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Princeton University Press announces publication of Stalin's Genocides, by Norman M. Naimark.

From the annotation:

Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.

Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

(Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University. His books include "Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe" and The "Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949").

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Genocide Issue 15
Chapter 2: The Making of a Genocidaire 30
Chapter 3: Dekulakization 51
Chapter 4: The Holodomor 70
Chapter 5: Removing Nations 80
Chapter 6: The Great Terror 99
Chapter 7: The Crimes of Stalin and Hitler 121
Conclusions 131
Notes 139
Index 155

More details about the book
Norman M. Naimark. Stalin's Genocides. Princeton: Priceton University Press, 2010. 176 pp. ISBN: 978-069-114-784-0.

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Cambridge University Press announces publication of The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953, by Donald Filtzer.

This is the first detailed study of the standard of living of ordinary Russians following World War II. It examines urban living conditions under the Stalinist regime with a focus on the key issues of sanitation, access to safe water supplies, personal hygiene and anti-epidemic controls, diet and nutrition, and infant mortality. Comparing five key industrial regions, it shows that living conditions lagged some fifty years behind Western European norms. The book reveals that, despite this, the years preceding Stalin's death saw dramatic improvements in mortality rates thanks to the application of rigorous public health controls and Western medical innovations. While tracing these changes, the book also analyzes the impact that the absence of an adequate urban infrastructure had on people's daily lives and on the relationship between the Stalinist regime and the Russian people, and, finally, how the Soviet experience compared to that of earlier industrializing societies.

• The first in-depth study of urban conditions during any period of Soviet history • Provides detailed statistical data on diet and nutrition, and on infant mortality, never before analyzed at a comparative local level • Will appeal to urban and labor historians, historians of the Soviet Union and economists and economic historians interested in Soviet economic development and industrialization

Contents:

Introduction;
1. The impossible task: keeping cities clean;
2. Water;
3. Personal hygiene and epidemic control;
4. Diet and nutrition: the 1947 food crisis and its aftermath;
5. Infant mortality;
Conclusion.

More details about the book

Donald Filtzer. The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 410 pp. ISBN: 978-052-111-373-1.