Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that will stay with him until the end of his days. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to St. Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the czar, in the early twentieth century—a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution. As Georgy overturns the most painful stone of all, we uncover the story of the house of special purpose.

    The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July sixteenth to seventeenth, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded. In the vivid style of a TV documentary, Helen Rappaport reveals both the atmosphere inside the family's claustrophobic prison and the political maneuverings of those who wished to save--or destroy--them. With the watching world and European monarchies proving incapable of saving the Romanovs, the narrative brings this tragic story to life in a compellingly new and dramatic way, culminating in a bloody night of horror in a cramped basement room.

    It would take some time for the scales to fall from her eyes. Over the next 17 years Kim discovered a Russia few tourists see. She ate some of the world's worst food, went to places few of us would venture, made good friends and met a lot of seriously dodgy people. On collective farms and on 40-hour train journeys, at red carpet parties and in marriage agencies, on nuclear bases and in the frozen wastes of Siberia, she navigated the country's changing fortunes, bearing witness to the horrific events of war, nuclear accidents, drug and alcohol addiction and ethnic rivalries. She even tried to make herself into a good Russian woman, abandoning her uniform of jeans, boots and Russian prison coat for heels and a skin-tight dress. RED SQUARE BLUES a full-blooded charge through a crumbling empire as it lurches from dark power to open society and back again. It is an eye-opening portrait of an eternally surprising country, leavened with the kind of bone-dry humour only life in a repressive police state can produce.

    His memoir of the Revolution and the years that followed constitute one of the most powerful testimonies of the events of the time.

    These cultural warriors sought to recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern nation but as a nation of moderns.Kenneth Moss offers the first comprehensive look at this fascinating moment in Jewish and Russian history. He examines what these numerous would-be cultural revolutionaries, such as El Lissitzky and Haim Nahman Bialik, meant by a new Jewish culture, and details their fierce disagreements but also their shared assumptions about what culture was and why it was so important. In close readings of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian texts, he traces how they sought to realize their ideals in practice as writers, artists, and thinkers in the burgeoning cultural centers of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. And he reveals what happened to them and their ideals as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over cultural life.Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.

    Morrison’s assignment is to work with British agent Sidney Reilly to kidnap Tsar Nicholas II and remove him from Russia before he can sabotage the upcoming Portsmouth Peace conference.The mission goes awry and Morrison is captured and sentenced to death. Through a quirk of fate, he is instead sent to the infamous Russian prison on Solovetsky Island. There, his increasingly violent nature eventually allows him to dominate the camp as “Moryak” (Russian for Sailor). He soon catches the attention of the Bolshevik prisoners and their growing interactions come to have devastating effects on the evolving revolution in Russia, as well as the Allied war effort as the world descends into the chaos of World War I.As events unfold and secrets are unveiled in an uncanny political intrigue, Moryak in fact tells the life story of one man’s struggle for acceptance, him finding his place and finding himself.