Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War

Robert Gellately

ISBN 10: 0199668043 / ISBN 13: 9780199668045

Published by Oxford University Press, United Kingdom, 2013

About this Item

1st. Edition , 1st.Printing 2013 , 1st. British edition , Hardcover in the dust jacket , 496 page book with some black & white photo illustrations and maps. Condition : As New Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 083019-P

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, United Kingdom
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199668043
• ISBN 13: 9780199668045
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • History / World History /

About this title

Synopsis

The Second World War almost destroyed Stalin's Soviet Union. But victory over Nazi Germany provided the dictator with his great opportunity: to expand Soviet power way beyond the borders of the Soviet state.

Well before the shooting stopped in 1945, the Soviet leader methodically set about the unprecedented task of creating a Red Empire that would soon stretch into the heart of Europe and Asia, displaying a supreme realism and ruthlessness that Machiavelli would surely have envied. By the time of his death in 1953, his new imperium was firmly in place, defining the contours of a Cold War world that was seemingly permanent and indestructible - and would last until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

But what were Stalin's motives in this spectacular power grab? Was he no more than a latter-day Russian tsar, for whom Communist ideology was little more than a smoke-screen? Or was he simply a psychopathic killer? In Stalin's Curse, best-selling historian Robert Gellately firmly rejects both these simplifications of the man and his motives.

Using a wealth of previously unavailable documentation, Gellately shows instead how Stalin's crimes are more accurately understood as the deeds of a ruthless and life-long Leninist revolutionary. Far from being a latter day 'Red Tsar' intent simply upon imperial expansion for its own sake, Stalin was in fact deeply inspired by the rhetoric of the Russian revolution and what Lenin had accomplished during the Great War. As Gellately convincingly shows, Stalin remained throughout these years steadfastly committed to a 'boundless faith' in Communism - and saw the Second World War as his chance to take up once again the old revolutionary mission to carry the Red Flag to the world.

About the Author

Robert Gellately is Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University. His publications have been translated into over twenty languages and include the widely acclaimed Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: the Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (2001), and The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (1990), the last two also published by Oxford University Press. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.