Stalin: A beginner's guide
Crimes and cults
Websites
Crimes of the Stalin Era
www.trussel.com/hf/stalin.htm
Text of Nikita Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, in which he exposed the truth about Stalin – 'his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power'.
Comrade Stalin
www.learningcurve.gov.uk/heroesvillains/stalin/
Interesting educational microsite on the UK National Archives site, which asks whether Stalin was a hero or a villain. Documents and sound clips from the Public Record Office are available as evidence.
Joseph Stalin killer file
www.moreorless.au.com/killers/stalin.htm
Fascinating attempt to ascertain exactly how many deaths Stalin was actually responsible for (at least one million). Contains the thought-provoking fact that, in 2003, 36% of Russians polled said that Stalin 'did more good than bad' for Russia.
Case Study: Stalin's purges
www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html
Detailed article about the tens of millions of people imprisoned and murdered under Stalin's dictatorship. This site has the added twist of concentrating on 'gendercide' – gender-selective mass killing. In this case study, it was the male gender that suffered most.
The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs in Stalin's Russia
www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/
Extremely interesting website from the Newseum (sponsored by USA Today newspaper) showing how Stalin made sure that his enemies (and particularly Trotsky) disappeared from the Soviet record.
The Cult of Stalin
http://it.stlawu.edu/~rkreuzer/indv2/stalin.htm
Remarkable website dealing with not only the Soviet leader's image in literature, film and the visual arts but also its deconstruction from the time of Khrushchev to today. Be warned, though: the background makes this site almost impossible to read (hint: highlighting the text makes it legible).
Stalin, Myth and Monster
www.photorussia.com/stalinex00.htm
Review of a show of contemporary Russian photography run by an American art gallery, with Stalin as its theme. Very interesting take on the dictator and on Soviet spin from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Why Stalin loved Tarzan and wanted John Wayne shot
www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/
2004/06/04/bfstalin04.xml
Article by Simon Sebag Montefiore (based on his book) in which he reveals that the Soviet leader fancied himself as a 'super-movie producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor'.
Books
Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the seduction of the intellectuals by Stephen Koch (Enigma Books, 2004) 1929631200
This book exposes a masterful Russian propaganda campaign that attempted to convert the West to the Communist cause by aligning such Western intellectuals as Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, and others with Stalin's Soviet Union.
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Shostakovich and Stalin by Solomon Volkov (Little Brown, 2004) 0316861413
'Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that …' So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who spent his life battling for the right to create his works under the Soviet Union's totalitarian regime. This proved dangerous under the autocratic Stalin, who perceived himself to be an erudite critic of modern culture. This is a fascinating and important story told by one of the greatest authorities on Russian culture in the Soviet years.
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Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet public culture from revolution to Cold War by Jeffrey Brooks (Princeton University Press, 2001) 0691088675
'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 study, Brooks explains the origins, nature and effects of this unrelenting idealisation of the state, the Communist Party and the leader.
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