Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions and Controversies

Description

This thought-provoking collection of essays, assembled in honour of renowned historian Geoffrey Roberts, analyses the complex, multi-faceted, and even contradictory nature of Stalinism and its representations. This volume ‘revisions’ Stalin in his various guises – despot and diplomat, soldier and statesman, rational bureaucrat and paranoid politician – and explores the complex picture that this created in Russia during the period. Broadly speaking, three important areas of debate are examined, united by a focus on political leadership: the key controversies surrounding Stalin’s leadership role; a reconsideration of Stalin and the Cold War; and new perspectives on the cult of personality. The Stalinist regime in the USSR was characterised by enormous complexity and contradiction. Committed to a vision of the complete emancipation of humanity and the onset of global communism, the Soviet state was rendered almost dysfunctional on the eve of the Second World War by waves of destructive violent purges. And yet, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the USSR withstood invasion and defeated Nazi Germany. It strove, unsuccessfully, to create a lasting peace in Europe, although in the process it contributed to a decades-long division of much of the world into ‘East’ and ‘West’. Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism introduces and intervenes in thematic controversies that characterize the political and cultural-political history of the Stalin period in the USSR and in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc. What is distinctive about the volume is the broad lens that it applies to the significance of Stalin and Stalinism as a study in political leadership. The essays contained here foreground the complex, multi-faceted, and often contradictory nature of Stalin, Stalinism, and Stalinist-style leadership and their representations. The volume ‘revisions’ Stalin and Stalinism in the particular sense that it underlines and captures these complexities. It also considers the ramifications of Stalinism outside the Soviet borders, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, and the transnational entanglements that shaped and were shaped by the Stalinist form of governance. Three important areas of debate are examined: controversies of Stalin’s leadership role; Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War; and new perspectives on the cult of personality. By way of conclusion, the place of Stalin and Stalinism in Russia today is explained. Cover Half title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on transliteration Introduction: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism Part One The Controversial Vozhd’: Stalin as Leader and Statesman 1 The many lives of Joseph Stalin: Writing the biography of a ‘Monster’ 2 Stalin’s purge of the Red Army and misperception of security threats 3 Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939: The new historiography 4 Brute force and genius: Stalin as war leader Part Two Challenging Stalinist Models: Cults of Personality 5 The Stalin cult in comparative context 6 From heroic lion to streetfighter: Historical legacies and the leader cult in twentieth-century Hungary Part Three New Ways of Understanding the Stalinist System: The Cold War 7 Revisioning Stalin’s Cold War 8 Working towards the Vozhd’? Stalin and the peace movement 9 Constructing a confession: The language and psychology of interrogations in Stalinist Czechoslovakia Part Four In Lieu of an Epilogue 10 Reckoning with the past: Stalin and Stalinism in Putin’s Russia Notes Select Bibliography Geoffrey Roberts Select Bibliography Index