Imatge de l'autor

Stephen Kotkin

Autor/a de Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

15+ obres 1,557 Membres 18 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Stephen Mark Kotkin was born on February 17, 1959. He is a historian, academic and author. Kotkin graduated from the University of Rochester in 1981 with a B.A. in English. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, mostra'n més where he earned his M.A. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1988, both in history. Starting in 1986, Kotkin traveled to the former Soviet Union several times for academic research and fellowships. He was a visiting scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2012). He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1989, and was the director of in Russian and Eurasian Studies Program for 13 years (1995-2008). He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton. He is also a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Biography with his title Stalin - Vol. 1 : Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys

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Obres de Stephen Kotkin

Obres associades

The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010) — Col·laborador — 38 exemplars
Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (1994) — Col·laborador — 16 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Nom normalitzat
Kotkin, Stephen
Nom oficial
Kotkin, Stephen Mark
Data de naixement
1959-02-17
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
USA
Lloc de naixement
Englewood, New Jersey, USA
Educació
University of California, Berkeley (PhD ∙ 1988)
Professions
professor
Agent
Andrew Wylie (The Wylie Agency)
Biografia breu
Professor Kotkin has been teaching in the department since 1989. He holds a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton. He is also a Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Professor Kotkin established the Princeton department's Global History initiative and workshop, and teaches the graduate seminar on global history since the 1850s. He served on the core editorial committee of the World Politics, flagship journal in comparative politics. He founded and co-edited a book series on Northeast Asia that published six volumes. From 2003 until 2007, he was a member and then chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press. From 1996 until 2009 he directed Princeton's Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has been the vice dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and acting director of the Princeton Institute for International and regional Studies. In 2014-15 he is serving as acting director of what is now Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Outside Princeton, from 2006 (until taking a break in February 2009) he was the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section.

His latest book is Stalin, vol. I: Paradoxes of Power (Penguin, 2014).

His research interests include authoritarianism, geopolitics, global political economy, empire, and modernism in the arts and politics.

http://www.princeton.edu/history/peop...

Membres

Ressenyes

This is interesting as a book about Stalin, but much more interesting as a formal experiment in biography, because there's not that much about Stalin here. Kotkin's canvas is much broader, and a better title might have been "Russia in the Age of Stalin" or, since that's probably the next volume, maybe "Russia During the Lifetime of Stalin." This is pretty impressive stuff, and it's an interesting way to write biography: just don't focus on the man, focus on the events, and then see where the man fits into them. Kotkin has some... biases, which aren't particularly helpful, but he's also a solid writer and pretty good at organizing his material. It can't be easy spending years with such a loathsome creature as Stalin, and I hope Kotkin's okay when he's finish. And I hope he gets rid of his biases then, too. I look forward to volume two, once my wrists have recovered from holding this monster.… (més)
 
Marcat
stillatim | Hi ha 5 ressenyes més | Oct 23, 2020 |
Very readable account that is focused almost entirely on Russia (I had hoped for more on the other republics). Kotkin is perhaps too keen to avoid the idiocies of right (THE EVIL EMPIRE CAN NEVER REFORM AND MUST BE DESTROYED!!!!) and left (AMERICAN ECONOMISTS LED DIRECTLY TO RUSSIAN OLIGARCHY!!!!), and so ends up with the strange position that whenever the USSR ended, it had to lead to massive theft and suffering. You can't blame anyone--not evil Russkies, not evil neoliberals--for what happened. Now, okay, I don't want to blame Milton Friedman for the state of Russia today, but I'm also pretty sure that things could have gone differently.

Speaking of Putin, the epilogue is deeply depressing reading, all about how Putin and Medvedev could make everything better, and how magnanimous of was of Putin to give up the presidency. Perhaps time for a new epilogue, or just time to re-issue the book without any epilogue whatsoever.
… (més)
 
Marcat
stillatim | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Oct 23, 2020 |
A massive book that is well worth reading if you want to know more about Stalin, the 1930s, the origins of WWII, or even dictatorship. One gets a strong sense of what Stalin was like, what it would be like to be around him, and his physical presence. He made a habit of breaking and humiliating people around him, including his family -- Stalin drove his second wife to suicide. His ideology blinded him and he could be incredibly wrong in his assumptions and predictions, which is why the Soviet Union was so exposed to the Nazi invasion in June 1941.

The reader gains an understanding of how Stalin built his regime. The only time he could’ve been removed was during the great famine when millions died because of his policies of forced collectivization and de-kulakization. He cemented his power by controlling information, constructing a multi-media cult of personality, and through the brute violence of terror and purges. His dictatorship spun around ideology, acceptance of authoritarian rule in the name of the masses, cult personality, party discipline, and the necessity of violence.
… (més)
 
Marcat
gregdehler | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Nov 18, 2019 |
Magisterial. I found the section on The Great Terror to be in particular as scary AF (and the exposition on the intricate Spanish Civil War particularly eye-opening), but whatever you've read about Stalin and his epoch you'll learn vastly more. An eminently readable, packed with detail, thick slab of history. & the greatest subtitle ever, bar none.
1 vota
Marcat
kencf0618 | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Jan 20, 2019 |

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Obres
15
També de
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Membres
1,557
Popularitat
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Valoració
4.2
Ressenyes
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ISBN
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Llengües
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