For eleven years, from 1974 to 1985, he acted as a secret agent, reporting to the British Secret Intelligence Service while continuing to work as a KGB officer, first in Copenhagen, then in London. He gave Western security organizations such a clear insight into the mind and methods of the KGB and the whole system of Soviet Government that he has been credited with doing more than any other individual in the West to accelerate the collapse of Communism. Here for the first time his extraordinary, meticulously planned escape from Russia is described. Peopled with bizarre, dangerous and corrupt characters, Gordievsky’s story introduces the reader to the fantastical world of the Soviet Embassy, tells of the British MPs and trade unionists who helped and took money from the KGB, and reveals at last what the author told Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders which made him of such value to the West. Gordievsky’s autobiography gives a fascinating account of life as a secret agent. It also paints the most graphic picture yet of the paranoia and incompetence, intrigues and sheer nastiness of the all-encompassing and sometimes ridiculous KGB. Praise for Oleg Gordievsky 'Gripping.' – Luke Harding, Guardian correspondent and author of Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia. 'Only Gordievsky could...persuade the powers that mattered.' – The Spectator Oleg Gordievsky was born in Moscow in 1938. He attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations where he specialized in German. He was sent to East Berlin as a diplomatic trainee in August 1961. Two days after his arrival, the Wall went up. In 1962 he joined the KGB and was posted to Copenhagen and London. He worked as a secret agent for eleven years until his dramatic escape to the West in 1985. He is the author of KGB: The Inside Story.

    Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion.As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide.As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.

    Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community.Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life.Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.

    This book represents a survey of these works.

    Petersburg became the center of liberal opposition to the dominating power of the state, whether czarist or communist. Acclaimed Russian historian and emigre Volkov writes the definitive "cultural biography" of that famed city, sharply detailing the well-known figures of the arts whose works are now part of the permanent fabric of Western high culture. Photos.

    This unique collection is taken from the personal album of the Tsar's daughter, Grand Duchess Maria, and from the Tsarina Alexandra's own commemorative album, both now in the James Blair Lovell Archive. An extraordinary chronicle of a way of life that ended in 1918 with the brutal execution of nearly every member of the Imperial Family pictured here.

    

    Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. An indefatigable worker, he wrote his arresting music despite deprivations during the Nazi invasion and constant surveillance under Stalin's regime. Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. In August 1942, his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, was performed in Nazi-besieged Leningrad by the city's surviving musicians, and was triumphantly broadcast to the German troops, who had been bombarded beforehand to silence them. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet, holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador with his unflagging artistic ambitions. In the years since his death in 1975, many have embraced a view of Shostakovich as a lifelong dissident who encoded anti-Communist messages in his music. This lucid and fascinating biography demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. Laurel Fay's book includes a detailed list of works, a glossary of names, and an extensive bibliography, making it an indispensable resource for future studies of Shostakovich.

    Anton goes hunting one night so he can feed his family. When he finds a swan, he raises his gun, but lowers it again. Can he kill such a beautiful creature so that his family may eat for just one day? Full-color illustrations.

    The issues posed in this fight-from the leadership's class composition, to the worker-peasant alliance and battle against national oppression-remain central to world politics today."Covers in detail the last 400 days in Lenin's fight in establishing the 'new order' of Russian Union & Peasants power since the advent of [the] October 1917 revolution . . . . Some of the facts which were clandestinely concealed for a long time . . . have been brought out for the first time in any language."-United Service Institution Journal [India]Chronology, glossary, index.

    Various Christian groups continue to scream that the end is near. Read a thoroughly Orthodox perspective on the End Times. Finally, a book that doesn't sensationalize these times, or rewrite traditional Christian teachings to fit in with the spirit of our age.

    In an intimate memoir that whispers with the intrigue of a spy novel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the once-anonymous heroes who risked their lives to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his other works to the West during the darkest days of the Soviet Union.

    This work explores the vanished world of the Russian country estate. It examines the aristocratic dwellings, discussing their origins, their design and decoration, the social, family, and cultural life within their walls, and their physical demise after the 1917 revolution.

    But as Stalin's regime grew increasingly paranoid and repressive, Babel found it difficult to write or publish. The Lonely Years is a collection of letters and nine stories from the period before Babel's arrest and disappearance. Together, they show an individual laboring against all odds to remain true to his craft and ideals. This edition contains a new introduction, based on previously unreleased information from the KGB files.

    Articles survey critical reactions and analyze Nabokov's works

    It shows how in the decades of the Cold War before perestroika, artists risked imprisonment, exile and poverty in their quest for individual expression. In opposition to the government-prescribed style of Socialist Realism, these artists worked in the prohibited styles of abstraction, surrealism, expressionism, photorealism and conceptualism, depicting forbidden subject matter concerned with politics, religion or eroticism. They produced a body of work that embraced a wide range of media from painting and sculpture to posters, banners and performance art. This text provides in-depth documentation of this period in Russian and Soviet art history. The 18 included essays offer a broad perspective on the subject, addressing a variety of issues and themes.

    However, the region's annexation succeeded in stirring the dreams of the country's most outstanding social and political visionaries, who declared it civilization's most important step forward. A decade later, this enthrallment and optimism had evaporated. Mark Bassin examines Russia's perceptions of the new territories, placing the Amur enigma in the context of Russian Zeitgeist mid-century, and offers a new perspective on the relationship among Russian nationalism, geographical identity and imperial expansion.

    The Russian Revolution suppressed "bourgeois freedom" to pave the way for the "true freedom" of communism. Totalitarianism was a by-product of this immense effort.The last section of the book gives a concise analysis of the dismantling of Stalinism, involving not only the gradual detotalitarization but also the partial decommunization of "really existing socialism."Throughout, Marxism is treated as an ideology that has compromised itself but that nevertheless deserves to be seen as the most important, however exaggerated and, ultimately, tragically mistaken, reaction to the multiple shortcomings of capitalist societies and the liberal tradition.

    This book features many of the remarkable works of art housed in the former armoury and other museums of the Moscow Kremlin, including Peter the Great's coronation crown, and Faberge's Tricentennial Easter Egg commissioned in 1913 by Nicholas II to celebrate 300 years of Romanov rule.

    

    But the theoretical ideas underlying their challenging imagery and language have hitherto been only glimpsed. Since Stalin stamped out such enquiry in the early Thirties, key personalities were driven into obscurity. Soviet researchers permitted to touch this material could publish only circumscribed vignettes which neither mediated the cultural divide nor placed the ideas in their larger intellectual and political contexts. Here for the first time is a study that exploits the freedoms of the new situation in Russia to explore the intellectual challenges of this extraordinary material and to present its ideas with the same objectivity as we apply to Western work. At one level the book is a readable and colourful introduction to the whole period and its major artistic and architectural personalities, many of whom emerge as individuals with coherent views and distinctive careers for the first time. At another level, it is a unique source book of original documentary texts which not only bring the period to life in entirely new detail, but offer a launchpad for teaching and further research. By cutting through the period in different ways, successive chapters build a multi-dimensional narrative that starts with foundations of avant-garde theoretical debate in the nineteenth century.

    Consequently, the 'Jewish Question' became one of most hotly debated topics in Russia. Attitudes toward the Jews which evolved during this period persisted up to the Revolution and beyond. This book, based on exhaustive archival research of materials published during the period, studies the interplay of public opinion and official policy. The author examines the attitudes of all sectors of Russian educated society towards the Jews. He also explores how a new group, the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, sought to define a modern Jewish identity in the midst of a multi-ethnic Empire.

    As he examines the emergence of a mass political culture in Poland, Robert E. Blobaum offers the first history in any Western language of this watershed period. Drawing on extensive archival research to explore the history of Poland's revolutionary upheavals, Blobaum departs from traditional interpretations of these events as peripheral to an essentially Russian movement that reached a climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He demonstrates that, although Polish independence was not formally recognized until after World War I, the social and political conditions necessary for nationhood were established in the years around 1905.

    Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, is famous for the beauty of its architecture. The interiors of the splendid palaces are much less well known, and this beautiful book reveals them in all their glorious detail. The palaces that have survived intact are still furnished and decorated as they were left at the beginning of the Communist Revolution, with sumptuous fabrics, furniture, glassware, china and detailed marquetry, all adding up to some of the most stunning interiors in the world. Many of those that were destroyed during the siege of Leningrad are being carefully and painstakingly restored to their full splendour. The Baroque grandeur of the Catherine Palace, the exquisite Chinese Palace - where Catherine the Great spent happy hours with her lover Grigory Orlov - and the tiny but perfect Yelagin Palace are but a few of the wonderful buildings that are featured within the book's pages.

    Today, thanks to the persistence of dedicated collectors, more than 40 eggs are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections all over the world. Now they have been assembled in this book. Each photo is accompanied by an authoritative commentary that not only describes the eggs in detail but also provides details of court life in Imperial Russia. An informative introduction sets the stage historically and relates the life of the genius behind the 'House of Faberge'.

    But Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison shatter this image. Out of Afghanistan shows that the Red Army was securely entrenched when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw: American weaponry and Afghan bravery raised the costs for Moscow, but it was six years of skillful diplomacy that gave the Russians a way out.Cordovez and Harrison provide the definitive account of the Soviet blunders that led up to the invasion and the bitter struggles over the withdrawal that raged in the Soviet and Afghan Communist parties and the Reagan Administration. The authors are particularly well-suited to their task: Cordovez was the United Nations mediator who negotiated the Soviet pullout, and Harrison is a leading South Asia expert with four decades of experience in covering Afghanistan. Their story of the U.N. negotiations is interwoven with a gripping chronicle of the war years, complete with palace shootouts in Kabul, turf warfare between rival Soviet intelligence agencies, and the CIA role in building up Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla leaders at the expense of Afghan moderates. Cordovez opens up his diaries to take us behind the scenes in his negotiations, and Harrison draws on interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and other key actors. The result is a book full of surprises. For example, the authors demonstrate that the Soviets intervened not out of a desire to drive to the Indian Ocean, but out of a fear of a U.S.-supported Afghan Tito. Rebuffs by hardline bleeders in the Reagan Administration undermined efforts by Yuri Andropov to secure a settlement before his death in 1983. Even more startling, Gorbachev resumed the search for a negotiated withdrawal more than a year before the first American-supplied Stinger missiles were deployed in the war.The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was one of the pivotal events of recent history. Out of Afghanistan destroys many of the myths surrounding the Afghan war and will have a profound impact on the emerging debate over how and why the Cold War ended.

    Softcover, 132 pp., 95 b/w, 91 color images.

    It is examined in the context of the extraordinarily diverse influences which affected it - from Greek and Persian to Russian and modern European literature, and the folklore of the Caucasus.

    Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and life-history analysis, the author provides a detailed ethnographic examination of the origins and local meanings of rock music and the countercultural way of life of rock musicians in St. Petersburg during the socialist period of Russian history. Rock music served as the basis for alternative forms of individual and collective identity which stood as beacons of difference and resistance in the bleak cultural environment of socialist industrial society. Cushman explores the experiences of members of the St. Petersburg musical community after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in order to shed light on the following questions: What happens to oppositional underground culture when it comes up from the underground? What is the fate of Russian rock music and those who make it under new conditions of the rapid capitalist rationalization of post-Soviet Russian society?The book traces the experiences of musicians in new capitalist culture markets, both in Russia and in Western societies to illustrate the more general process of commercialization of dissent which is taking place in post-communist societies. Russia's entrance into the path of Western capitalist modernity is viewed not so much as a path to freedom and cultural autonomy, but as the intersection of two trajectories of modernity that has given rise to new and unique cultural dilemmas. It concludes with an examination of important theoretical issues about the problematic relationship between capitalism, cultural freedom, and democracy in contemporary Russian society.

    It covers major writers including Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lermontov, but also introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. Setting these writings and the responses of the Russian readership in historical and cultural context, Susan Layton examines ways that literature underwrote imperialism. But her study also reveals the tensions between the Russian state's ideology of a European mission to civilize the Caucasian Muslim mountaineers, and romantic perceptions of those peoples as noble primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration.

    Wrapped in her sheets like a corpse, stinking like a goat, she screams like a banshee whenever anyone comes near her. Yet Jung, the disciple of Freud, cures her - and in doing so, falls in love with her. What would the Master say? As Jung unravels her hysteria like the sheets from her head, he finds himself enmeshed in a wild dream that he knows in his bones to be true - a dream that goes back to the beginnings of Western civilization, to the pre-Hellenic campfires where men and women carved Venus stones, worshiped the moon, and enacted a savage ritual of death, sex, and rebirth. Only there can he and Fraulein S consummate their love. In the end, the Pygmalion Jung must betray his creation. And Freud. And himself. Until thirty years later, when Fraulein S, now herself a psychoanalyst in her native Russia, offers him a chance at redemption. Based loosely on the celebrated case of Sabina Spielrein, this brilliant and provocative novel blends the fierce eroticism at the core of psychoanalysis with the speculations of ancient history in a tale of love, betrayal, and the mysteries of the human psyche.

    The results of this assault on Russian culture are particularly evident in ruined architectural monuments, some of which are little known even within Russia itself. Over the past four decades William Craft Brumfield, noted historian and photographer of Russian architecture, has traveled throughout Russia and photographed many of these neglected, lost buildings, poignant and haunting in their ruin. Lost Russia provides a unique view of Brumfield’s acclaimed work, which illuminates Russian culture as reflected in these remnants of its distinctive architectural traditions. Capturing the quiet, ineffable beauty that graces these buildings, these photographs are accompanied by a text that provides not only a brief historical background for Russian architecture, but also Brumfield’s personal impressions, thoughts, and insights on the structures he views. Churches and monasteries from the fifteenth to the twentieth century as well as abandoned, ruined manor houses are shown—ravaged by time, willful neglect, and cultural vandalism. Brumfield also illustrates examples of recent local initiatives to preserve cultural landmarks from steady decline and destruction. Concluding with photographs of the remarkable log architecture found in Russia’s far north, Lost Russia is a book for all those concerned with the nation’s cultural legacy, history, and architecture, and with historic and cultural preservation generally. It will also interest those who appreciate the fine art of exceptional photography.

    

    It describes Russian achievements in building private banks, companies, stock exchanges, new laws and law courts. It analyzes the role of the mafia, the new financial empires, entrepreneurs, business tycoons, and the shrinking Russian state. Thane Gustafson tells how the Soviet system was dismantled and the new market society was born, and examines the prospects for a Russian economic miracle in the twenty-first century.

    The results are two volumes of great scope based on archival evidence. They stand as a compulsory reference point for anyone with an interest in the operational endeavours of the Soviet Army from the 1920's onward.

    Averell Harriman, William Bullitt, Joseph E. Davies, Llewlleyn Thompson, Jack Matlock: these are important names in the history of American foreign policy. Together with a number of lesser-known officials, these diplomats played a vital role in shaping U.S. strategy and popular attitudes toward the Soviet Union throughout its 75-year history. In The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy, David Mayers presents the most comprehensive critical examination yet of U.S. diplomats in the Soviet Union. Mayers' vivid portrayal evokes the social and intellectual atmosphere of the American embassy in the midst of crucial episodes: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Purges, the Grand Alliance in World War II, the early Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the rise and decline of detente, and the heady days of perestroika and glasnost. He also offers rare portraits of the professional lives of the diplomats themselves: their adjustment to Soviet life, the quality of their analytical reporting, their contact with other diplomats in Moscow, and their influence on Washington. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of American diplomacy in its most challenging area, this compelling book fills an important gap in the history of U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-Soviet relations. Readers interested in U.S. foreign policy, the cold war, and the policies and history of the former Soviet Union will find The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy an intriguing and informative work.