Stalin's Italian Prisoners of War
Stalin's Italian Prisoners of War

Author: Maria Teresa Giusti

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2021-04-30

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9633863562

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This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.

From Incarceration to Repatriation
From Incarceration to Repatriation

Author: Susan C. I. Grunewald

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1501776037

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From Incarceration to Repatriation explores the lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German POWs who were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than the prisoners of any other Allied nation. Susan C. I. Grunewald argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible. Engaging with recently declassified documents in former Soviet archives, archival material from multiple German governments, as well as innovative use of digital humanities methods and geographic information system (GIS) mapping, Grunewald demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the four thousand POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction. From Incarceration to Repatriation is the first book to draw together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after World War II. Attending to the ways that the memory of German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, Grunewald tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.

Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace
Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace

Author: Barbara Hately-Broad

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2005-02-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1845207246

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Millions of servicemen of the belligerent powers were taken prisoner during World War II. Until recently, the popular image of these men has been framed by tales of heroic escape or immense suffering at the hands of malevolent captors. For the vast majority, however, the reality was very different. Their history, both during and after the War, has largely been ignored in the grand narratives of the conflict. This collection brings together new scholarship, largely based on sources from previously unavailable Eastern European or Japanese archives. Authors highlight a number of important comparatives. Whereas for the British and Americans held by the Germans and Japanese, the end of the war meant a swift repatriation and demobilization, for the Germans, it heralded the beginning of an imprisonment that, for some, lasted until 1956. These and many more moving stories are revealed here for the first time.

Dimitrov and Stalin
Dimitrov and Stalin

Author: Georgi Dimitrov

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0300080212

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Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin's close confidant and trusted ally, served as secretary general of the Communist International (Comintern) from 1934 to its dissolution in 1943. In this collection of more than fifty top-secret letters, the real workings of the Comintern emerge clearly for the first time. Drawn from classified Soviet archives only recently opened to Russian and American scholars, these letters offer unique insights into Soviet foreign policy and Stalin's attitudes and intentions while the Great Terror of the 1930s was in progress and in the years leading up to the Second World War. Annotated by the editors to provide the historical context in which these letters were written, the collection is vivid and startlingly significant. The letters confirm the complete dependence of the Comintern on the Kremlin, while also exposing bureaucratic maneuvering, backbiting, and jockeying for influence. These messages cast much light on the Soviet confusion about policies toward foreign Communist parties, and they uncover the extent to which Stalin shaped the Comintern. Stalin's perspectives on America, French communism, and the Spanish Civil War are recorded, as are his differences with Mao Zedong and with Marshal Tito at important turning points. With the publication of these letters, the history of twentieth-century communism gains authentic evidence about a critical decade.

Saving Stalin
Saving Stalin

Author: John Kelly

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0306902761

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During World War II, the Allied leaders banded together, forged a great victory--and created a new and dangerous post-war world. In the summer of 1941, Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt's trusted advisor, arrived in Moscow to assess whether the US should send aid to Russia as it had to Britain. Unofficially, he was there to determine whether Josef Stalin--the man who had killed over six million Ukrainians during the 1930s--was worth saving. In this riveting and sweeping narrative, author John Kelly chronicles the turbulent wartime relationship between the great leaders--Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--and military commanders of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Faced with the greatest challenge of the century, the Allied leaders and their war managers struggled against a common enemy--and each other. The story behind how victory was forged is an epic story, rich in drama, passion and larger-than-life personalities. The Allies eventually triumphed, but at what cost? Using his trademark character-rich writing style and focusing on unique, unknown, and unexplored aspects of the story, Kelly offers a fresh perspective on the decision-making that changed the course of the war--and the course of history. Saving Stalin brings to vivid life the epic story of the century's greatest human catastrophe. It is an unforgettable master work in historical narrative.

Love and War in the Apennines
Love and War in the Apennines

Author: Eric Newby

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0007367899

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In 1943, Eric Newby escaped from the Italian prison camp in which he had been held for a year. Evading the advancing German army, he was sheltered by an informal network of Italian peasants. Love and War in the Apennines is Newby's tribute to these selfless and courageous people and their bleak and unchanging way of life. Of the cast of idiosyncratic characters, most notable was the beautiful local girl on a bike who would teach him the language, and eventually help him escape. Two years later they were married and would spend the rest of their lives as co-adventurers. Part travelogue, part escape story and part romance, this is a mesmerising account of wisdom, courage, humour, adventure and above all, love from the man who would become one of Britain's best-loved literary adventurers.

Stalin and Togliatti
Stalin and Togliatti

Author: Elena Aga Rossi

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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The authors employ previously classified documents in Russian and Italian archives, including reports to Stalin on the virtually daily meetings of Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, with Soviet diplomats. This recent, post-revisionist scholarship underscores the role of Stalin's ambitions and their incompatibility with liberal-democratic systems in the development of the Cold War. Stalin and Togliatti come across as shrewd politicians, implacable enemies of the capitalist West, yet acutely aware of the limits of their power.

The Price of Victory
The Price of Victory

Author: Lev Lopukhovsky

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2017-06-30

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1473899664

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“A stark picture of war between the Germans and the Soviets, including some very interesting illustration . . . fascinating, if chilling, reading.”—Firetrench The Red Army’s casualties during the Second World War and the casualties sustained by the German army they fought are a key element in any assessment of the conflict on the Eastern Front. Since the war ended over seventy years ago, the statistics have been a source of bitter controversy, of claim and counterclaim, as each generation of historians has struggled to uncover the truth. This contentious issue is the subject of this absorbing book. The figures reveal much about the way the war was fought, and they demonstrate the enormous human price the Soviet Union paid for its victory. That is why the statistics have been so strongly contested. Distortion and falsification by official historians have obscured the facts because the issue has been so heavily politicized. Using recently declassified information from the Russian archives, the authors focus in forensic detail on the way the figures were recorded and compiled and seek to explain why, so many years after the war, the full truth about the subject is still far from our reach.

From Stalin to Mao
From Stalin to Mao

Author: Elidor Mëhilli

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1501712233

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Elidor Mëhilli has produced a groundbreaking history of communist Albania that illuminates one of Europe’s longest but least understood dictatorships. From Stalin to Mao, which is informed throughout by Mëhilli’s unprecedented access to previously restricted archives, captures the powerful globalism of post-1945 socialism, as well as the unintended consequences of cross-border exchanges from the Mediterranean to East Asia. After a decade of vigorous borrowing from the Soviet Union—advisers, factories, school textbooks, urban plans—Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China during the 1960s Sino-Soviet conflict, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Mëhilli shows how socialism created a shared transnational material and mental culture—still evident today around Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity. Combining an analysis of ideology with a sharp sense of geopolitics, he brings into view Fascist Italy’s involvement in Albania, then explores the country’s Eastern bloc entanglements, the profound fascination with the Soviets, and the contradictions of the dramatic anti-Soviet turn. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs, From Stalin to Mao draws on a wealth of Albanian, Russian, German, British, Italian, Czech, and American archival sources, in addition to fiction, interviews, and memoirs. Mëhilli’s fresh perspective on the Soviet-Chinese battle for the soul of revolution in the global Cold War also illuminates the paradoxes of state planning in the twentieth century.

Stalin and the Fate of Europe
Stalin and the Fate of Europe

Author: Norman M. Naimark

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674242920

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Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.