It was not until he discovered 30,000 victims were massacred by Nazi forces in his hometown of Berdichev - including his own mother - that he confronted his own Jewishness and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust. Determined to tell the story of Soviet complicity with the Nazi extermination of Russian Jewry, Grossman was labeled an enemy of the state by both Stalin and Khrushchev - barely escaping Stalin's death squads - and his exposes were suppressed and buried deep within the Communist Party's archives. For nearly thirty years Grossman's writings - including a fictional treatment of the Berdichev massacre in his novel Life and Fateremained hidden from the world, little known outside of a small circle of Russian dissidents. Finally published in the late 1980s, they provided crucial ammunition to those fighting to overthrow the Soviet regime in 1991. Now, drawing on archival materials that have become available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, John Garrard and Carol Garrard have written an eloquent biography of Vasily Grossman. More than just a vivid portrait of a writer's life in a totalitarian, anti-Semitic state, The Bones of Berdichev provides new evidence concerning the origins of the Holocaust itself. The authors show how the Holocaust began not in the ghettos and death camps of Poland, but on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, with the knowledge and cooperation of many Soviet citizens who aided and profited from the murder of their Jewish neighbors. The Soviet authorities in turn suppressed those actions - providing chilling evidence to support Grossman's conclusion that the two formerly warring German and Soviet totalitarian states were in fact mirror images of each other.

    Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music.Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity--"Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, " and "Les Noces." Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"--the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art--and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music.Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed.Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

    In a substantial new piece for this edition, Mr. Ligachev outlines the political agenda of today’s communist coalition—the establishment of a new Soviet Union, with strong economic and political integration of its member-states.Yegor Ligachev, a seasoned Party boss from Siberia, made a solid career for himself in the capital during the Khrushchev era, but, following Khrushchev’s ouster, chose to retreat to the provinces. In 1985, his political patrons brought him back to Moscow to help them build a dynamic new leadership team under Mikhail Gorbachev. The two reform-minded communists launched an effort to inject life and energy into the Party, economy, and society through a series of liberalizing measures. But when Ligachev saw the reforms moving into a revolutionary phase that could result in the Party’s loss of control over the helm of state, he found himself increasingly siding with the opposition.In this gripping book, Ligachev describes the evolving confrontation between opposing forces at high-level Party meetings and sessions of the Politburo as well as in less formal conversations. Along the way, he gives revealing glimpses not only of Gorbachev but also of Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Boris Yeltsin, and other top leaders. Notorious events such as the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi and the Gdlyan/Ivanov affair—in which, Ligachev argues, he was unjustly implicated—are also highlighted.