Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden joins a penal battalion made up of Cossacks and convicts to fight the Nazis. He joins the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of brothers are sent on a desperate mission behind enemy lines.
Alexey Wangenheim - a celebrated meteorologist - had been hailed by Stalin as a national hero. But following his sudden arrest, he was exiled to a gulag, forced to spend his remaining years on an island in the frozen north. This is a moving account of an innocent man and his family caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia.
Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism rejects the simplistic treatment of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens.
1917, post-Russian Revolution, an unlikely and eccentric band of British spies are smuggled into newly Soviet Russia to thwart Lenin's plan to destroy British rule in India, as a precursor to toppling the democracies of the West. The spies, under Mansfield Cumming, were the unsung founders of the present-day MI6.
He was rich, secretive and - through his friendship with a famous Russian singer - implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937.Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world.
A vivid and compelling account of the final thirteen days of the Romanovs, counting down to the last, tense hours of their lives. Thirteen days later, at Yurovsky's command, and on direct orders from Moscow, the family was gunned down in a blaze of bullets in a basement room.
Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin's exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change 20th century history.
'A compelling and illuminating account of a great drama in the history of our times which showed once again that ordinary men and women really can change the world' Jonathan Dimbleby, MAIL ON SUNDAY
Award-winning and critically acclaimed historian Helen Rappaport turns to the tragic story of the daughters of the last Tsar of all the Russias, slaughtered with their parents at Ekaterinburg.
This book interprets newly available evidence from the Soviet archives and provides a framework for student discussion of relevant issues together with a guide to further reading and research.
Including letters from individuals to newspapers, institutions or leaders, this collection gives voice to the experiences, thoughts and feelings of ordinary Russian people - workers, peasants, soldiers - as expressed in their own words during the vast upheavals of 1917.
The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is brilliantly captured in Chris Ward's account, which not only conceptualises the field in a clear and helpful way, offering a synthesis of the vast secondary literature in the area, but also provides the author's own evaluation of the key issues at stake.
This fully updated new edition of Sheila Fitzpatrick's classic short history of the Russian Revolution takes into account the new evidence that has come to light since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, incorporating material that was previously inaccessible not only to Western but also to Soviet historians
In 1917 revolutionary fervour swept through Russia, ending centuries of imperial rule and instigating political and social changes that would lead to the formation of the Soviet Union. This book provides a concise yet thorough overview of the revolution and the path to civil war.
Between the first revolution in February 1917, and Lenin's Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd was in turmoil. Foreign visitors who filled hotels, bars and embassies were acutely aware of the chaos breaking out on their doorsteps. Among them were journalists, diplomats, businessmen, governesses and volunteer nurses.
War-torn, virtually bankrupt, Russia tried to light its way to the future with the fitful glow of science. Stalin believed that science should serve the state. The human cost of this peculiar marriage between the state and its scientists was horrendous. This book makes clear what Soviet science has done for us.
This text examines Russia at the end of the 20th century, as it seeks to come to terms with its new status within the world community. It looks at the pressures and tensions arising from economic and social change, and the problems of securing a democratic future.
Grigory Rasputin, Siberian peasant-turned-mystic and court sage, was as fascinating as he was unfathomable. In this riveting and eye-opening short biography, Frances Welch turns her inimitable wry gaze on one of the great mysteries of Russian history.
Magnitsky's brutal killing has remained uninvestigated and unpunished to this day. His farcical posthumous show-trial brought Putin's regime to a new low in the eyes of the international community.
The plan was to attach a Greenpeace pod to Gazprom's platform and launch a peaceful protest against oil being pumped from the icy waters of the Arctic. However, heavily armed commandos flooded the deck of the Arctic Sunrise and the Arctic Thirty began their ordeal at the hands of Putin's regime. This book tells their story.
Provides an analytical narrative of the main events and developments in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1936. This very short introduction examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole - on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, and youth.
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators - her father, Josef Stalin.
With first access to previously classified CIA files, this book gives an portrait of Pasternak, and takes us deep into the Cold War, back to a time when literature had the power to shake the world.
Based on a study in Russian and many other foreign archives, this title explains why this suicidal decision was made and explores the world of the men who made it, thereby consigning their entire class to death or exile and making their country the victim of a uniquely terrible political experiment under Lenin and Stalin.
The 900-day siege of Leningrad (1941-44) was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. Using her own using notes and sketches she wrote during the siege, the author distils the collective experience of life under siege.
A panoramic account of the Russian empire from the last years of the nineteenth century, through revolution and civil war, to the brutal collectivization and crash industrialization under Stalin in the late 1920s
On 26 April 1986, at 1.23am, a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. While officials tried to hush up the accident, the author spent years collecting testimonies from survivors. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, this book shows what it is like to remember in a world that wants you to forget.
Russia's recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change. This book discusses Russia's unresolved economic and social difficulties and its determination to regain its leading role on the world stage.