Stalin and his hangmen : an authoritative portrait of a tyrant and those who served him

Select an Action

Title:

Stalin and his hangmen : an authoritative portrait of a tyrant and those who served him

Author:

Rayfield, Donald, 1942-

ISBN:

9780141003757

Personal Author:

Rayfield, Donald, 1942-

Publication Information:

London : Penguin, 2005.

Physical Description:

528 p., [24] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 20 cm.

Abstract:

"Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin's dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin's secret police. Donald Rayfield probes the lives, the minds, the twisted careers, and the unpunished crimes of Stalin's loyal assassins.".

"As Rayfield shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists. Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mandelstam were all caught in Stalin's web - courted, toyed with, betrayed, and then ruthlessly destroyed. In bringing to light the careers, personalities, relationships, and "accomplishments" of Stalin's key henchmen and their most prominent victims, Rayfield creates a chilling drama, spanning half a century, of the intersection of political fanaticism, personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power."--BOOK JACKET.

Personal Subject:

Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953.

Corporate Subject:

Kommunisticheskai︠a︡ partii︠a︡ Sovetskogo Soi︠u︡za -- Purges -- History.

Subject Term:

Police chiefs -- Soviet Union.

Political atrocities -- Soviet Union.

Geographic Term:

Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1917-1936.

Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1936-1953.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168015773225	947.0840922 R266S 2005	1	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators - hangmen. Drawing on newly released archival material, Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin's inner circle than ever before. Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What motivated his chiefs of police, Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Manzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria? What did they want? What were their relations with the regime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and experience mould them? And how does the terror they create connect with the terror they felt? Stalin and His Hangmen reconstructs the psychological mechanism of a whole regime and what it held together. The extent of the misery caused by Stalin and his Hangmen can be compared in Europe only to that brought about by Hitler and his henchmen. But Stalin's heritage is, if possible, even worse than Hitler's. His rule enslaved three generations, not one, the horror of what he did has not yet been fully understood and his countrymen have not yet found the strenth to disavow him. All the more important, then, that this diabolical tale should be told.