Soviet Politics 1945 53

Placing Stalinism in its international context, The Stalinist Era explains the origins and consequences of Soviet state intervention and violence.

Following his country's victory over Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin was widely hailed as a great wartime leader and international statesman. Unchallenged on the domestic front, he headed one of the most powerful nations in the world. Yet, in the period from the end of World War II until his death, Stalin remained a man possessed by his fears. In order to reinforce his despotic rule in the face of old age and uncertain health, he habitually humiliated and terrorized members of his inner circle. He had their telephones bugged and even forced his deputy, Viacheslav Molotov, to betray his own spouse as a token of his allegiance. Often dismissed as paranoid and irrational, Stalin's behavior followed a clear political logic, contend Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk. Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after the war was to consolidate the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and, in the face of growing decrepitude, to maintain his own hold as leader of that power. To that end, he fashioned a system of leadership that was at once patrimonial-repressive and quite modern. While maintaining informal relations based on personal loyalty at the apex of the system, in the postwar period Stalin also vested authority in committees, elevated younger specialists, and initiated key institutional innovations with lasting consequences. Close scrutiny of Stalin's relationships with his most intimate colleagues also shows how, in the teeth of periodic persecution, Stalin's deputies cultivated informal norms and mutual understandings which provided the foundations for collective rule after his death. Based on newly released archival documents, including personal correspondence, drafts of Central Committee paperwork, new memoirs, and interviews with former functionaries and the families of Politburo members, this book will appeal to all those interested in Soviet history, political history, and the lives of dictators. Cold Peace was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005.

This book is a provocative and thoroughly documented reassessment of President Truman's profound influence on U.S. foreign policy and the Cold War. The author contends that Truman remained a parochial nationalist who lacked the vision and leadership to move the United States away from conflict and toward detente. Instead, he promoted an ideology and politics of Cold War confrontation that set the pattern for successor administrations."

This book presents the ups and downs of the Soviet-Turkish relations during World War II and immediately after it. Hasanli draws on declassified archive documents from the United States, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan to recreate a true picture of the time when the 'Turkish crisis' of the Cold War broke out. It explains why and how the friendly relations between the USSR and Turkey escalated into enmity, led to the increased confrontation between these two countries, and ended up with Turkey's entry into NATO. Hasanli uses recently-released Soviet archive documents to shed light on some dark points of the Cold War era and the relations between the Soviets and the West. Apart from bringing in an original point of view regarding starting of the Cold War, the book reveals some secret sides of the Soviet domestic and foreign policies. The book convincingly demonstrates how Soviet political technologists led by Josef Stalin distorted the picture of a friendly and peaceful country_Turkey_into the image of an enemy in the minds of millions of Soviet citizens.

One of the most significant industrial states in the country, with a powerful radical tradition, Pennsylvania was, by the early 1950s, the scene of some of the fiercest anti-Communist activism in the United States. Philip Jenkins examines the political an

After the Cold War, its history must be reassessed as the opening of Soviet archives allows a much fuller understanding of the Russian dimension. These essays on the classic period of the Cold War (1945-53) use Soviet and Western sources to shed new light on Stalin's aims, objectives and actions; on Moscow's relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West European Communist Parties; and on the diplomatic relations of Britain, France and Italy with the USSR. The contributors are prominent European, Russian and American specialists.