architects of success. In this original and comprehensive study, Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership cultivated a legacy that was to burden the Soviet Union and Russia to the present day.

The first comprehensive account of Stalin's struggle to make criminal law in the USSR a reliable instrument of rule offers new perspectives on collectivization, the Great Terror, the politics of abortion, and the disciplining of the labor force.

The purpose of this text is to provide the Army with a factual account of the organization and operations of the Soviet resistance movement behind the German forces on the Eastern Front during World War II. This movement offers a particularly valuable case study, for it can be viewed both in relation to the German occupation in the Soviet Union and to the offensive and defensive operations of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The scope of the study includes an over-all picture of a quasi-military organization in relation to a larger conflict between two regular armies. It is not a study in partisan tactics, nor is it intended to be. German measures taken to combat the partisan movement are sketched in, but the story in large part remains that of an organization and how it operated. The German planning for the invasion of Russia is treated at some length because many of the circumstances which favored the rise and development of the movement had their bases in errors the Germans made in their initial planning. The operations of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army are likewise described in considerable detail as the backdrop against which the operations of the partisan units are projected. Because of the lack of reliable Soviet sources, the story has been told much as the Germans recorded it. German documents written during the course of World War II constitute the principal sources, but many survivors who had experience in Russia have made important contributions based upon their personal experience.

Under Joseph Stalin's iron-fisted rule, the Soviet state tried to forge an army that would be both a shining example of proletarian power and an indomitable deterrent against fascist aggression. In reality, the author reveals, Stalin's grand military experiment failed miserably on both counts before it was finally rescued within the crucible of war. Instead, the author portrays an army at war with itself, focusing on the daily lives of soldiers, officers, and civilians.