Suchergebnisse

Leningrad 1941 – 1942. Morality of a City under Siege. By Sergey Yarov. Foreword by John Barber. Translated by Arch Tait (Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2017), pp.xiii + 409. Notes. Index. £26.99 (hb).

From their inception, the 1917 Russian Revolutions, specifically the October Revolution, have been synonymous with Bolshevik violence. In the course of the last century, almost all observers have believed that violence was inherent in the Russian revolutions and revolutions generally. Such views have obscured what a revolution actually is. Closer examination of the October Revolution confirms violence was not its defining feature. Further, the Bolsheviks conceived October as the opening salvo of international, socialist revolution; expectations largely crushed by overwhelming counter-revolutionary violence. The discrediting of war and political violence since World War II has seen the conception of revolution as a "velvet" process of political transformation emerge, particularly in Latin America, the US, Britain, and Europe. While such movements rarely look back to the Russian Revolutions, they echo the democratic, egalitarian, and emancipatory impulses bequeathed by 1917, and raise the possibility of near non-violent socialist revolutions.

Stalin. New Biography of a Dictator. By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven and London: Yale university Press, 2015), pp.xvi + 392. Notes. Photographs. Index. AU$64.00 (cloth), distributed by Footprint Books in Australia.

Some 500,000 women fought with the Red Army in the Great Fatherland War, 1941‐1945. Based on a selection of women veterans' memoirs published since the demise of the Soviet Union, this article looks at what these women choose to remember about the war, and how, and equally what they choose to forget or remain silent about. The paper seeks to illuminate shared or disparate collective and individual memory and experiences. A particular objective of the paper is to assess the degree to which these written recollections coincide with or deviate from the predominant patriotic, heroic, masculine paradigm of the Great Fatherland War and its historiography. The overall objective of the paper is to humanise the female faces behind the masculine mask of the Red Army at war against Nazism.