Brian Moynahan, Author Of 'Leningrad: Siege And Symphony' : NPR. Citizens of Leningrad collect water from a broken main in the winter of 1. Russian city by Nazis. He was one of Soviet Russia's most brilliant composers, but he had fallen out of favor with the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin. He'd been forced to denounce several of his own pieces of music, and some of his friends and family had been imprisoned or killed.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar . This widely acclaimed biography of Stalin and his. Latest news, expert advice and information on money. Pensions, property and more. With Richard Brake, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Jason Isaacs. Follows the Soviet dictator's last days and depicts the chaos of the regime after his death.

He knew the same thing could happen to him. He became withdrawn and if not frightened, certainly justifiably nervous. He began to toy with themes of a dark, menacing presence. Then came other great monster of the 2. Adolf Hitler. For a while, the relationship between between Russia and Germany was fairly calm; they'd signed a non- aggression pact. The Nazis invade.

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And that is when Shostakovich begins to write this great symphony. So was the Leningrad Philharmonic. Left behind were millions of civilians, left to starve and freeze in the catastrophic conditions. When Shostakovich finished his Symphony No. Kuibyshev, then Moscow, then London, then New York City.

But the people of Leningrad — to whom he'd dedicated the symphony — still had not heard it. Though most of the city's remaining musicians had fled or died since the beginning of the siege, an orchestra was cobbled together. The score was flown in over German lines.

Rehearsals were difficult; musicians frequently fainted from hunger or cold. Three died. The haggard orchestra premiered the symphony on August 9 — the very date that the Nazis had reportedly planned to hold a victory banquet in Leningrad. The city's defiant act remains one of the most famous performances in the history of classical music. Nothing, nothing.

You had in the winter of 1. Shostakovich is writing this symphony — although he's been evacuated — something of the order of 1. They were eating any sort of old leather there was around, old handbags were being sold. So you had, I mean, on the absolute edge, a catastrophe. On the role of music during the siege. Music was extremely important.

And it was soon realized that music fed the soul in a way that was extremely good for shattered morale, so a real effort was put into music in this dying city. But gradually all that winds down as fewer and fewer musicians are left alive to play — literally. And then the idea, when Shostakovich finally finishes his seventh symphony in February 1. Leningrad, because he devotes it to the people of Leningrad. The main orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, had been evacuated before the siege began as the Germans were advancing, and all that was left was the . And to begin with, there weren't nearly enough musicians left to play.

They only had 2. 0 . Karl Eliasberg, who is the conductor, managed to force them through rehearsals.

But they were never fit enough to play it as a whole until the actual premiere. On the significance of the Leningrad premiere date, August 9, 1. There was a significance in that Hitler had claimed that Leningrad would fall in August 1.

Astoria Hotel, the very same place where this conductor Eliasberg and lead members of the orchestra were barely being kept alive. So the fact that there was still this resistance, still this pride that Leningrad as a city had not been broken, at the very time that Hitler said he would finally sweep through it — it's utterly moving. Read an excerpt of Leningrad.

Joseph Stalin - Biography - IMDb. Joseph Stalin (a code name meaning . His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently and left the family when Joseph was young. His mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, supported herself and her son (her other three children died young and Jopseph was effectively an only child) by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1. Karl Marx. Since 1.

Stalin became active in the Communist underground as the organizer of a powerful gang involved in a series of armed robberies. After robbing several banks in southern Russia, Stalin delivered the stolen money to V. I. Lenin to finance the Communist Party. Stalin's gang was also involved in the murders of its political opponents; Stalin himself was arrested seven times, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1.

During those years he changed his name twice and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. He escaped many times from prison and was shuttling money between Lenin and other communists in hiding, where his intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin grew, as did his dissatisfaction with fellow Communist leader Leon Trotsky. In 1. 91. 2 he was co- opted on to the illegal Communist Central Committee. At that time he wrote propaganda articles, and later edited the Communist paper, . As Lenin's apprentice he joined the Communist majority (Bolsheviks), and was responsible for the consolidation of several secret communist cells into a larger ring. Stalin's Communist ring in St.

Petersburg and across Russia played the leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1. After the revolution the Bolsheviks Communists grabbed the power, then Communists murdered the Tsar and the Russian royal family. Stalin and Lenin took over the Tsar's palaces and used the main one in Kremlin as their private residence. Lenin appointed Stalin the People's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Politburo, thus giving him unlimited power. Stalin led the . He also organized . With his appointment as General Secretary to the Party Central Committee in 1. Lenin's death in 1.

He also took, or gave himself, other key positions that enabled him to amass total power in the Party and Soviet government. Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and terrifying stare, which he used to cow his opponents into submission during private discussions. In 1. 92. 7 Stalin requested medical help for his insomnia, anger and severe anxiety disorder. His doctors diagnosed him as having . Instead, Stalin became angry and summoned his secret service agents. The next day the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Bekhterev, and his assistants died of poisoning.

In addition, before the doctors' diagnosis about Stalin's mental condition could become known, he ordered the executions of intellectuals, resulting in the murders of hundreds of thousands of doctors, professors, writers, and others. Stalin's policy of amassing dictatorial power under the guise of building . His purges of the Soviet military brought about the execution of tens of thousands of army officers, many of them experienced combat veterans of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Polish campaigns and other military operations (this decimation of the Russian officer corps would result in the Soviet Union's initial defeats at the hands of Nazi invaders at the beginning of World War II). He also isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky.

Stalin's economic policies of strict centralized planning (i. Popular resistance to Stalin's policies, such as nationalization of private lands and collective farming, by independent farmers (. Altogether Stalin's economic and political policies resulted in the deaths of up to 1. Between 1. 93. 4 and 1. In the late 1. 93. Stalin sent some Red Army forces and material to support the Spanish Republican government in its fight against the rebels led by Gen.

Francisco Franco and aided by troops and material from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Stalin made the Non- Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1. Soviet Union two years' respite from involvement in World War 2. After the German invasion in 1. USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimus.

He had no formal military training and scorned the advice of his senior officers, due to suspicion and his rising paranoia, actions that resulted in horrific losses to the Russian military in both men and material (not to mention civilian losses). He rejected military plans made by such experienced officers as Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and insisted they be replaced by his own plans, which led to even more horrific losses. Towards the end of WWII he took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam with Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Harry S. The agreements reached in those conferences resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar Castern and Central Europe. From 1. 94. 5 until his death Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home, resulting in censorship of the arts, literature and cinema, forced exiles of hundreds of thousands and the executions of intellectuals and other potential . At that time he conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice and had several mistresses.

His first wife (Ekaterina Svanidze, married c. Jacob (also known as Yacov), an officer in the Russian army during World War II who was captured by the Nazis and died in a POW camp (his father refused German offers to exchange him for captured German officers). His second wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, married 1.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin, who later died in exile. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin launched attacks on such intellectuals as Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other cultural luminaries. Stalin personally intervened in the fate of . Thirteen of them were executed by the Soviet secret police; their leader, Perets Markish, was executed in the typical KGB manner by a single gunshot to the head on August 1. Moscow. Stalin died suddenly on March 5, 1.

Jewish doctors, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. Stalin's apprentice, Georgi Malenkov, took the power, but was soon ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Three years after death, Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 2. Party Congress in 1. Party and for building a . In 1. 96. 4 Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev and brought back some of Stalin's hard- line policies.

After 1. 98. 6 Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of liberal political reforms known as . Next day Doctor Bekhterev and his assistant died of poisoning.

Clinical paranoia explains ruthless killings of millions and brutal treatment of his own wives and children. His mother called him . There, in the north, Stalin felt that the true spirit of Russia resided. He later ordered Ekaterina's relatives shot. His mom called him . The accident left him with a stiff left shoulder and for the rest of his life he was unable to use his left arm.

He couldn't even shoot straight! He was a native of Georgia, a Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire and later a Southern part of the Soviet Union. Stalin was bilingual and spoke Russian fluently, but had a heavy Georgian accent. It is believed that as many as 1. However according to R. J. Rummel, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii who has studied mass killing Joseph Stalin was responsible for 4.

He believed that by then Europe and Germany would be so exhausted by war that it would be an easy conquest. Biography Movies Watch Ride Along 2 (2016) here.