E. A. Rees - Böcker

From 1931 to 1936, Stalin vacationed at his Black Sea residence for two to three months each year. While away from Moscow, he relied on correspondence with his subordinates to receive information, watch over the work of the Politburo and the government, give orders, and express his opinions. This book publishes for the first time translations of 177 handwritten letters and coded telegrams exchanged during this period between Stalin and his most highly trusted deputy, Lazar Kaganovich. The unique and revealing collection of letters—all previously classified top secret—provides a dramatic account of the mainsprings of Soviet policy while Stalin was consolidating his position as personal dictator. The correspondence records his positions on major internal and foreign affairs decisions and reveals his opinions about fellow members of the Politburo and other senior figures. Written during the years of agricultural collectivization, forced industrialization, famine, repression, and Soviet rearmament in the face of threats from Germany and Japan, these letters constitute an unsurpassed historical resource for all students of the Stalin regime and Soviet history.

This work provides an in-depth case-study of decision-making in the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It focuses on the development of rail transport policy, upon which the entire economy as well as the country's defence were so crucially dependent. It analyses the role of institutional lobbies in shaping policy, and sheds new light on the Stakhanovite movement, and analyses for the first time the impact of the Great Purges on the railways. The work provides a critical examination of the adequacy of existing conceptualisations of the Stalinist state.

The first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s leading deputies, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the life of a man of key importance to the shaping of the Stalinist state. With its insight into the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, as well as its examination of this aspiring politician’s policy-making role during the Stalinist regime, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the previously undocumented life of Lazar Kaganovich, the last surviving member of the Stalin government and one-time heir apparent to the Soviet Union.

This work provides an in-depth case-study of decision-making in the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It analyses the role of institutional lobbies in shaping policy, and sheds new light on the Stakhanovite movement, and analyses for the first time the impact of the Great Purges on the railways.

This work presents eleven studies in the field of Russian/Soviet economic and social history, which have been specially commissioned as a tribute to Professor R.W. Each chapter highlights a particular area of controversy, and illuminates the process of policy formation in this critical period of Soviet development.

A detailed examination of economic policy-making in the USSR during the period of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937).

This book analyzes the development of the Stalinist state of the 1930s from the perspective of the changing nature of centre-local relations.

This is the first book in English to explore the relationship between Stalin's ideas and methods, and the practices advocated by Machiavelli and those associated with 'Machiavellian' politics.

This volume analyses the development of the Stalinist state of the 1930s from the perspective of the changing nature of centre-local relations. It examines the trend toward greater central state control over the formation and implementation of economic policy and the shift towards increased state repression, through a series of archive-based case studies of the centre's interactions with its republican and regional bodies. The book provides the basis for a new conceptualization of the Stalinist state.

This is the first attempt to systematically study the nature of the political leadership system under Stalin. It draws on a wealth of new archival material to highlight Stalin's relations with his co-leaders and wider elite groups, and offers different perspectives on the nature and degree of Stalin's system of personal power.

This volume explores the relationship between Stalin's ideas and methods and the practices advocated by Machiavelli and the practices associated with "Machiavellian" politics. It advances the concept of "revolutionary Machiavellism" as a way of understanding a particular strand of revolutionary thought from the Jacobins to Leninism and Stalinism. It also provides a wide ranging survey of European political thought in the 19th and early 20th century, and locates the Bolshevik tradition within the wider European tradition.