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 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 quickly ushered in a popular and political movement toward nuclear disarmament. Across the globe, heads of state, high-ranking ministers, and bureaucrats led intense efforts to achieve effective disarmament agreements. Ultimately these efforts failed. In The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, David Tal offers a detailed analysis of U.S. policy from 1945 to the summer of 1963, exploring the reasons for failure and revealing the complex motivations that eventually led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty. While previous books have focused on the policies of specific administrations, Tal’s is the first to consider negotiations as an evolving phenomenon that preoccupied three presidents, from Truman to Kennedy. Drawing on extensive archival research, the author examines the profound dilemma faced by leaders on all sides—forced by political pressure to engage in negotiations whose success they saw as injurious to national interests. Far from believing that the nuclear arms race would inevitably lead to war, the United States regarded nuclear weapons as the greatest guarantee that war would not happen.

This book examines the staggering popularity of early-twentieth-century Russian detective serials. Traditionally maligned as Pinkertonovshchina, these appropriations of American and British detective stories featuring Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Ethel King, and scores of other sleuths swept the Russian reading market in successive waves between 1907 and 1917, and famously experienced a red resurgence in the 1920s under the aegis of Nikolai Bukharin. The book presents the first holistic view of Pinkertonovshchina as a phenomenon, and produces a working model of cross-cultural appropriation and reception. The red Pinkerton emerges as a vital missing link between pre- and post-Revolutionary popular literature, and marks the fitful start of a decades-long negotiation between the regime, the author, and the reading masses.