More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper's rifle, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering and killed... They killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, had attacked their land, their homes and their children. Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans. The Soviet press called the book"a vivid reporting of events long past, which affected the destiny of the nation as a whole." The most important thing about the book is not so much the front-line episodes as women's heart-rending experiences in the war. Through their testimony the past makes an impassioned appeal to the present, denouncing yesterday's and today's fascism...

    His writings in The New Yorker and other prominent periodicals have made him one of the most widely read of Russian émigré authors. In Ours, he traces four generations of Russian family life – and the very course of modern Soviet history – through a portrait of the Dovlatov clan: from Uncle Aron, whose political convictions wavered with his own unstable health; to upstanding Cousin Boris, the family’s pride, who found he was happy only when in trouble with the authorities; to larger-than-life Grandpa Isaak; to the wildly comic story of how Dovlatov met his wife; to off-the-wall tales of parents and cousins, uncles and children, and even the pet dog.In the tradition of the great Russian satirists, featuring the same irreverence and irony for which Dovlatov’s previous works were celebrated, Ours is an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable group self-portrait by one of the freshest voices to emerge from the Soviet Union.

    The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha, but during Alikhanov’s stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylovskoye, his life continues to unravel.Populated with unforgettable characters—including Alikhanov’s fellow guides Mitrofanov and Pototsky, and the KGB officer Belyaev—Pushkin Hills ranks among Dovlatov’s renowned works The Suitcase and The Zone as his most personal and poignant portrayal of the Russian attitude towards life and art.

    He could not believe his eyes; in this forbidding part of the world, human habitation was a statistical impossibility. A team of scientists parachuted in and were stunned by what they found: a primitive wood cabin, and a family dressed in rags that spoke, thought, and lived in the manner of seventeenth-century Russian peasants during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great. How they come here, how they survived, and how they ultimately prevailed in a climate of unimaginable adversity make for one of the most extraordinary human adventures of this century. Acclaimed Pravda journalist Vasily Peskov has visited this family once a year for the past twelve years, gaining their trust and learning their story. It begins in the late seventeenth century, when a community of Russian Orthodox fundamentalists made a two-thousand-mile odyssey from the Ukraine to the depths of the Siberian taiga to escape religious persecution at the hands of Peter the Great, who sought to reform the Russian Orthodox Church. For nearly 250 years, this band of "Old Believers" kept the outside world at bay, but in the 1930s Stalin's brutal collectivization program swept East and threw them from their land. But the young family of Karp Osipovich Lykov refused to abandon the only way of life they knew, and fled even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland. By the time Peskov came to know them, they had been alone for more than fifty years, surviving solely on what they could harvest, hunt, and build by their own means. The sole surviving family member, the daughter Agafia, lives by herself in the Lykov family cabin to this day. In Lost in the Taiga, Peskov brings to life the Lykovs' faith, their doubt, and their epic struggle against an unyielding wilderness, even as he pays homage to a natural habitat th

    With over 200 recipes on everything from borsch to blini, from Salmon Coulbiac to Beef Stew, from Marinated Mushrooms to Black Bread, Goldstein shows off the best that Russian cooking has to offer.

    His absorbing tale describes the adventures of a thirty-day journey on a trans-Siberian train, the success of a long-sought-after inspection of a Soviet warship viewed through the haze of innumerable Vodka toasts, and the unease of state banquets with Stalin and Churchill. It also provides dramatic evidence of the contrasts of Soviet life with descriptions of elegant nights at the ballet accompanied by a beautiful agente provocatrice and memories of starving stevedores wolfing down scraps of raw meat thrown out by American ships. Filled with clever one-liners and complemented by numerous period photographs culled from the author's own collection, this reminiscence has enjoyed great appeal, since first published on 1983, with readers who like adventure and have an interest in the behind-the-scenes activities of the U.S. Navy and Soviet Union in the early 1940s.

    

    

    "...that rare thing, a piece of careful scholarship that is also superby entertaining...Starr, who is president of Oberlin College and has been associated with the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, is also a professional jazz musician, and his knowledgeable affection for the music shines through the text." - Andrea Lee, New York Times Book Review

    Includes translations of Marx's notes from the 1880s, among the most important finds of the last century.