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The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start-date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finns. In 882, Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority, moving the governance center to Kiev by the end of the 10th century, and maintaining northern and southern parts with significant autonomy from each other. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasions in 1237–1240 along with the resulting deaths of significant numbers of the population, and with the numerous principalities being forced to accept the overlordship of the Mongols.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country spanning most of northern Eurasia that existed from 30 December 1922 to 26 December 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Tashkent, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It was the largest country in the world, covering over 22,402,200 square kilometres (8,649,500 sq mi) and spanning eleven time zones.
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of that socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, colonization of Eastern Europe, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin’s ideology begin to wane in the USSR. The second wave of de-Stalinization started during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Glasnost.
Human rights in the Soviet Union were severely limited. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953 and a one-party state until 1990. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. Independent political activities were not tolerated, whether they involved participation in free labor unions, private corporations, independent churches or opposition political parties. The citizens' freedom of movement was limited both inside and outside the country. The state restricted citizens' rights to own private property.
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, was a Soviet politician and Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary. He served as head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. From 1926, he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov, Doctor of Science, Professor was a Soviet and Ukrainian doctor of Russian origin, heart surgeon, inventor, best-selling author, and exercise enthusiast, known for his inventions of several surgical procedures for treating heart defects.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of famine across the Soviet Union. Major contributing factors to the famine include: the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan, and forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialization and a decreasing agricultural workforce. Sources disagree on the possible role of drought. During this period the Soviet government escalated its persecution against the kulaks. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had ordered kulaks "to be liquidated as a class", and became a target for the state. Persecution against the kulaks had been ongoing since the Russian Civil War, and had never fully subsided. Once collectivization became widely implemented, the persecution against the kulaks increased which culminated in a Soviet campaign of political repression, including arrests, deportations, and executions of large numbers of the kulaks in 1929–1932. Some kulaks responded by carrying out acts of sabotage such as killing livestock and destroying crops intended for consumption by factory workers. Despite the death toll mounting, Stalin chose to continue the Five Year Plan and collectivization. By 1934, the Soviet Union established an industrial baseline; however, it did come at the cost of millions of lives.
Ronald Grigor Suny is an American historian and political scientist. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, 2009 to 2012 and was the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015, and is Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago.
Moshe "Misha" Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s.
Murray Feshbach was an American scholar focusing on the demographics of the Soviet Union and demographics of Russia, including population, health, and environment. He was a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center where he conducted research on the policy implications of the demographic, health and environmental crises in Russia.[1] He was a frequently turned-to source for both detailed analysis and a broad understanding of trends in the USSR and then the Former Soviet Union.
Maria Natanovna Smith-Falkner was a Soviet economist, statistician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1939 onwards. She was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having joined the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
Craig Heron is a Canadian social historian and public intellectual with a broad interest in labour and cultural history. A former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he is a professor emeritus at York University.
Nikolay Nikolayevich Baransky was a Soviet economic geographer, founder of Soviet Rayon (Regional) school of economic geography, and corresponding member of Soviet Academy of Sciences (1939); he was a Hero of Socialist Labour (1962) and winner of the Stalin Prize (1952).
Serhii Plokhy, or Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Robert William Davies, better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
Frank E. Sysyn is an American historian of Ukrainian origin. His grandmother was from Ukraine.
This is a select bibliography of post World War II English language books and journal articles about Stalinism and the Stalinist era of Soviet history. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below.
References
- ↑ http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~rjohnson/ Professor Robert Johnson's official UTM homepage
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