This Book Will Give You N i g h t m a r e s ! - Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004) / Συνέντευξη γιά μελετημένους - Βιβλίο που προκαλεί ΕΦΙΑΛΤΕΣ!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8KXnpxb3mA&ab_channel=TheFilmArchives

The Film Archives

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a 2003 history book by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Listen to the book: https://amzn.to/33DdiNq

It primarily deals with the lives of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and those around him from the late 1920s through to his death in 1953, covering the period of collectivization, the Moscow show trials, the purges, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

The book used previously unseen archival material and Montefiore also conducted interviews with surviving family members from Stalin's inner circle.

Montefiore later wrote the companion piece Young Stalin, published in 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin:... The Soviet Union introduced the collectivization (Russian: Коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin.

It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into collectively-controlled and state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly.

The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms.

Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927.

This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food needed to be produced to keep up with urban demand.

In the early 1930s, over 91% of agricultural land became collectivized as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets.

The collectivization era saw several famines, many due to both the shortage of modern technology in USSR at the time and deliberate action on the government's part. The death toll cited by experts has ranged from 4 million to 7 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collect... The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin.

They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the time the three Moscow Trials were given extravagant titles: the "Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" (or Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, also known as the 'Trial of the Sixteen', August 1936); the "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" (or Pyatakov-Radek Trial, January 1937); and the "Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"" (or the Bukharin-Rykov Trial, also known as the 'Trial of the Twenty-One', March 1938).

The defendants were Old Bolshevik Party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police.

Most were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with Imperialist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism.

Several prominent figures (such as Andrei Bubnov, Alexander Beloborodov, Nikolay Yezhov) were sentenced to death during this period outside these trials.

The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants.

The trials are generally seen as part of Stalin's Great Purge, a campaign to rid the party of current or prior opposition, including Trotskyists and leading Bolshevik cadre members from the time of the Russian Revolution or earlier, who might even potentially become a figurehead for the growing discontent in the Soviet populace resulting from Stalin's mismanagement of the economy.[1]: xvii  Stalin's rapid industrialization during the period of the First Five Year Plan and the brutality of the forced agricultural collectivization had led to an acute economic and political crisis in 1928–1933, made worse by the global Great Depression, which led to enormous suffering on the part of the Soviet workers and peasants.

Stalin was acutely conscious of this fact and took steps to prevent it taking the form of an opposition inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to his increasingly totalitarian rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_... The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (37-ой год, Tridtsat sedmoi god) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the party and nation; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other political rivals within the party.

It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_P...