Stalin's World
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Dictating the Soviet Order
Sarah Davies and James Harris
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Format: ClothPrice: $85.00
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Drawing on recently declassified material from Stalin’s personal archive in Moscow, this is the first attempt by scholars to systematically analyze the way Stalin interpreted and envisioned his world—both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Since Stalin rarely left his offices and perceived the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books, a comprehensive analysis of these materials provides a unique and valuable opportunity to study his way of thinking and his interaction with the outside world.
Comparing the materials that Stalin read from week to week with the decisions that he subsequently shaped, Sarah Davies and James Harris show not only how Stalin perceived the world but also how he misperceived it. After considering the often far-reaching consequences of those misperceptions, they investigate Stalin’s contribution to the production and regulation of official verbal discourse in a system in which huge political importance was attached to the correct use of words and phrases..
Comparing the materials that Stalin read from week to week with the decisions that he subsequently shaped, Sarah Davies and James Harris show not only how Stalin perceived the world but also how he misperceived it. After considering the often far-reaching consequences of those misperceptions, they investigate Stalin’s contribution to the production and regulation of official verbal discourse in a system in which huge political importance was attached to the correct use of words and phrases..
Sarah Davies is senior lecturer in history in the Department of History at Durham University. James Harris is senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Leeds.
“Davies and Harris are THE specialists on Stalin's personal archive, which contains the dictator's notes, rough drafts and correspondence. They present a careful study of how Stalin processed information in areas ranging from terror to art, foreign policy to leadership technique, class to cults of personality. This will be the standard scholarly work on Stalin for years to come.”—J. Arch Getty, author of Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition
“The analysis in Stalin’s World is consistently intelligent, careful, and judicious. . . . [T]he book’s novel approach . . . will be of broad interest to scholars of Soviet history.”—Edward Cohn, Journal of Modern History
ISBN: 9780300182811
Publication Date: October 14, 2014
Publication Date: October 14, 2014
360 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
