Born in splendor difficult to imagine today, she endured a lifetime of relentless tragedy with courage and exceptional powers of adjustment.The Last Grand Duchess is a valuable account of the final decades of the house of Romanov as seen through the eyes of its last surviving member. Through Olga, we meet Queen Victoria, George V of England, Rasputin, Mrs. Anderson - on whose story the movie Anastasia was made - and other impostors who plagued the exiled duchess with false hope.In this official memoir, Ian Vorres captures the loneliness and violence of Olga's years in Russia, her loveless first marriage to Prince Peter of Oldenburg, her years of exile in England and Denmark, and her final settlement with her second husband and family in Canada.Long out of print, and now reissued in a handsomely illustrated edition, The Last Grand Duchess is the thorough and engaging official biography of an extraordinary woman.

    Her dramatic and poignant memoir tells of her recruitment into underground service at age 14, her participation in resistance activities during the War, her bittersweet marriage to revolutionary leader Orlan, her struggle against Stalinist forces, and her captures by and escapes from the KGB. In the 1950s when she escaped to the West, she began these memoirs, which were not published in Ukrainian until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Their appearance in Ukrainian caused a sensation, as she remains the only survivor of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to have told her tale, now offered in English. Pyskir, whose escape came at the cost of her husband, children, and family, recreates in her memoir an astonishing account of her experiences as a Ukrainian partisan, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an outcast from her own land. The book contains maps, many of the author's own photographs, and a foreword by John A. Armstrong.

    This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one." --Doris Lessing"The sixteen life stories are riveting.... testimony to the complexity of the human spirit[, ] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions.... Till My Tale Is Told remind[s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history."--The Women's Review of BooksArrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and sentencing, transport, labor camps, internal exile, sometimes release, often followed by re-arrest and re-imprisonment and, for those who outlived Stalin, eventual reprieve and rehabilitation these are the outlines of the experiences recorded by 16 courageous Russian women whose moving testimonies, most of them written in secret and at great personal risk, are presented here.

    Civil War, African American, African and Muslim history in particular. It is the story of an African Muslim, born Mohammed Ali Ben Said, who was enslaved on three continents, mastered nine languages, traveled to over thirty cities, came to America a free man and fought in the U.S. Civil War from 1863-1865 both as a corporal and a sergeant before going on to start schools for Blacks in the South and in his words show the world the possibilities that may be accomplished by the African … and stimulate some at least of my people to systematic efforts in the direction of mental culture and improvement. The discovery of this book has been described as an astounding discovery and achievement, and a significant addition to the canon of African-American writing. It is edited and introduced by Precious Rasheeda Muhammad, who discovered this overlooked text and reintroduced it to the world as the first publication of Journal of Islam in America Press (JIAP), a division of Sojourners' Truth Publishing Ltd (STPL). Ms. Muhammad is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and founder/CEO of STPL.

    This book, translated into English, presents a history of the civilisations along the Silk Road, including the Sarmatians in the first century AD, the Turks and Mongols, discussing aspects such as trade, money, the aristocracy and lower classes, religion, city life, as well as excavated material and sites.

    This book traces the development of Ivan's positive image, placing it in the context of Stalin's campaign for patriotism. In addition to historians' images of Ivan, the author examines literary and artistic representations, including Sergei Eisenstein's famous film Ivan the Terrible, banned for its depiction of the tsar which was interpreted as an allegorical criticism of Stalin.

    Petersburg's erratic and confused diplomacy. The key to understanding tsarist involvement in East Asia, he explains, is to examine the ideas of those who competed to impose their visions of destiny on the Pacific. Drawing from previously inaccessible archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Schimmelpenninck presents a new approach to understanding the causes of the Russo-Japanese War. He begins with lively sketches of Tsar Nicholas II and the four leading proponents of expansion in East Asia­—famous Inner Asia explorer Nikolai Przhevalskii, Sinophile newspaper publisher Prince Esper Ukhtomskii, Finance Minister Sergei Witte, and War Minister Aleksei Kuropatkin. In each case, ideologies of empire are explored in the context of both European and Russian thought. Toward the Rising Sun goes on to reinterpret tsarist prewar democracy—from Russia's involvement in East Asia during the 1890s to Admiral Togo's surprise attack at Port Arthur in 1904—using extensive archival sources. Throughout, Schimmelpenninck demonstrates the ties between ideas and policy. Interweaving intellectual and cultural history with international perspectives, he addresses an important aspect of Russian national identity at a crucial point in history and helps to elucidate the struggle between East and West that continues in Russia today.

    Werth considers these large questions in his survey of imperial Russian rule in the vast Volga-Kama region. First conquered in the sixteenth century, the Volga-Kama lands were by the nineteenth century both part of the Russian heartland and resolutely "other" the home of a mix of Slavic, Finnic, and Turkic peoples where the urge to assimilate was always counterbalanced by determined efforts to preserve cultural and religious differences. The Volga-Kama thus poses the dilemmas of empire in especially complex and telling ways. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, Werth untangles and reconstructs this complicated history, focusing on the ways in which the tsarist state and Orthodox missions used conversion in their ongoing (and regularly frustrated) efforts to transform the region's Muslim and animist populations into imperial, Orthodox citizens. He shows that the regime became less concerned with religion and more concerned with secular attributes as the marker of cultural differences, an emphasis that would change dramatically in the early years of Soviet rule."

    Only with the advent of glasnost in the 1980s did the tight lid of secrecy placed on the entire episode by the Soviets begin slowly to lift.

    British and American troops were poised to cross the River Rhine in the west, while in the East the vast Soviet war machine was steam-rolling the soldiers of the Third Reich back towards the capital, Berlin. Even in retreat, the German Army was still a force to be reckoned with and vigorously defended every last bridge, castle, town and village against the massive Russian onslaught. Tony Le Tissier has interviewed a wide range of former German Army and SS soldiers to provide ten vivid first-hand accounts of the fighting retreat that, for one soldier, ended in Hitler's Chancellery building in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945. The dramatic descriptions of combat are contrasted with insights into the human dimension of these desperate battles, reminding the reader that many of the German soldiers whose stories we read shared similar values to the average British 'Tommy' or the American GI and were not all crazed Nazis. Illustrated with photographs of the main characters and specially commissioned maps identifying the location and course of the battles, With Our Backs to Berlin is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in the final days of the Second World War.

    The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committe to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremilin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account o