"As World War II comes to a close, the United States and the Soviet Union emerge as the two greatest world powers on extreme opposites of the political spectrum. After the United States showed its hand with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the Soviets refuse to be left behind. With communism sweeping the globe, the two nations begin a neck-and-neck competition to build even more destructive bombs and conquer the Space Race. In their battle for dominance, spy planes fly above, armed submarines swim deep below, and undercover agents meet in the dead of night. The Cold War game grows more precarious as weapons are pointed towards each other, with fingers literally on the trigger. The decades-long showdown culminates in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world's close call with the third-and final-world war"--

A collection of novels by the Russian-born author of Suite Française," who died in Auschwitz in 1942, features David Golder," a parable about greed and loneliness, as well as three novels available in English for the first time.

When twelve-year-old Arcady is sent to a children's home after his parents are declared enemies of the state in Soviet Russia, soccer becomes a way to secure extra rations, respect, and protection but it may also be his way out if he can believe in and love another person--and himself.

When Lenin died and the Russian Revolution began to devour its leaders, Trotsky survived longer than most as an exile in Mexico, until his assassination in 1940. The Essential Trotsky , first published in 1963, demonstrates the significance of this innovative and radical thinker's contribution to the Bolshevik success, the magnetism of his personality, and also a certain tragic heroism discernible throughout his life. The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk was written immediately after the events it describes, when Trotsky was attending the negotiations that extracted Russia from the First World War; The Lessons of October , an answer to his opponents in 1924, matches Lenin in power of analysis; and Stalin Falsifies History , written in 1927, presents the beginning of the distorting process by which Stalin secured his position, and defeated a range of attitudes, many more benign than his own, towards the future of the Revolution. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of value to students with an interest in early-twentieth century Russia, the Russian Revolution and the writings of Trotsky more generally.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In one of history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded--not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two scholars of Eastern European and Soviet affairs revisit what happened, in this fresh, incisive look at communism's collapse.

Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them. This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.--Publisher's description

Dean Reed was an American and the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union. He was so famous his icons were sold alongside those of Josef Stalin. Reggie Nadelson first saw him in 1986 on a TV chat show. Few people in the West had ever heard of him. Six weeks later Reed was found dead in a lake in East Berlin.

Cold War is the story of the half-century since the end of the Second World War - the story of our lives. Its framework is the confrontation, military and ideological, between two great powers that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of crises and conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest and Prague, to spies, student riots and encounters in space. In Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing record epic history through the detail of individual human experience: the recollections not only of statesmen whose decisions led to these momentous events, but also of the ordinary men and women whose lives were bound up in these years of conflict. Cold War is the first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from the recent opening of Soviet, East European and Chinese archives as well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving narrative that it both gripping and informative, the true story of the Cold War can at last be told.

In this fascinating book, noted journalist Thomas de Waal—author of the highly acclaimed Black Garden—makes the case that while the Caucasus is often treated as a sub-plot in the history of Russia, or as a mere gateway to Asia. The five-day war in Georgia, which flared into a major international crisis in 2008, proves that this is still a combustible region, whose inner dynamics and history deserve a much more complex appreciation from the wider world. In The Caucasus, de Waal provides this richer, deeper, and much-needed appreciation, one that reveals that the South Caucasus—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and their many smaller regions, enclaves, and breakaway entities—is a fascinating and distinct world unto itself. Providing both historical background and an insightful analysis of the period after 1991, de Waal sheds light on how the region has been scarred by the tumultuous scramble for independence and the three major conflicts that broke out with the end of the Soviet Union—Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The book examines the region as a major energy producer and exporter; offers a compelling account of the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the rise of Mikheil Saakashvili, and the August 2008 war; and considers the failure of the South Caucasus, thus far, to become a single viable region. In addition, the book features a dozen or so "boxes" which provide brief snapshots of such fascinating side topics as the Kurds, Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, the promotion of the region as the "Soviet Florida," and the most famous of all Georgians, Stalin. The Caucasus delivers a vibrantly written and timely account of this turbulent region, one that will prove indispensable for all concerned with world politics. It is, as well, a stimulating read for armchair travelers and for anyone curious about far-flung corners of the world.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Fran aise . In 1903 Leon M - the son of two Russian revolutionaries - is given the responsibility of 'liquidating' Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, the notoriously brutal and cold-blooded Russian Minister of Education, by the Revolutionary Committee. The assassination, he is told, must take place in public and be carried out in the most grandiose manner possible in order to strike the imagination of the people. Posing as his newly appointed personal physician, Leon M takes up residence with Courilof in his summer house in the Iles and awaits instructions. But over the course of his stay he is made privy to the inner world of the man he must kill - his failing health, his troubled domestic situation and, most importantly, the tyrannical grip that the Czar himself holds over all his Ministers, forcing them to obey him or suffer the most deadly punishments. Set during a period of radical upheaval in European history, The Courliof Affair is an unsparing observation of human motives and the abuses of power, an elegy to a lost world and an unflinchingly topical cautionary tale.

"Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent--with echoes of Inglourious Basterds and Seven Samurai--THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction"--

Considered among the most important Cold War records to emerge thus far by the former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times, The Kissinger Transcripts gives readers the unvarnished record of Henry Kissinger's diplomacy during the Nixon years.

"Why is a book about SMERSH relevant today? As Mr. Birstein takes pains to point out, 'the present Russian government seems intent on whitewashing Stalin's atrocities and the history of the Soviet security services.'"-- The Washington Times SMERSH is primarily known to readers in English as James Bond's sinister opponent. Yet SMERSH was a real organization and was just as diabolical as its fictional counterpart. Based on Russian documents and memoirs, a critical missing piece of the history of World War II and the Soviet secret services is finally exposed to the light of day. Vadim J. Birstein, PhD , is a historian, activist, and molecular geneticist. He lives in New York.

"The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during World War II and the Holocaust (1941-45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews."--BOOK JACKET.

"Two former spy chief rivals reveal how Russia stole America's nuclear technology, assassinated its President, and killed dozens of foreign political leaders"--

"With a revised foreword by Brookings President Strobe Talbott and a new introduction by Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy. George Kennan, the architect of US policy toward the Soviet Union, called Isaiah Berlin 'the patron saint among the commentators of the Russian scene.' In The Soviet Mind, Berlin proves himself fully worthy of that accolade. Although the essays in this book were originally written to explore the tensions between Soviet communism and Russian culture, the thinking about the Russian mind that emerges is as relevant today under Putin's post-communist Russia as it was when this book first appeared more than a decade ago. This Brookings Classic brings together Berlin's writings about the Soviet Union. Among the highlights are accounts of Berlin's meetings with the Russian writers in the aftermath of the war; a celebrated memorandum he wrote for the British Foreign Office in 1945 about the state of the arts under Stalin; Berlin's account of Stalin's manipulative 'artificial dialectic'; portraits of Pasternak and poet Osip Mandel'shtam; Berlin's survey of Russian culture based on a visit in 1956; and a postscript reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events in 1989. Henry Hardy prepared the essays for publication; his introductory discussions describe their history. In his foreword, revised for this new edition, Brookings's Strobe Talbott, a long-time expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin's other work. The essays and other pieces in The Soviet Mind-which includes a new essay, 'Marxist versus Non-Marxist Ideas in Soviet Policy, ' and a summary of a talk on communism-represent Berlin at his most brilliant, and are invaluable for policy-makers, students and anyone interested in Russian politics and thought-past, present and future" ...

The year 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called "the year of the thaw"--a time when Stalin's dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a "genius," a wizard of communism--Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a "madman" whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year's end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship

This is the first and probably still the best history of russian and polish jews. Written in russian before the WWI it did appear in english in three volumes in 1916, 1918 and 1920. translated from the Russian by I. Friedlaender; with a biographical essay, new introd., and Outline of the history of Russian and Soviet Jewry, 1912-1974, by Leon Shapiro 1975, c1916-1920. Physical Description: 3 v. in 2 v. 1. From the beginning until the death of Alexander I (1825). From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III (1825-1894). -v. 2. From the accession of Nicholas II until the present day, with bibliography and index.

A History of Soviet Russia"A foremost historian brings vividly to life the men and events of Russia's postrevolutionary era. Though the years of war communism, NEP, and collectivization, Professor Ulam traces the transformation of the Bolsheviks' early sense of mission and advancement of world revolution into the quest for power for its own sake. He skillfully describes the interaction of internal dilemmas with international pressures, the maturing of Soviet political and social systems under communism, and the mixture of nationalistic and ideological motives that colored the behavior of Russia's leaders and shaped its development."Keywords: SOVIET UNION HISTORY 1917 1991