Stalin and His Hangmen
Encyclopedia
Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him by Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...

, and the imprinted with another subtitle:
Stalin and His Hangmen
: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him, is a political biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 by Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...

, of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

 and his subordinates who ran the Soviet secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....

: Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky was a Polish-Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Party official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934...

, Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...

, Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...

 and Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....

.

The books are based on recent publications by Russian authors, Soviet archives, starting to open after the dissolution of the USSR and some private holdings, including the Nestor Lakoba
Nestor Lakoba
Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba was an Abkhaz Communist leader and a victim of the Great Purge.-Biography:Nestor Lakoba was born in the village of Lykhny in Abkhazia and like many Caucasian Bolsheviks, began as a bandit persecuted by the Tsarist police, and he became a personal friend of Stalin's...

 archive (acquired by the Hoover Institute). It demonstrates how Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...

 and its successors were indispensable in Stalin's consolidation and maintenance of power.

Table of contents

  1. The Long Road to Power
  2. Stalin, Dzierzynski, and the Cheka
  3. The Exquisite Inquisitor
  4. Stalin Solo
  5. Iagoda's Rise
  6. Murdering of the Old Guard
  7. The Ezhov Bloodbath
  8. The of Lavrenti Beria
  9. Hangmen at War
  10. The Gratification of Curelty

The work

  • Library of Congress
    Library of Congress
    The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

    :
LC Control No.: 2004042833
Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
Personal Name: Rayfield, Donald, 1942-
Main Title: Stalin and his hangmen : the tyrant and those who killed for him / Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...

.
Edition Information: 1st U.S. ed.
Published/Created: New York : Random House, c2004.
Description: xxviii, 541 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
ISBN 0375506322
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [493]-501) and index.
Subjects: Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953.
Kommunisticheskai︠a︡ partii︠a︡ Sovetskogo Soiuza--Purges--History.
Soviet Union. Narodnyĭ komissariat vnutrennikh del--History.
Political atrocities--Soviet Union.
Soviet Union--Politics and government--1917-1936.
Soviet Union--Politics and government--1936-1953.
LC Classification: DK268.4 .R39 2004
Dewey Class No.: 947.084/092/2 22

  • Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him.
by Donald Rayfield.
Viking Press, 2004.
£20.00. xxvi + 528 pages.
ISBN 0-670-91088-0.

  • Audio Cassette
Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc. (2005)
Language: English
ISBN 10 1415905185
ISBN 13 978-1415905180

Reviews

  • Kramer, Mark. 2006.
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (review).
Journal of Cold War Studies.
8 (1): 122-127.

  • WorldCat
    WorldCat
    WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

    :
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (review)
by Mark Kramer
Type: Article
Language: English
Publisher: Project Muse
Publication: Journal of Cold War Studies, 8, no. 1 (2006): 122-127
Database: Article First
ISSN: 1520-3972
OCLC: 86914457

  • WorldCat
    WorldCat
    WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

    :
HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY - Stalin and His Hangmen - An authoritative portrait of a tyrant and those who served him - Donald Rayfield
by Stephen Kotkin
Type: Article
Language: English
Publisher: [London, Times Newspapers Ltd.]
Publication: TLS, the Times literary supplement. no. 5301, (2004): 10
Database: ArticleFirst
ISSN: 0307-661X
OCLC: 98160467
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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