Gerstein, Emma:Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Literary Russia Under Stalin
- Taschenbuch 2008, ISBN: 9781585675951
Gebundene Ausgabe
Houghton Mifflin. Very Good. 6.25 x 1 x 9 inches. Hardcover. 2005. 326 pages. <br>Reassessing the Soviet response to the Nazi invasi on of Russia, the author portrays Stalin as an i… Mehr…
Houghton Mifflin. Very Good. 6.25 x 1 x 9 inches. Hardcover. 2005. 326 pages. <br>Reassessing the Soviet response to the Nazi invasi on of Russia, the author portrays Stalin as an ineffective milita ry leader who allowed hundreds of thousands of his soldiers to be slaughtered in the first ten days of the invasion. Editorial Re views From Publishers Weekly The subtitle of this provocative an d useful work by a noted historian (The Tsar's Last Armada) accur ately describes its subject. The author supports the revisionist thesis that Stalin was not deceived about Hitler's ultimate inten tions, only their timing, and was planning a preemptive attack in to Poland and the Balkans--in 1942. Soviet deployments certainly make this plausible, as do other factors, such as the failure to build up defenses on the new Soviet border after stripping the ol d ones of most of their weapons and troops. The Germans, as is we ll known, struck first, and the result was a Russian military dis aster of such proportions as to influence history to this day. Th e book is well-balanced, moving from the Kremlin, where Stalin wa s in denial and Zhukov was at least keeping his head, to soldiers of every rank from general to unarmed private. With his talent f or assembling gripping narratives out of long-suppressed sources, Pleshakov will bring joy to fans of John Erickson. (May 5) Copy right Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc . All rights reserved. From Booklist Stalin's actions immediatel y preceding the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union remain somewhat m urky because historians cannot search relevant Russian archives. Yet tantalizing but circumstantial evidence suggests Stalin inten ded to preempt Hitler by launching his own war, a proposition tha t historian Pleshakov accepts and to which his title refers. What ever plot the Soviet dictator harbored, the blitzkrieg blasted it to pieces on June 22, 1941, and the ensuing, catastrophic two we eks dramatically unfold in this forceful account. Pleshakov, who displayed excellent popular pitch in The Tsar's Last Armada (2002 ), adeptly commands the available sources and narrates the destru ction of the frontline Soviet armies and the chaotic reports of t he disaster that reached Moscow. Tracking the retreats of general s and missions of Stalin's emissaries to ascertain the situation, Pleshakov arrives at the moment--the German capture of Minsk--wh en Stalin apparently went into a swoon; he plainly expected to be overthrown. Illustrating the terrible totalitarian maelstrom wit h vignettes of individual fates, Pleshakov powerfully portrays th e opening shots of the most destructive war in history. Gilbert T aylor Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserve d Review Pleshakov, already author of outstanding and wonderfull y readable books on Soviet foreign policy and the 1904 Russo-Japa nese War, delivers an accessible, scholarly and gripping narrativ e that tells of Stalin's biggest mistake and the mayhem of the fi rst days of Barbarossa. --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stali n: The Court of the Red Tsar and Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner Stalin's failure to prepare for Hitler's sudden attack in June of 1941 takes on terrible new meaning in Constant ine Pleshakov's gripping book. Trained as an historian, but inter preting newly available sources with a novelist's eye and ear, Pl eshakov provides devastating sketches of Stalin and his generals, heartbreaking descriptions of ordinary soldiers and civilians aw ash in the chaos of war, new revelations about Stalin's own secre t planning for a preemptive attack until Hitler beat him to it, a nd biting, trenchant analysis of how the rout and despair demonst rated the utter failure of the Soviet system, yet inspired the Re d Army to fight its way to the heart of the Third Reich four year s later. --William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khru shchev: The Man and His Era A stimulating, and often fruitfully provocative account of the array of complex and self-contradictor y irrationalities with which Stalin mishandled, and barely surviv ed, Hitler's attack in 1941. And, as background, a striking overv iew of the human suffering that resulted. --Robert Conquest, auth or of The Great Terror and The Dragons of Expectation This is a very lively account of a most deadly moment in modern history. Pl eshakov knows how to tell a story, and his portrait of Stalin, ba sed on fresh evidence from the Russian archives, is a devastating depiction of colossal incompetence. --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of His Excellency: George Washington, Americ an Sphinx, and Founding Brothers About the Author Russian-born C onstantine Pleshakov is the author of The Tsar's Last Armada The Flight of the Romanovs, and Inside the Kremlin's Cold War. He is a visiting prefessor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Excerp t. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 WAR GAME JA NUARY 2, 1941: THE KREMLIN The end of 1940 was grim. Two armies, one clad in gray, the other in khaki, were destroying the Old Wor ld. They had thrown themselves at Europe abruptly and ferociously , like ants attacking a cake left on a garden table. And like ant s, they arrived in geometrically impeccable columns, never questi oning their right to devour the trophy. The ants were of two diff erent species. The grays took orders from the German Fhrer, Adolf Hitler; the khakis closed ranks around the Soviet leader, or voz hd, Joseph Stalin. Having been dismissed by cultured European pol iticians, cartoonists, and sketch writers as pests that could be stamped out by the civilized world in a flash, the ants had prove d their worth by 1940. France crumbled under the wheels of German tanks in less than three weeks. The British force on the contine nt, expected to save the day, was decimated at Dunkirk. As headli nes shouted about the impending demise of these two great powers, pillars of the West since the days of the Crusades, smaller Euro pean nations such as Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslo vakia, and Norway wriggled under German occupation, their cries u nheard by the panicking world. At the other end of the continent, the Red Army grabbed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and tore awa y chunks of Poland, Finland, and Romania. In both the west and th e east, killings were performed speedily and expertly: troops swe pt through the ancient cities, blind to decorum, and the punitive squads followed immediately to scavenge, to cleanse, to kill. Hi tler's men looked for Jews and Communists; Stalin's went for the exploiting classes. The proud and elaborate European order, which had taken centuries to create, was smashed in less than a year, because the two armies acted in accord. Hitler let Stalin do what he wanted to on the fringes of Europe, and Stalin turned a blind eye to the plight of the West and even reined in his fifth colum n abroad, the fanatically anti-Nazi Comintern. But this was not a partnership of equals - Hitler snatched the best pieces, and Sta lin collected the crumbs. Kaunas was a poor match for Paris, the port of Riga didn't fare nearly as well as that of Rotterdam, and Romanian Cabernet hardly deserved the name when compared to the French varieties. At the end of 1940 a weird lull fell over Europ e. The two armies had reached an impasse. Germany's hunger could not be sated by the annexation of the few lesser countries, like Yugoslavia and Greece, that were still stubbornly maintaining the ir sovereignty. The Germans had to launch a spectacular conquest to justify their roll across Europe; that was what all other empi res had done at the peak of their might, and that was what Adolf Hitler had promised the German people. They had few options. One was to invade Britain, another the Middle East; yet another was t o strike at the Soviet Union. At the end of 1940 nobody knew whic h path Hitler would choose. Virtually every person in the Soviet Union had heard about Mein Kampf, Hitler's manifesto, published y ears before and now distributed to German newlyweds as a state gi ft. In the book Hitler promised the Germans virtually unlimited l iving space, lebensraum, on the immense plains between the Danube and the Urals, which now belonged to the Union of Soviet Sociali st Republics, formerly the Russian Empire. Since August 1939 the two countries had been allies, but few Soviets doubted that the d eal would be short-lived. They also knew that almost every promin ent general in the USSR had been shot during the Great Purge, and the talent and vigor of the men who replaced them had yet to be tested. No matter how much the newspapers bragged about the prosp erity of the Communist motherland, people knew that just ten year s before, few households had had electricity and people had been signing papers with an X because they couldn't read or write. The workers building power plants, factories, and dams still lived i n wooden shacks and muddy holes. In 1932 the government ordered s o much grain from Ukraine, with its unsurpassed black earth, that its people suffered a fierce famine. Meanwhile, Germany was a na tion of science, efficiency, and advancement. None of this bode w ell for the nations that had been forcibly herded into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics over the course of the past twenty- three years. The Red Army, whose soldiers were drafted from urban e Leningrad and arrogant Moscow, demure Byelorussia and warlike C hechnya, Islamic Uzbekistan and Buddhist Buryatia, froze in suspe nse, anticipating the vozhd's instructions. But as yet no order h ad come its way. In the fall of 1940 the Soviet people discovere d thatt their woods were studded with an amazing number of mushro oms. Highly prized as a delicacy by both rich and poor, mushrooms rarely survived thhhhhe month of September, since they were enth usiastically picked and then pickled, boiled, fried, dried, and s auted. However, in 1940 the mushrooms were so plentiful that no m atter how many were gathered, many more sprang forth - not just t he uninspiring yellow chanterelles and the barely edible scarlet russulas, but also the czar of the forest, the delicious and beau tiful King Boletus. In a country devastated by economic barbarism and political ineptitude, such a surprising harvest should have been a welcome supplement to a meager diet. It wasn't. Every adul t in that superstitious land knew that the unusual abundance of m ushrooms meant just one thing: war. In the early evening of Janu ary 2, 1941, the generals were summoned to the Kremlin. The order came without warning. The generals were important, and so was th eir mission in Moscow - they were attending an annual conference - yet nobody was sure whether the heir of Lenin, the genius of al l times and peoples, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, would deign to see them. Regardless of the awe the leader inspired in their hear ts, the generals knew that he must have been alarmed by what was happening in the west of the country. The strongest army in the w orld, Hitler's Wehrmacht, rustled and coiled along the border lik e a gigantic serpent, and it was hard to believe that its intenti ons were peaceful. The very fact that they had been summoned to t he conference indicated that the vozhd was concerned about the st ate of the army. Conferences of military leaders were held annual ly, but this assembly was extraordinary. Usually the gatherings w ere attended by district commanders, their commissars, and chiefs of staff, but this time they were joined by a number of army, co rps, and even division leaders, and the meeting was to be followe d by a comprehensive strategic game. The generals were uneasy. Th e most recent execution of military leaders had occurred less tha n two years before. All of the participants in the conference had benefited from the carnage, as the murders had created lucrative vacancies. However, they could not be sure that the butchery wou ld not resume, this time destroying them as it had destroyed thei r predecessors. Also, they were confused. Throughout the 1930s th ey had been taught that Nazism was a belligerent and therefore da ngerous ideology. Now, however, their country was bound to Nazi G ermany by a pact and also by the joint conquest of Eastern Europe . Throughout the conference week, five reports and fifty presenta tions were made. One report definitely stood out: that supplied b y the commander of the Kiev Military District, Army General Georg y Zhukov, on The Nature of Modern Offensive Operation. Zhukov tho ught big. In his view, to win a war, an army group had to use at least eighty-five rifle divisions, four mechanized corps, two cav alry corps, and thirty air force divisions. In all, Zhukov sugges ted, a strike would involve about 1.5 million men, 8,000 aircraft , and 5,000 tanks. Nobody had ever fought a war like that. Whethe r the generals agreed with Zhukov or not-and some found his prese ntation presumptuous- he inspired respect. The man was remarkably vigorous, ambitious, and blunt, qualities all but lost to the ar my in the recent purge. He looked like he had stepped in from ano ther, happier age, when ingenuity and risk-taking were still the marks of the military man. Zhukov was not the only star of the co nference. The commander of the Western Military District, Colonel General Dmitry Pavlov, also delivered a rousing report. Pavlov c ompared tank operations of World War I to those currently unfoldi ng in Europe. The differences were staggering. During the Battle of the Somme, Pavlov said, tanks had advanced two and a half mile s in three hours, and that had been trumpeted as a major success. In May and June 1940, however, the German panzers had crushed al l of France in seventeen days. Pavlov sounded motivated and keen, and his presentation was well received. In a way, his report com plemented Zhukov's, advocating aggressive use of modern weaponry, but after Pavlov spoke the two generals began to look at each ot her apprehensively, as their rivalry became clear. On New Year's Eve the junior corps and division commanders were sent back home. Senior generals started preparing for the strategic game, which would pit the Reds against the Blues - or the Soviets against the Germans. Unexpectedly, before they began, the generals were told that Stalin required their presence. By 1941 the Kremlin was fo ur and a half centuries old. The Italian architects invited to bu ild it must have felt overwhelmed by the task. For starters, the grand prince of Moscow, Ivan III, needed a castle that could with stand any deadly attack, and Muscovite Russia was endowed with un fortunate strategic terrain: it was remarkably flat, with no sign ificant natural, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, 3, New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1992 Book. As New. Hardcover. First American Edition. 9 1/2 h x 6 1/4w. A real nice clean 1101 page first American edition hardcover. Has 3 black & white photo sections. A dual biography told in the context of Berlin-Moscow relations tells how the two similar men temporarily took total command of the historical forces swirling around them. A monumental and completely absorbing volume that creates vivid portraits of...two tyrants, while illuminating the first half of this blood-stained century.., Alfred A, Knopf, 1992, 5, Paperback / softback. New. <p><b>'Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had'</b> <i>Financial Times</i><br /><br /><b>How did the great European dream turn sour? And where do we go from here?</b><br /><br /><b>From the author of the internationally acclaimed </b><b><i>In Europe</i>, a stunning history of our present, </b><b>examining the first two decades of this most fragile and fraught new millennium.</b><br /><br />The great European project was built out of a common desire for peace, prosperity and freedom; a wish for a united Europe striving towards a common goal. The EU was to set an example: an arena for close cooperation, tackling crucial shared concerns from climate change to organized crime, promoting open borders and social security. <br /><br />But the first two turbulent decades of this century have been times of rapid and profound change. From the shores of Lampedusa to Putin's Moscow, the continent threatens to tear itself apart. What's happened to Europe's optimism and euphoria? How has it given way to nostalgia, frustration and fear, the fragile European dream in danger of turning into a nightmare?<br /><br />In <i>The Dream of Europe</i>, Geert Mak, one of Europe's best-loved commentators, charts the seismic events that have shaped people's lives over the past twenty years. Mak's monumental book <i>In Europe</i> defined the continent on the verge of a new millennium.<i> The</i> <i>Dream of Europe</i> brings us up to the present day, through the rocky expansion of the EU, the aftermath of 9/11 and terrorist attacks across Europe, the 2008 financial crash and the euro crisis, the tragedy of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, the rise of right-wing populism and Brexit.<br /><br />Like no other, Mak blends history, politics and culture with the stories and experiences of the many Europeans he meets on his travels. He brings this continent to life, and asks what role does Europe play now, and how might we face our challenges together, in the spirit of solidarity and connection.<br /><br /><b>'A powerful, humane and serious mind'</b> <i>Guardian</i><br /><br /><b>'Mak is a truly cosmopolitan chronicler' </b><i>Independent</i></p>, 6, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, PA, 2004. First Edition. Hardcover (Original Cloth). Very Good Condition/Very Good. First impression. Size: Octavo 8vo (standard book size). 482 pages. Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. No foxing in this copy. Dust jacket has been protected by its library plastic cover. All edges clean, neat and free of foxing. Endpapers marked with Library stamps, but very discretely, spine unmarked, in all other respects in very good condition throughout. The book is available and will be PACKAGED professionally, DISPATCHED promptly and a TRACKING NUMBER will be advised by Australia Post.. Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova stood at the pinnacle of twentieth-century Russian literature, and their works continue to stand as monuments of literary achievement, yet they also suffered brutally under Stalin's regime, martyrs to its paranoia and its suppression of free thought. In the early 1960s Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her memories of Mandelstam, but Gerstein's vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998, her memoirs provoked a wide array of responses, from condemnation to rapturous praise. A shrewd observer and serious literary specialist in her own right, Gerstein was uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals, and to bring the extraordinary atmosphere of the Soviet 1930s back to life. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest twentieth-century poets and provides memorable vignettes of numerous other figures, Boris Pasternak among them, from that partly forgotten and misunderstood world. Gerstein's integrity and perceptive comments make her account compulsively readable and enable us to reexamine that extraordinary epoch. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Literature & Literary; Russia; 20th century; Biography & Autobiography. ISBN: 1585675954. ISBN/EAN: 9781585675951. Pictures of this item not already displayed here available upon request. Inventory No: 9932. . 9781585675951, The Overlook Press, 2004, 3<
