On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick from Princeton University Press on Vimeo.
The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth
and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany,
but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it
ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your
ancestors?
When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom.
He
remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a
large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos..
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Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the
first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families, vividly
describing how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely
with Stalin, whom they both feared and admired, but also constituted his
social circle. Readers meet the wily security chief Beria, whom the
rest of the team quickly had executed following Stalin’s death; Stalin’s
number-two man, Molotov, who continued on the team even after his wife
was arrested and exiled; the charismatic Ordzhonikidze, who ran the
country’s industry with entrepreneurial flair; Andreev, who traveled to
provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone;
and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after
Stalin’s death. Among the book’s surprising findings are that Stalin
almost always worked with the team on important issues and that after
his death the team managed a brilliant transition to a reforming
collective leadership. PRINCTON UNIVERSITY PRESS
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