Stalin's Master Narrative

Stalin's Master Narrative

Author: David Brandenberger

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 759

ISBN-13: 0300155360

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A critical edition of the text that defined communist party ideology in Stalin's Soviet Union The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR--a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.


Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R.

Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R.

Author: Thomas Henry Rigby

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 0691656681

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In this comprehensive and latest statistical profile of the membership of the Communist Party during the first half-century of the Soviet regime, Professor Rigby analyzes the history of party recruitment and composition. Since the party makes vital contributions to the performance of several basic tasks within the Soviet political system, the author interprets his data mainly in functional terms. He identifies and evaluates the influence of these functional considerations on recruitment policies and on the changing patterns of membership, and determines the priorities assigned to different functions under changing circumstances. T.H. Rigby is Professor of Political Science, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University. Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


The High Title of a Communist

The High Title of a Communist

Author: Edward Cohn

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-06-19

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1609091795

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Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist is the first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life. The postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy and political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their liquor. Soviet power, in other words, became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources and avoids a narrow focus on life in Moscow and Leningrad, combining rich local materials from several Russian provinces with materials from throughout the USSR. The High Title of a Communist paints a vivid portrait of the USSR's postwar era that will help scholars and students understand both the history of the Soviet Union's postwar elite and the changing values of the Soviet regime. In the end, it shows, the regime failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for its Communists—a failure that would threaten the party's legitimacy in the USSR's final days.


Communist Parties Revisited

Communist Parties Revisited

Author: Rüdiger Bergien

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2018-01-31

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1785337777

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The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.


Perestroika and the Party

Perestroika and the Party

Author: Francesco Di Palma

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-08-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1789200210

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Countless studies have assessed the dramatic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, but their analysis of the impact on European communism has focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. This ambitious collection takes a much broader view, reconstructing and evaluating the historical trajectories of glasnost and perestroika on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Moving beyond domestic politics and foreign relations narrowly defined, the research gathered here constitutes a transnational survey of these reforms’ collective impact, showing how they were variably received and implemented, and how they shaped the prospects for “proletarian internationalism” in diverse political contexts.


The Secret World of American Communism

The Secret World of American Communism

Author: Harvey Klehr

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0300137834

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The hidden world of American communism can now be examined with the help of documents from the recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union. Interweaving narrative and documents, the authors of this book present a convincing new picture of the Communist Part of the the United States of America (CPUSA), providing proof that it was involved in espionage and other subversive activitives. 16 illustrations.


The Formation of the Soviet Union

The Formation of the Soviet Union

Author: Richard Pipes

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9780674309517

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Here is the history of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and the emergence of a multinational Communist state. Pipes tells how the Communists exploited the new nationalism of the peoples of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Volga-Ural area—first to seize power and then to expand into the borderlands.


Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

Author: Jeffrey Brooks

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1400843928

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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.