The book also describes some distinguished contemporaries, including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Bukharin.

    This classic biography carefully traces Bukharin's rise to and fall from power, focusing particularly on the development of his theories and programmatic ideas during the critical period between Lenin's death in 1924 and the ascendancy of Stalin in 1929.

    Ulam in his now-classic biography, was the consummate outsider, a man who spoke Russian with a Georgian accent all his life yet still proclaimed himself to be the supreme father of the Russian people. Often pictured as a semiliterate boor, Stalin was in fact an intellectual, and he destroyed the intellectual class to which he belonged "as thoroughly as any class in history had ever been destroyed." Ulam's account of the 20th century's Genghis Khan is an absorbing study of power won and terrifyingly applied.

    This book covers virtually all the significant Russian thinkers from the age of Catherine the Great Down to the eve of the 1905 Revolution.

    

    The editor has provided an introduction surveying the development of drama and the theater in Russia and discussing the significance of the plays, and he has included a note on each play commenting on its literary and historical context."The Minor" by Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin"The Trouble with Reason" by Aleksander Sergeyevich Griboyedov"Boris Godunov" by Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin"The Inspector General" by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol"The Storm" by Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky"The Power of Darkness" by Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy**Originally published under the title of "An Anthology of Russian Plays, Volume I"