After World War II, German scientist Nikolaus Riehl and his family were held captive in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1955. His story is uniquely interesting in part because of its historical content, in part because he was bilingual in German and Russian, having grown up in St. Petersburg as the son of a German father and a Russian mother, and as a result of his warm human interest in the Russian people. He tells his story in Ten Years in a Golden Cage. Frederick Seitz has written a detailed introduction that provides a historical context for his translation (from German) of Riehl's book.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

"Emil Draitser dreamed of becoming a writer. Born to a working-class Jewish family in the USSR on the eve of World War II, he came of age during the Brezhnev era, often considered the nadir of Soviet culture. Bored with an engineering job, he found refuge in writing, attracting the attention of a Moscow editor who encouraged him to try his hand at satire. He spent the next decade contributing to Crocodile, the major Party-sponsored magazine known for its sharp-tongued essays and caustic cartoons. After he got in trouble for criticizing an important Soviet official, he began weighing the heavy decision of whether to emigrate. In this captivating memoir, Draitser explores what it means to be a satirist in a country lacking freedom of expression. His experience provides a window into the lives of a generation of artists who were allowed to poke fun and make readers laugh, as long as they toed a narrow, state-approved line. In the Jaws of the Crocodile also includes several of Draitser's wry pieces translated into English for the first time." --Amazon.com.

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience, yet there was a danger that his name would disappear from history. Originally published in 1954, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography was the first major publication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda machine. In this definitive biography Trotsky emerges in his real stature, as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian Revolution. This third volume of the trilogy, first published in 1963, is a self-contained narrative of Trotsky’s years in exile and of his murder in Mexico in 1940. Deutscher’s masterful account of the period, and of the ideological controversies ranging throughout it, forms a background against which, as he says, ‘the protagonist’s character reveals itself, while he is moving towards catastrophe.’

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a memoir of coming-of-age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB’s persecution of refuseniks, a poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer’s remembrances are set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire’s collapse. His story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.

Trotsky's last battle against the Stalinist murder machine - the only book by him never before published in English. Contains all the articles against the GPU written between the raid on Trotsky's house on May 24, 1940, and his assassination on August 20. The record of a life-and-death struggle against the agents of the bureaucracy, 'Stalin's Gangsters' is essential for training today's generation of revolutionaries in the history of the movement and the fight for its security.

Memoirs of motion picture director, Sergei Eisenstein, 1898-1948; translated from Russian text.

12mo. Light wear to edges. Creasing to covers, browning to page edges.

Upon arriving at the kibbutz, after years of running and living in a constant state of fear and anxiety, I finally felt that I could unburden my heart and mind. I had dreamed of the day I would arrive, alive, in Eretz Israel. The constant stress of the last few years was made easier by my constant desire to achieve that goal. So, when I first arrived in the kibbutz dining hall, it was as if all my dreams had come true. David J. Azrieli was born in 1922 in Maków Mazowiecki, Poland. Written by his daughter Danna, this gripping account of survival during World War II describes David’s extraordinary travels, always just one step ahead of life-threatening danger, which took him to the Soviet-occupied zones of Poland and later to Ukraine, Tashkent, and Buchara. He subsequently served in the Anders Army, before making his way from Baghdad to the frontiers of British-occupied Palestine. The memoir chronicles David J. Azrieli’s arrival in Palestine, his studies at the Technion in Haifa, his experiences as a soldier in the War of Independence, and his realization that most of his immediate family had perished in the Holocaust. Azrieli finally settled in Canada in 1954. There he married his wife, Stephanie, and together they raised four children—Rafi, Sharon, Naomi, and Danna. This story of survival is all the more remarkable given Azrieli’s later achievements as a successful real estate developer and philanthropist. One of the economic giants of the Jewish world, his many developments changed the face of Israel and stand as a striking testament to the strength and courage of a boy whom Hitler could not defeat. The highlight of his activities is the establishment of the Canadian and Israeli Azrieli Foundations, which focus on improving the lives of present and future generations through education, research, healthcare, and arts. -- page 4 of cover.

Text: English, German (translation)

A WORLD APART by GUSTAV HERLING. Contents include: PREFACE , k PART I CHAP. PAGE 1 VITEBSK LENINGRAD VOLOGDA 1 2 HUNTING BY NIGHT 20 3 WORK 1 DAY AFTER DAY 32 2 THROWN TO THE WOLVES 45 3 STALINS MURDERER 50 4 DREI KAMERADEN 56 5 THE ICE-BREAKER 65 6 THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS 86 7 RESURRECTION 97 8 THE DAY OF REST 113 PART II 9 HUNGER 131 10 NIGHTFALL 143 11 THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD 152 12 N THE REAR OF THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND 1 A GAME OF CHESS 174 2 HAYMAKING 183 13 MARTYRDOM FOR THE FAITH 190 14 THE MORTUARY 210 15 IN THE URALS, 1942 227 EPILOGUE THE FALL OF PARIS 242 APPENDIX 249 ILLUSTRATIONS THE AUTHORS PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN GRODNO PRISON IN 1940, AND STOLEN BY HIM FROM HIS DOSSIER ON THE DAY OF HIS RELEASE FROM KARGOPOL CAMP frontispiece A PHOTOGRAPH OF ONE OF THE CAMP-SECTIONS OF THE KARGOPOL CAMP, TAKEN ORIGINALLY BY A CAMP GUARD AS A SOUVENIR, AND LATER SOLD BY HIM TO ONE OF THE PRISONERS facing page 24 A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE HANDKERCHIEF MADE AND EMBROI DERED BY Miss Z. facing page 220 IGANOVS POSTCARD facing page 228 AN EXTRACT FROM THE AUTHORS DIARY, KEPT AFTER HIS RELEASE FROM THE CAMP facing page 234. PREFACE by BERTRAND RUSSELL: OF the many books that I have read relating the experiences of victims in Soviet prisons and labour camps, Mr. Gustav Herlings A World Apart is the most impressive and the best written. He possesses in a very rare degree the power of simple and vivid description, and it is quite impossible to question his sincerity at any point. In the years 1940-42 he was first in prison and then in a forced labour camp near Archangel. The bulk of the book relates what he saw and suffered in the camp. The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr. Herlings are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it. Communists and Nazis alike have tragically demonstrated that in a large proportion of mankind the impulse to inflict torture exists, and requires only opportunity to display itself in all its naked horror. But I do not think that these evils can be cured by blind hatred of their perpetrators. This will only lead us to become like them. Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a book as this one, to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realise that it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not say that to understand is to pardon there are things which for my part I find I cannot pardon. But I do say that to understand is absolutely necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented. I hope that Mr...

First published in 2004, this book tells the stories of four remarkable British women, whose lives were scorched by Stalin's purges. One was shot as a spy; one nearly died as a slave labourer in Kazakhstan; and two saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country. We think of the horrors of the middle of the twentieth century- the Holocaust in Central Europe, the purges in the Soviet Union- as something foreign: terrible, but remote. Rosal Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley, and Pearl Rimel were all Londoners. Like hundreds of young, idealistic Britons in the 1930s, they looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, for a way in which society could be run better, without the exploitation and poverty which unrestrained capitalism had created. They were less fortunate than most of us: they saw their dreams fulfilled. In this book, Francis Beckett draws on personal letters, interviews with surviving relatives and archivists to create a picture of four courageous, intelligent, and very different women. The result is a harrowing human document with vivid and unforgettable insights into the world of Stalin's Russia: its secret trials, labour camps, random disappearances, and concealed executions.

Text: English, Yiddish (translation)

This volume completes the biography of Peter Struve (1870-1944), one of the most remarkable and influential Russian intellectuals of this century. More than anyone else in his time, Struve was the master of history, journalism, economics, international relations, and practical politics. A scholar and activist, he helped found the Marxist movement in Russia, initiated Marxist Revisionism there, and launched Lenin's career, and he was the theoretician and a cofounder of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After 1905--the years covered in this self-contained volume--Struve became the principal critic of the Russian intelligentsia and the main political ideologist of the anti-Bolshevik opposition during the Civil War and in emigration. His life was a part of the life of Russia as he struggled to craft a liberal democracy and wound up defeated and faced with an emerging totalitarian state. In writing about Struve, Richard Pipes turns biography into history. He lays bare the split soul of the Russian intellectuals--their irresponsibility, unwillingness to compromise, intolerance. Struve, the liberal turned conservative, preached to his countrymen physical and spiritual freedom based on law. He was a Westerner in his championing of social reform, legality, private property, and a vigorous state and foreign policy. This long and rich tradition of liberal-conservatism is recounted against the background of a "monstrous growth of political claims on the individual that caused intellectual and moral independence increasingly to be punished with ostracism, confinement, exile, and death."