Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies

Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Introduction: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism
	Interpreting Stalinism: Controversies and contestations
Part One The Controversial Vozhd’: Stalin as Leader and Statesman
1 The many lives of Joseph Stalin: Writing the biography of a ‘monster’
	The first draft: The Stalin cult
	Breaking the Manichaean binary
	Retrieving the historical Stalin
	Personal reflections on writing a biography of Stalin
2 Stalin’s purge of the Red Army and misperception of security threats
	Civil war and military vulnerabilities
	The 1920s: Dangers in peacetime
	The Great Terror and military purge
3 Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939: The new historiography
	Historiographical currents, East and West: 1936–91
	Historiography since the end of the Cold War
4 Brute force and genius: Stalin as war leader
	Overture at Tsaritsyn
	Geopolitics and geostrategy
	Stalin and the pre-war development of the Soviet armed forces
	The cruel romance with Germany: Stalin’s motives
	Shock and denial
	Penitence and resilience
Part Two Challenging Stalinist Models: Cults of Personality
5 The Stalin cult in comparative context
	Forms and functions: Iconography
	Biography and history
	Rituals and cult practices
	Post-mortem cults
	Conclusion
6 From heroic lion to streetfighter: Historical legacies and the leader cult in twentieth-century Hungary
	Persistence, change, legacy
	Monarchy, nationalism and the leader cult
	Hungarian communism and the leader cult
	Post-communist legacies: The return of the cult
	Conclusions
Part Three New Ways of Understanding the Stalinist System: The Cold War
7 Revisioning Stalin’s Cold War
	Histories
	Novelty
	Realpolitik
	Moralism
	A broader landscape
	Villain
	Reflections
8 Working towards the Vozhd’? Stalin and the peace movement
	Post-war Soviet foreign policy
	Emergence of the peace movement
	Stalin: Man of peace
	The Stockholm Appeal
	The World Peace Council
	Vienna peace congress
	After Stalin
	Conclusion
9 Constructing a confession: The language and psychology of interrogations in Stalinist Czechoslovakia
	The interrogation department: Powers, structure, purpose
	On attaining confessions: Between torture, psychology, and language
	Language and ‘question protocols’
	Conclusion
Part Four In Lieu of an Epilogue
10 Reckoning with the past: Stalin and Stalinism in Putin’s Russia
	Re-Stalinization of the ruling elite?
	Re-Stalinization of Russian society?
	Reckoning with repression
	Conclusions
Notes
Select Bibliography
Geoffrey Roberts Select Bibliography
Index