Six Months in 1945

Six Months in 1945

Author: Michael Dobbs

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0307960897

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When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler’s armies were on the run, and victory was imminent. The Big Three wanted to draft a blueprint for a lasting peace—but instead they set the stage for a forty-four year division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. After fighting side by side for nearly four years, their political alliance was beginning to fracture. Although the most dramatic Cold War confrontations such as the Berlin airlift were still to come, a new struggle for global hegemony had got underway by August 1945 when Truman used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Six Months in 1945 brilliantly captures this momentous historical turning point while illuminating the aims and personalities of larger-than-life political giants.


The Last Decade of the Cold War

The Last Decade of the Cold War

Author: Olav Njolstad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1135754136

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The last decade of the Cold War witnessed the transformation of world politics with the collapse of one-party Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This book explains how it happened and why.


A Failed Empire

A Failed Empire

Author: Vladislav M. Zubok

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-02-01

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0807899054

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In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok offers the first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side. A Failed Empire provides a history quite different from those written by the Western victors. In a new preface for this edition, the author adds to our understanding of today's events in Russia, including who the new players are and how their policies will affect the state of the world in the twenty-first century.


Trust and Mistrust in International Relations

Trust and Mistrust in International Relations

Author: Andrew H. Kydd

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0691188513

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The difference between war and peace can be a matter of trust. States that trust each other can cooperate and remain at peace. States that mistrust each other enough can wage preventive wars, attacking now in fear that the other side will attack in the future. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Kydd develops a theory of trust in international relations and applies it to the Cold War. Grounded in a realist tradition but arriving at conclusions very different from current realist approaches, this theory is the first systematic game theoretic approach to trust in international relations, and is also the first to explicitly consider how we as external observers should make inferences about the trustworthiness of states. Kydd makes three major claims. First, while trustworthy states may enter conflict, when we see conflict we should become more convinced that the states involved are untrustworthy. Second, strong states, traditionally thought to promote cooperation, can do so only if they are relatively trustworthy. Third, even states that strongly mistrust each other can reassure each other and cooperate provided they are trustworthy. The book's historical chapters focus on the growing mistrust at the beginning of the Cold War. Contrary to the common view that both sides were willing to compromise but failed because of mistrust, Kydd argues that most of the mistrust in the Cold War was justified, because the Soviets were not trustworthy.


Stalin's Wars

Stalin's Wars

Author: Geoffrey Roberts

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780300112047

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This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.


The Cold War

The Cold War

Author: J.P.D. Dunbabin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 1317875206

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The Cold War offers a brief but detailed treatment of one of the most complex eras of the 20th Century. In this fully revised second edition, J.P.D. Dunbabin, drawing on international scholarship and using much new material from communist sources, describes a world in which covert operations could be as important as outright diplomacy, 'soft' power as influential as 'hard', and in which competing ideologies ruled the hearts as much as the heads of the leaders in power. Dunbabin’s account is global in scope, taking into account the importance of players beyond the superpowers, and shedding light on the proxy conflicts such as those in Africa and the Middle East that, if not caused by the continuing stalemate between the great powers, were used as weapons within it.


Bourgeois Radicals

Bourgeois Radicals

Author: Carol Anderson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0521763789

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Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. In the eyes of the NAACP's leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a "third way" to democracy and nationhood for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and die-hard imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.


Aftermath

Aftermath

Author: Richard Crowder

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-05-29

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0857738437

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In a decade, between 1940 and 1950, the old world order collapsed, and a new one was created. Old European empires - France, Germany and the United Kingdom - receded, replaced by two new superpowers - the Soviet Union and the United States. Beyond Europe, a swath of new countries was created: India, Communist China, Israel and the modern Arab states, Indonesia, the Koreas. But there were darker shadows too, cast by the onset of the Cold War: the failure to establish international controls on atomic energy, or the growth of the national security state and modern intelligence apparatus. This era also produced some of the most remarkable statesmen of modern times, including leaders such as Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, de Gaulle, Nehru and Mao Tsetung; diplomats like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin and Robert Schuman; and international fixers, such as Averell Harriman, John Maynard Keynes, or Jean Monnet. Their stories form the core fabric of this book. Richard Crowder examines their shared ambition to rebuild the world, and launch a second age of globalization.


Origins of the Cold War

Origins of the Cold War

Author: David S. Painter

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780415341103

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This second edition brings the collection up to date, including the newest research from the Communist side of the Cold War and the most recent debates on culture, race and intelligence.