Joseph Stalin was the soviet communist leader who's passing molded an era, and whose iron rule determined the lives of millions of people. Considering that he shaped the direction of post-World War II Europe, we may regard him as the most powerful person to live during the 20th c...

1984 vs. Animal Farm 1984, by George Orwell, is a very powerful drama which involves man and totalitarian society. It is a story of a lonely rebel whose only valuable is his mind and who later conspires with another in an attempt to separate from their increasingly dominant hate-infested s...

How far was Stalinism the outcome of Leninist political practice?The political system which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin was a system of terror. The purges of the 1930s sent millions of Russians to their deaths or to the Gulags, the population was scared of the secret police, the NKVD, t...

Preface: How has the ninth edition been updated? In this updated edition, certain chapters have in added in light of the attacks of September 11, 2001. There was a chapter added on the foreign policies of Clinton and Yelstin-Putin also, an introduction to the beginnings of George W. Bush's...

Ideological differences between Liberalism in England and Leninism in the Soviet Union place the two nations at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The former advocates for the importance of individualism and the ability of the market to regulate itself, whereas the latter prioritizes the stat...

George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Nazi Germany, and Stalin ruled Russia can all be related to Walker Percy's essay, The Loss of the Creature. In the book 1984 the world is run by a brainwashing committee called the Party. In Brave New World everybody is conditioned, from the tim...

The fall of the Communist regime and adoption of Democracy in the Soviet Union was more than just a political affair. The resolute bond between economics and politics, which was the central characteristic of the state socialist system, created a unique situation for the successor states of the Sov...

In February 1945, Nazi armies were quickly beaten back towards Berlin by armies of the Soviet Union. British and American forces were preparing to invade Germany. Unconditional surrender could be expected from Germany in a matter of weeks. Also, in the Pacific War, American forces moved steadily ...

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, was born on April 22, 1870, in the sleepy little town of Simbrisk, Russia. Childhood in Simbrisk was serene and pleasant for Lenin, and his father, Ilya Nikolaievich, was highly respected by many of the nobles in this province. Vladimir took just as much intere...

The persecution, deportation, and general abuse of those who call themselves Chechnyans, has been a heavy burden to bear over the last few centuries. Ethnically and religiously these people from the Caucasus are markedly different from their expansionist Russian neighbors. Centuries of miscommunicat...

"From My Cold, Dead Hands!" When anyone mentions "gun control," it makes me cringe with disbelief. It is impossible for me to understand why people want to (and might some day) take away my right to gun ownership. They defend their cases by using examples of school shootings and gang vi...

Was the invention of the atomic bomb the creation of just another weapon, or the creation of a doomsday device? For over fifty years, the controversy over whether or not it was necessary to drop the atomic bomb to conclude World War II has continued to question America and the rest of the world. In ...

Herbert Feis served as the Special Consultant to three Secretaries of War. This book was his finale to a series on the governmental viewed history of World War II, one of these receiving the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Feis gives personal accounts in a strictly factual description leaving out no informati...

In his introduction to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published in 1999, Thomas Freidman states that "[t]he world is 10 years old. It was born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Cold War system was replaced by a new, very greased, interconnected system called globalization." As a...

Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was published in 1957. It was not published in Pasternak's native country of Russia, but in Italy. The USSR did not allow the publication of the novel because some believed that it showed a 'nonacceptance of the socialist revolution." (...

It has been a 'splendid little war' wrote John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt after the fall of Santiago. Little, the Spanish-American War was; it was over in barely four months. Splendid? Maybe for those at home, reading the headline about its lucky victories. But for those men who fo...

The victorious forces at the end of the war divided Germany into four zones. They also divided Berlin into four zones. Each of the victorious nations controlled one zone and one sector of Berlin.The Allies (Britain, America and France) ran their zones differently to the areas controlled by Russia. ...

Chechen Rebels In the course of Russian history, there has been one territory that has caused a lot of controversy. The area is Chechnya, which is located in southwestern Russia near Dagestan and Georgia. Most of Chechnya's population is Muslim and doesn't like the rule of the Christi...

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Soviet State was undergoing changes in all aspects of life, including both political and economical reforms. Within Soviet society, there was a reform of another type taking place. In particular, the lower members of society, such as the proletariat, w...

The overlapping crises in Hungary and Poland in the autumn of 1956 posed a severe challenge for the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU). After a tense standoff with Poland, the CPSU Presidium (as the Politburo was then called) decided to refrain from military intervention and to s...

1. Catherine II (the Great). The successor of the sickly Peter III, Catherine II was his wife until his suspected murder and she took the throne in 1762. Although she made no great reforms in Russian society, she gathered many friends by her death in 1796.Catherine had to keep the nobility pleased...

The First Phase: Dominance of the Axis Man for man, the German and Polish forces were an even match. Hitler committed about 1.5 million troops, and the Polish commander, Marshal Edward Smigy-Rydz, expected to muster 1.8 million. That was not the whole picture, however. The Germans had six pa...

The methods that Russia has used to deal with the break-away Republic of Chechnya has caught the eye of the world media, and not without good cause. This dynamic portion of the former Soviet Union is seen as a predecessor of things to come from other pieces of the dead communist giant. So many diffe...

New Historicism Of late movies like Titanic make more or less a new historicist attempt in the field of cinema. Based on true events, the movie recounts the tragedy from the perspective of a 90-year-old survivor. The director successfully reconstructs the occurrence linking the past and...

Evolution and Society Boom! The Universe began. Millions of years ago tiny dust particles and chemicals were brought together to form the solar system as we know it (Weed 46). Slowly one-celled organisms, plants, animals, and man evolved into what we are today. So we are taught in science classes ...