1946 The making of the modern world

Victor Sebestyen, 1956-

Sound recording - 2015

Drawing on new archival material and many interviews, Victor Sebestyen analyzes several major postwar decisions as he discusses the economic collapse, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and displacement that followed World War II.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

COMPACT DISC/909.824/Sebestyen
0 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor COMPACT DISC/909.824/Sebestyen Due Oct 18, 2024
Subjects
Published
[Old Saybrook, Connecticut] : Tantor Audio [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Victor Sebestyen, 1956- (author)
Other Authors
Derek Perkins (narrator)
Edition
Unabridged
Physical Description
10 audio discs (12.5 hr.) : digital, CD audio ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781494517052
  • "I'm tired of babying the Soviets"
  • The American century
  • The Russians : "a tsarist people"
  • Stunde Null : Zero Hour
  • Austria forgets its past
  • The spy comes in from the cold
  • Austerity Britain
  • A performance at the Bolshoi
  • The declaration of Cold War
  • The abdication crisis
  • Rape and pillage
  • "Woe, woe to the Germans"
  • "Anywhere but home"
  • "This Chinese cesspit"
  • Iron Curtain
  • The fog of war
  • Sunset on the Raj
  • Refugees
  • Trials and errors
  • A Greek tragedy
  • She'erit Ha-Pleta : the surviving remnant
  • "A Jewish-Bolshevik plot" : blood libels
  • The war against terror
  • "Listen world. This is crossroads"
  • The glory of France : "resistance in the heart"
  • Stalin's Turkish bluff
  • The bloodbath in Calcutta
  • "Half-nun, half-whore"
  • The return of the king
  • "Sand down a rat hole"
  • The general orders : democracy
  • The big freeze.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this salient, grim narrative history, journalist and historian Sebestyen (Revolution 1989) portrays 1946 as the year that "laid the foundations of the modern world." The early postwar period witnessed vast and unprecedented destruction, famine, and displacement throughout much of Europe and Asia, which Sebestyen describes in harrowing detail, reminding readers that human suffering didn't end with the conclusion of the war. With mesmerizing detail and riveting vignettes scattered throughout, Sebestyen explores virtually every major postwar theme and event: German de-Nazification and guilt (or lack thereof), lingering anti-Semitism throughout Europe, the early stages of the creation of Israel, civil war in Greece, the disarmament and remaking of Japan, British imperial exhaustion and decline, the lead-up to independence and partition of India and Pakistan, the increasing likelihood of a communist victory in China's civil war, the division of Europe, and the early stages of the Cold War. Though admittedly focused largely on Europe, this informed, engaging, and accessible history of the year that U.S. president Harry Truman called the year of decisions will prove to have wide and diverse appeal. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Even though World War II had ended by 1946, the conflict and suffering continued throughout the world. The grand alliance between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin-vital to Allied victory-fell apart as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated, marking the start of the Cold War. The special relationship between the United States and Britain also suffered over postwar loans and Britain's desire to hold on to its empire. Global violence persisted: civil wars raged in China and Greece, tensions escalated between Muslims and Hindus in India, and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by a militant Zionist group. Civilian suffering was especially acute in 1946 as many faced starvation, poverty, and disease. Numerous German civilians died during forced expulsion from Germany's former eastern provinces and many German women were raped by Soviet troops. Jews who had survived the Holocaust were killed in anti-Semitic brutality in Kielce, Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe. Sebestyen (Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire) chronicles these and other crucial events of 1946 in this outstanding work. The author does not shy away from the explicit and heartbreaking details in creating a powerful and readable account of this challenging year. VERDICT Highly recommended for anyone interested in world history or for those seeking to understand why the world is as it is today.-Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

1 'I'm Tired of Babying the Soviets' The coup had been almost bloodless. On 15 December 1945, the new Prime Minister of the People's Government of Azerbaijan had just announced his first proclamation to a bemused people, from his capital, Tabriz, in north-west Iran. Henceforth, he declared, his fledgling nation would cease to be a province of Iran, ruled by a distant and 'alien' shah in Tehran. It would become an autonomous republic. Rather than Farsi, the Turkic dialect spoken by most Azeris would now be the official state language. A new constitution would guarantee freedoms long suppressed by Iran's autocratic rulers. The banks would be nationalised. There would be 'a job for everybody who wants one'. Peasants would be given land expropriated from big absentee landlords in a far-reaching socialist revolution. Ja'far Pishevari was an unlikely nationalist firebrand much less communist dictator. At fifty-two, this stocky, good-natured PM had been a journalist most of his life, and a low-level Comintern agent, apart from the nine years he had spent in an Iranian prison for 'subversion'. Most of his family had lived in the USSR for years; one of his brothers was a doctor in the Red Army. Pishevari had been relatively unknown until 1944, except as the author of a few fiery articles promoting Azeri nationalism. His story became a brief cause célèbre among the left/liberal intelligentsia in Tehran when he won election to the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, but was barred from taking his seat by the Shah's government. He returned to obscurity, then to his own amazement, let alone that of anyone else, he was handpicked by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader in the Kremlin, to be front man for the new order in a strategic part of central Asia, bordering the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.   In Marco Polo's time Tabriz had been one of the largest cities in the world, the principal gateway to the Orient - 'a great city of beautiful gardens . . . exceptionally positioned for merchants,' as the Venetian traveller described it. After Tamerlane sacked it in 1392, history and other potential conquerors passed by Tabriz for several hundred years. In the middle of the twentieth century it was a dusty, sleepy town of some 110,000 mostly poor artisans, traders and subsistence farmers. The gardens were long gone. A few grand buildings stood amidst the mud huts and general squalor. Now this backwater was centre stage again. If the Cold War can be said to have started anywhere, Tabriz is the place. Over the next few weeks, only a few people at the highest levels in Washington, London and Moscow knew how very close the world came to the start of a new war.   Pishevari established himself in the biggest and grandest of the remaining buildings - an enormous, if ugly, palace that had once belonged to an Iranian provincial governor. He held court in a vast reception room decorated in gilded eighteenth-century French style. Soviet troops stood guard outside the door. 'He looked deceptively unlike a ruthless communist gauleiter,' a visitor recorded. 'He stood about five feet five inches, had steely grey hair and a small brush moustache under a sharp hook nose . . . [he wore] a shiny blue serge suit and a collared shirt frayed at the cuffs and noticeably soiled at the collar, which was buttoned but tieless. His hands were the rough hands of the peasant and the fingernails were dirty.'   Western diplomats agreed that the real power in the new state belonged to the diminutive, smartly dressed Mohammed Biriya, a sinister figure in his mid-forties who had done much to foment revolution as head of the Society of Friends of the USSR. Formerly, Biriya had been a talented professional flautist and leader of the Tabriz street cleaners' union. Officially, his title was Minister of Propaganda but, more importantly, he ran the secret police, whose members were trained by Russian advisors from the NKVD. They had been arresting opponents for the last few days, roughing up well-known anti-communists and other potential opponents.   Three days earlier, members of Pishevari's ragbag People's Army had taken over the police stations in Tabriz and the sur­rounding area, the central post office and the radio station, the classic revolutionary targets, and blocked all principal roads into the city. But the coup could not have succeeded without help from outside. There were between thirty and fifty thousand Soviet troops in or near Tabriz. Without firing a shot, one Russian detachment surrounded the Iranian army headquarters on the outskirts of the city and disarmed the garrison. The central gov­ernment in Tehran despatched a small relief column, but it was halted on the main road between the two cities when confronted by a far stronger Soviet force as it reached the border of the 'rebel' province. The commander turned his soldiers back.   The Soviets claimed they were aiding freedom-loving Azeris, many of whom had family connections in the USSR, and had intervened 'to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.' But it was a lie. Amidst the strictest secrecy in order to maintain plausible deniability, the Russians had begun planning the takeover in the summer of 1945. The proof emerged only five decades later, after the USSR fell apart. Officials from Baku, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, and in Moscow, organised the coup meticulously and financed it. Stalin personally gave the go-ahead and later was made aware of every significant detail. The Soviet spy chief, Lavrenti Beria, was in nominal charge of the operation from Moscow, but the nuts and bolts would be the responsibility of the local Communist Party boss in Baku, Mir Bagirov.   The strategy had been decided in Moscow on 6 July, at a meeting of senior Soviet magnates who authorised Bagirov to 'organise a separatist movement . . . which would agitate for an autonomous Azerbaijani province'. It named Pishevari as leader of the new organisation, which Kremlin officials insisted should be called the Azerbaijan Democratic Party, the ADP, in a crude and pointless effort to make it look different from the Communist Party, the Tudeh. Funds were provided, reasonably generous sums given the dire condition of the post-war Soviet economy. The ADP launched a newspaper that avoided socialist agitprop but was designed to fuel ethnic tensions.   The ADP was supplied with weapons to arm a partisan group of around 3,000 fighters, which would later form the core of a People's Army. But Kremlin officials insisted that 'the equipment must be of foreign make' to hide its origins. Pishevari was given a million US dollars in convertible currency, a large sum for Moscow at the time. By the end of November, the ADP proudly reported to the Kremlin that it had assembled thirty units of a hundred men each, supplied with 11,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 2,000 grenades and more than a million rounds of ammunition 'ready to fight whoever stood in the way of . . . autonomy for Azerbaijan.'   The takeover mystified Iranian Azeris, most of whom were unconcerned with nationalism. Poverty, the rapacity of absentee landlords, and the scarcity of water were more pressing concerns, as Moscow was told by its own agents and military on the ground. Iranian rulers, including the former Shah, had periodically tried to ban the Turkic language, which was deeply resented. But the laws were invariably disobeyed. Over the centuries the various ethnic groups in Iran had gotten along together reasonably well with no serious bloodshed. The Russians, though, were feared by all the region's ethnic groups, not only the Azeris. True, the rulers in Tehran were distant and cared little for Azeri feelings, but at least they were fellow Muslims. Apart from a small number of communists and ultra-nationalists in Tabriz, few people felt kinship with the Azeris across the border in the USSR, who had to endure life under the godless and sinful Soviets.   Biriya, in particular, knew he and the Soviets faced an uphill struggle to win over hearts and minds for the ADP. Soon after the coup he resorted to traditional methods of persuasion. Tribal leaders and prominent figures brave enough to voice opposition were jailed and a few were murdered. Dissent was quickly silenced.   One of the few Western observers who had seen the takeover coming was John Wall, the British Consul in Tabriz. Wall had been monitoring troop movements and café talk in the bazaar and wrote a series of warning telegrams to London, to which he seldom received a response - until the coup. Now he was pessi­mistic for the future. He saw how his Soviet equivalent behaved more like a commissar in one of the Baltic states than a diplomat in a foreign country. 'The Russians are more determined than ever to maintain their hold on the province,' he reported in mid-December. 'There is no railway to Tehran, but there is to Baku and that is where "autonomous" Azerbaijan is heading . . . [it] feels more like a part of Russia than of Iran.' Excerpted from 1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.