This book focuses upon significant aspects of Stalinism as a system in the USSR. It sheds new light on established questions and addresses issues that have never before been raised in the study of Stalinism. Stalinism constitutes one of the most striking and contentious phenomena of the twentieth century. It not only transformed the Soviet Union into a major military-industrial power, but through both the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War, and its effect on the political Left throughout much of the world, it also transformed much of that world. This collection of papers by an international cast of authors investigates a variety of major aspects of Stalinism. Significant new questions – like the role of private enterprise and violence in state-making – as well as some of the more established questions – like the number of Soviet citizens who died in the Second World War, whether agricultural collectivisation was genocidal, nationality policy, the politics of executive power, and the Leningrad affair – are addressed here in innovative and stimulating ways. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.

Drawing on research based on access to the recently-opened Soviet archives, this new edition provides a valuable thematic account of the nature of Stalinism. The author surveys the arguments about the origins of the Stalinist phenomenon and discusses the way in which the different faces of Stalinism (economic, social, cultural and political) changed over time. Gill concludes that the dramatic fall of the USSR was connected to the nature of Stalinism.

Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.

Tracking the degeneration of the Russian Revolution Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism. Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.