Survival Through War And Revolution In Russia

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This is a highly readable and absorbing account of Bolshevik foreign policy during Lenin's first year in power. In tracing the development of that policy, the book considers both the impact it had on a world torn by war and the effect it had on the Bolsheviks themselves, now no longer engaged in clandestine struggle but in effective state control. The book explores Lenin's relationship with the various elements of the party – his fruitful, but frequently discordant, relationship with Trotsky in particular – and the way he sought and obtained support for his policies in the tumultuous political circumstances of 1917 and 1918. It studies Lenin's political style as well, in an attempt to explain the shift from his utopianism of 1917 to his hard-headed political realism of 1918. The analysis focuses on the fundamental questions of how the Soviet state, lacking significant military forces in the midst of a world war, succeeded in surviving the first year of the revolution, and how it survived the new threat of the changed political situation at the end of the war. Revolution and Survival is the first history of Lenin's foreign policy during this crucial period, and Richard Debo has fused insight with style in a fascinating and authoritative book.

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born. Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War. Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

Reinterpreting the emergence of the Soviet state, Holquist situates the Bolshevik Revolution within the continuum of mobilization and violence that began with World War I and extended through Russia's civil war, thereby providing a genealogy for Bolshevik political practices that places them clearly among Russian and European wartime measures.

'A masterpiece of history' DAILY TELEGRAPH Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky's Red Army and Lenin's single-minded Communist dictatorship. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man's inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed international bestseller Stalingrad, assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital.

At a time when the Soviet Union is disintegrating, Richard Debo provides an intriguing and detailed examination of the new political realities that slowly and painfully emerged in eastern Europe out of the chaos left in the wake of the First World War. Revealing the reasons for the victory of Lenin's Bolshevik government in the Russian civil war, Debo demonstrates that Bolshevik political and diplomatic skills were far superior to those of either their indigenous opponents or their many foreign enemies. For much of 1919, enemies of the Soviet government were more interested in fighting each other than the Bolsheviks, and, although foreign powers sought to influence competing anti-Bolshevik generals, they actually contributed little to the defeat of the Red Army. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks established realistic priorities, formulated flexible policies, and made political sacrifices unimagined by their enemies. As a result they were able to find allies and divide opponents.

The Holocaust has come to be known as the greatest attempt in history to destroy European Jewry. But the plight of the Jews began many years before the events of World War II. From The Broken Windows chronicles the survival of one family during historically unheralded times when Jews found themselves under attack in their towns and homes in early 20th century Ukraine/Russia. The author compiled the stories told to him mostly by his father (Boruch) and expanded the events with contributions from his mother, grandmother, relatives and friends of the family who came from other towns and villages. The author actually traveled to Ukraine and Shargorod to see first hand what is left of the crumbling shtetl and to experience actual distances the family had to travel in order to escape. Many of the villages and towns still exist there, but soon will pass into history as the Jews are few and are either dying out or moving to other countries. The story includes their flight to freedom in an historical narrative that echoes the grim memories of those sinister years, yet illuminates a spark of hope for humanity.