In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.

    The first major book on Alexandra in 30 years, this definitive work presents an unbiased account of the empress's life, including her dominant role in Russian politics and her involvement with the infamous Rasputin.

    These brave women, the first ever to fly in combat, proved that women could be among the best of warriors, withstanding the rigors of combat and downing the enemy. The women who tell their stories here began the war mostly as inexperienced girls - many of them teenagers. In support of their homeland, they volunteered to serve as bomber and fighter pilots, navigator-bombardiers, gunners, and support crews. Flying against the Luftwaffe, they saw many of their friends - as well as many of their foes - fall to earth in flames. Their three combat Air Force regiments fought as many as one thousand missions during the war. For their heroism and success against the enemy, two of the women's regiments were honored by designation as "Guard" regiments. At least thirty women were decorated with the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union, their nation's highest award. But equally courageous were the women's efforts to show the Red Army that they were entirely adequate to the great role they sought. For even though Stalin had decreed equality for both sexes, the women had to grapple initially with deep distrust from male pilots and Red Army officers, against whom they eventually prevailed. War, Stalin-era politics, and human emotion mix in these gripping, first-person accounts. Supported by photographs of the women at war, the stories are unforgettable. Portraits of the women as they are now taken by award-winning photographer Anne Noggle, add the perspective of time to the experiences of the survivors of this great dance with death.

    "A highly fluent narrative with the heft and density of history and the emotional resonance of fiction."--New York Times.

    Combining personal and professional reminiscences, the interpreter for both Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov offers firsthand observations from the Soviet perspective of the events of World War II, including the historic meetings where the Allies united against Hitler.

    Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.

    Writing from various points of view, the authors reflect the diverse experiences of Russia's failed 1905 revolution. Condemned by Lenin and rediscoverd by dissidents, this translation has relevance for discussions on contemporary Russia.

    New essays by fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts to make them Soviet.Initial chapters consider power relations and working-class identity in imperial Russia. The effects of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 on labor relations among printers and coal miners are then discussed. Addressing subsequent decades, other essays document the situation of cotton workers and white-collar workers embroiled within the ambiguities of the New Economic Policy or challenge the appropriateness of class analysis for the Stalin era. Additional chapters reconstruct workers' responses to the Great Purges and trace the significance of class in visual and verbal discourse. Making Workers Soviet will be central to the current rethinking of Soviet history and of class formation in noncapitalist settings.Contributors: Victoria E. Bonnell; Sheila Fitzpatrick; Heather Hogan; Diane P. Koenker; Stephen Kotkin; Hiroaki Kuromiya; Moshe Lewin; Daniel Orlovsky; Gabor T. Rittersporn; Lewis H. Siegelbaum; S. A. Smith; Mark D. Steinberg; Ronald Grigor Suny; Chris Ward; Reginald E. Zelnik

    Based on intelligence material provided by the Japanese government and previously classified "confidential" by the Royal Navy, this study could well become one of the essential books on naval strategy for the 1990s.

    Conventionally regarded as a perimeter, it is in fact a collage of overlapping borderlands with a distinct historical identity. Based on a quarter-century of research by a leading authority on the area, this is a monumental survey of Pacific Siberia from prehistoric times to the present. Drawing from political, diplomatic, economic, geographical, social, and cultural evidence, the book reveals that this vast, rugged, and supposedly insular land has harbored vibrantly cosmopolitan lifestyles. For over a millennium, Chinese culture found expression in Tungus, Mongol, and Korean politics. Russian penetration in the seventeenth century eventually turned the region into a colony sustained by state subsidies, foreign enterprise, and a mosaic of Ukrainian, Estonian, Finnish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese communities. Tsarist and Soviet penal policies contributed to the diversity and volatility of Far Eastern society. Regional aspirations articulated by Siberian intellectuals, disingenuously institutionalized in a Far Eastern Republic (1920-22), survived lethal bouts of economic and demographic engineering to come to life again in the post-Soviet era. The Russian Far East today reverberates with autonomist rhetoric, but if the region is no longer an appanage, it is still far short of independence. For the time being, the robust tradition of cosmopolitanism is reinventing itself under the banner of capitalism. Reexamining twentieth-century history through a Far Eastern prism, the book offers fresh and often provocative perspectives on imperial rivalries, colonialism, revolution, civil war, and utopianism gone awry in Northeast Asia.