Stalin's Curse

Introduction; Part I: The Stalinist Revolution; 1 Making the Stalinist Revolution; 2 Exterminating Internal Threats to Socialist Unity; 3 War and Illusions; 4 Soviet Aims and Western Concessions; 5 Taking Eastern Europe; 6 The Communists in Berlin; 7 Restoring the Stalinist Dictatorship in a Broken Society; Part II: Shadows of the Cold War; 8 Stalin and Truman: False Starts; 9 Potsdam, the Bomb, and Asia; 10 Soviet Retribution and Post-War Trials; 11 Settling Retribution and Ethnic Groups; 12 Reaffirming Communist Ideology; Part III: Stalins' Cold War; 13 New Communist Regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia; 14 The Pattern of Dictatorships: Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary; 15 Communism in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece; 16 The Passing of the Communist Moment in Western Europe; 17 Stalin's Choices and the Future of Europe; 18 Stalinist Failures: Yugoslavia and Germany; 19 Looking at Asia from the Kremlin; 20 New Waves of Stalinization; 21 Stalin's Last Will and Testament; Epilogue; Index

Robert Gellately is Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University. His publications have been translated into over twenty languages and include the widely acclaimed Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: the Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (2001), and The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (1990), the last two also published by Oxford University Press. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Stalin's Curse draws on up-to-date secondary literature and recent documentary collections. It is a powerful work of synthesis. Professor Robert Service, the New Statesman Mr Gellately's latest work has a good claim to be the best single-volume account of the darkest period in Russian history. The Economist graphically and succinctly told ... The narrative is compelling. Donald Rayfield, Literary Review [An] outstanding work A prominent historian of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Gellately offers a panoramic view of Stalin's political, diplomatic and psychological manoeuvres that allowed the USSR to achieve superpower status. The author has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject and provides a compelling narrative of deception, brutality, foolishness and betrayed idealism. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Times Higher Education Incisive work Joseph C. Goulden, The Washington Times Masterful ... this book should become a go-to read on how the Cold War developed Library Journal An impeccably researched and cogently argued book Andrew Roberts, Wall Street Journal Thoroughly researched, Gellately's fine contribution to Cold War studies will engage readers with its inside-the-Kremlin detail. Booklist Gellately ... adds to his distinguished body of work on 20th-century totalitarianism with this analysis ... Interweaving scholarship and the testimonies of those who suffered under Stalin's rule, [his] history is political and personal. Publishers' Weekly