Russia In Flames

Download or read book Russia in Flames written by Laura Engelstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.

Download or read book The Burning of Moscow written by Alexander Mikaberidze and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As soon as Napoleon and his Grand Army entered Moscow, on 14 September 1812, the capital erupted in flames that eventually engulfed and destroyed two thirds of the city. The fiery devastation had a profound effect on the Grand Army, but for thirty-five days Napoleon stayed, making increasingly desperate efforts to achieve peace with Russia. Then, in October, almost surrounded by the Russians and with winter fast approaching, he abandoned the capital and embarked on the long, bitter retreat that destroyed his army. The month-long stay in Moscow was a pivotal moment in the war of 1812 the moment when the initiative swung towards the Tsar's armies and spelled doom for the invading Grand Army yet it has rarely been studied in the same depth as the other key events of the campaign.Alexander Mikaberidze, in this third volume of his in-depth reassessment of the war between the French and Russian empires, emphasizes the importance of the Moscow fire and shows how Russian intransigence sealed the fate of the French army. He uses a vast array of French, German, Polish and Russian memoirs, letters and diaries as well as archival material in order to tell the dramatic story of the Moscow fire. Not only does he provide a comprehensive account of events, looking at them from both the French and Russian points of view, but he explores the Russians' motives for leaving, then burning their capital. Using extensive eyewitness accounts, he paints a vivid picture of the harsh reality of life in the remains of the occupied city and describes military operations around Moscow at this turning point in the campaign.

Download or read book Russia in Revolution written by Stephen Anthony Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

Download or read book Lenin's Moscow written by Alfred Rosmer and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by a Comintern leader in the early Soviet Union is “a vital primary source . . . clear and unpretentious”(Ian Birchall, from the new preface). When Alfred Rosmer arrived in Russia in 1919, it was considered by millions to be the center of world revolution. It was also a society beleaguered by civil war and encircled by hostile powers seeking to snuff out the promise and potential the first successful workers’ revolution represented. It was in this context that revolutionaries from across the globe undertook the creation of the Communist International, hoping to forge an instrument to fan the flames of the struggle against global capitalism. In this gripping political memoir of his time in Moscow, Rosmer draws on his unique perspective as both a delegate to the Comintern and as a member of its Executive Committee to paint a stunning picture of the early years of Soviet rule. From the debates sparked by the publication of Lenin’s State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism to the efforts of the International to extend its influence beyond Europe with the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Rosmer documents key developments with an unparalleled clarity of vision and offers invaluable insights.

Download or read book Slavophile Empire written by Laura Engelstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life. Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.

Download or read book The End of Tsarist Russia written by Dominic Lieven and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Winner of the the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize An Amazon Best Book of the Month (History) One of the world’s leading scholars offers a fresh interpretation of the linked origins of World War I and the Russian Revolution "Lieven has a double gift: first, for harvesting details to convey the essence of an era and, second, for finding new, startling, and clarifying elements in familiar stories. This is history with a heartbeat, and it could not be more engrossing."—Foreign Affairs World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the twentieth century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War’s origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened. Based on exhaustive work in seven Russian archives as well as many non-Russian sources, Dominic Lieven’s work is about far more than just Russia. By placing the crisis of empire at its core, Lieven links World War I to the sweep of twentieth-century global history. He shows how contemporary hot issues such as the struggle for Ukraine were already crucial elements in the run-up to 1914. By incorporating into his book new approaches and comparisons, Lieven tells the story of war and revolution in a way that is truly original and thought-provoking.

Download or read book Russia After the War written by Elena Zubkova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years of late Stalinism are one of the murkiest periods in Soviet history, best known to us through the voices of Ehrenburg, Khrushchev and Solzhenitsyn. This is a sweeping history of Russia from the end of the war to the Thaw by one of Russia's respected younger historians. Drawing on the resources of newly opened archives as well as the recent outpouring of published diaries and memoirs, Elena Zubkova presents a richly detailed portrayal of the basic conditions of people's lives in Soviet Russia from 1945 to 1957. She brings out the dynamics of postwar popular expectations and the cultural stirrings set in motion by the wartime experience versus the regime's determination to reassert command over territories and populations and the mechanisms of repression. Her interpretation of the period establishes the context for the liberalizing and reformist impulses that surfaced in the post-Stalin succession struggle, characterizing what would be the formative period for a future generation of leaders: Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their contemporaries.