Russian playwright and historian Radzinsky mines  sources never before available to create a  fascinating portrait of the monarch, and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days.  Updated for the paperback edition.

    An album that chronicles both a tragic tale of failed leadership and an extraordinary love story compiles more than three hundred family photographs of the last czar, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, their hemophiliac son, and their four daughters.

    It's the greatest pioneering story in history, uniquely combining the heroic colonization of an intractable virgin land, the ghastly dangers & high adventure of Arctic exploration, & the grimmest saga of penal servitude. 400 years of continual human striving chart its course, a drama of unremitting extremes & elemental confrontations, pitting man against nature, & man against man. East of the Sun, a work of panoramic scope, is the 1st complete account of this strange & terrible story. To most Westerners, Siberia is a vast & mysterious place. The richest resource area on the face of the earth, its land mass covers 5 million square miles-7.5% of the total land surface of the globe. From the 1st foray in 1581 across the Ural Mountains by a band of Cossack outlaws to the fall of Gorbachev, East of the Sun is history on a grand scale. With vivid immediacy, Bobrick describes the often brutal subjugation of Siberia's aboriginal tribes & the cultures that were destroyed; the great 18th-century explorations that defined Siberia's borders & Russia's attempt to "extend" Siberia further with settlements in Alaska, California & Hawaii; & the transformation of Siberia into a penal colony for criminal & political exiles, an experiment more terrible than Australia's Botany Bay. There's the building of the stupendous Trans-Siberian Railway across 7 time zones; Siberia's key role in the bloody aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917; & Stalin's dreaded Gulag, which corrupted its very soil. Today, Siberia is the hope of Russia's future, now that all her appended republic have broken away. Its story has never been more timely.

    In a tragic time her fate was perhaps the most tragic of all. Born in 1892, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what is today the Pushkin Museum, Tsvetaeva had an intense, cloistered and romantic childhood. Her early teenage years were spent largely in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, as the family travelled Europe in search of a cure for her mother's tuberculosis. In 1910 she published her first collection of poetry, which was immediately recognized in literary circles as the work of a true poet, and the following year in the Crimea she met Sergey Efron, the man around whom her life would revolve to the end. Although Tsvetaeva married him, had three children by him and dedicated her life to him, she had passionate affairs with many lovers, the poets Osip Mandelstam and Sofia Parnok foremost amongst them. In 1917 Sergey joined the White Army and Marina did not see him again for five years. She and her elder daughter, Alya, barely survived the Revolution (her younger daughter died) and, in 1922, they joined Efron in emigration in Prague. There, and later in Paris, she wrote and published many of her greatest works, and kept up an intense correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak. However, by 1939, hardly known in her own country, estranged from her husband and virtually ostracized by the emigre community, she was nevertheless persuaded by Sergey, who had by then been exposed as a Soviet agent, to return to Moscow. Efron and Alya were arrested, and as the German Army pushed ever deeper into Russia, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Elabuga on the KamaRiver. There, on 31 August 1941, Tsvetaeva took her own life. Viktoria Schweitzer, who is recognized as being pre-eminent amongst Tsvetaeva specialists, spent twenty years researching her subject and was able to interview many of the people who knew Tsvetaeva personally, including her daughter and her sister. This is the first full-length story of the life and work of this supreme lyric poet and prose stylist to be based on such detailed research.

    This major survey of Russia as a multi-ethnic empire spans the imperial years from the sixteenth century to 1917, with major consideration of the Soviet phase. It asks how Russians incorporated new territories, how they were resisted, what the character of a multi-ethnic empire was and how, finally, these issues related to nationalism.Greeted with critical acclaim in the original German, this major survey of Russia as a multi ethnic empire spans the imperial years from the sixteenth century to 1917, with a serious consideration of the Soviet phase. It asks how Russians incorporated new territories, how they were resisted, what the character of a multi ethnic empire was and how, finally, these issues related to nationalism. With modern Russia at the forefront of contemporary world affairs, our need to understand its colonial and national past and its implications for the present has never been greater. Breaking completely new ground, The Russian Empire is essential reading. Andreas Kappeler is Professor of East European History, University of Vienna. The translator of this edition is Alfred Clayton.

    This second and final volume of the author's definitive study of the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath focuses on the years 1906 and 1907, and in particular on the struggle over the Duma, the elected legislature that was the major consequence of the events of 1905.

    Most 4-year colleges and some 2-year colleges offer a survey course,usually 2-semester,on sophomore,junior,and senior levels. Course is taken by history and political science majors; also by significant numbers of business,sociology,economics,and engineering majors. This book provides the essentials of the subject to supplement lecture and text. In view of the vast and dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union today,the book should attract general readers as well as students.

    Bringing together fifteen of the West's leading scholars on this subject, the book examines the policy apparatus, atheist education, cults and sects, and recent changes in legislation and policy, presenting hitherto unknown material for the first time.

    It covers from the early history of Siberia after the Russian conquest to collectivization and conscription during World War II and to the 1980s movement ror native rights. In this, the first substantive post-Glasnost account to appear, James Forsyth compares the Siberian experience with that of Indians and Eskimos in North America.

    A biography of the aeronautical engineer whose achievements include the multi-motored airplane and the helicopter.

    It describes and analyzes--in the words of The New York Times' correspondents on the spot--the trickle of events which began in 1985 and which, by 1992, had become a flood.