Stalin: A beginner's guide
Episodes of a life
Websites
The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's killing field
www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html
Fascinating article by Benjamin B Fischer of the American CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, which examines the latest evidence for Stalin and his toadies ordering the execution of thousands of Polish officers, soldiers and civilians in 1939.
Did Stalin cause the Cold War?
www.learningcurve.gov.uk/coldwar/G3/cs1
Educational site from the National Archive. Provides seven relevant documents and a number of ways of interpreting them.
Race for the Superbomb: Joseph Stalin
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/
pandeAMEX69.html
Brief article on Stalin's reaction to the Americans' development of the atomic bomb. Also check out Truman Tells Stalin, where all those who were at Potsdam on 24 July 1945, when the Soviet leader was told of the bomb, give their versions of events.
The Doctors' Plot
www.cyberussr.com/rus/vrach-ubijca-e.html
The article – 'Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians' – published on 13 January 1953 in Pravda, which gives the official rationale behind the arrests and imminent executions (only aborted because of Stalin's death) of a number of mainly Jewish doctors – Stalin's last attempt at a purge.
The mystery of Stalin's death
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2793501.stm
BBC News article on the conspiracy theory that Stalin was murdered on Beria's orders, to stop him from starting World War III against the Americans.
Stalin's Death: 1953
http://stalin.narod.ru/
Photographs and text about the funeral of the Soviet leader, at which some 500 people lost their lives because of the crowding.
Books
Stalin's Last Crime: The Doctors' Plot by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P Naumov (John Murray, 2004) 0719565081
On 13 January 1953, the world learned that a conspiracy among Jewish doctors to murder Kremlin leaders had been unmasked. Mass arrests followed. The Doctors' Plot was Stalin's last great criminal conspiracy. Did Stalin himself invent it or was it engineered by subordinates who wished to eliminate Kremlin rivals? Was Stalin motivated by venomous anti-Semitism? How did the plot relate to the Cold War then raging in Europe and to the war in Korea? And, finally, was the plot connected with Stalin's convenient death? Through access to previously unseen Soviet documents, this great conundrum of Cold War politics is unravelled for the first time.
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