A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain’s drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, Churchill’s rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front.   Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.

    Such descriptions are based largely on prejudice, ignorance and wilful animosity. This book is an attempt to provide a more balanced evaluation and to examine GDR-style socialism in terms of what we can learn from it. The authors, while not ignoring the real deficiencies of GDR society, emphasise the many aspects that were positive, and demonstrate that alternative ways of organising society are possible. This volume is an updated and much expanded edition of their booklet first published in 2009. The authors have added more detail on how the GDR came into being as a separate state, and about how society functioned and what values determined the every-day life of its citizens. There is also a whole new section on what happened in the aftermath of unification, particularly to the economy. While unification brought East Germans access to a more affluent society, freedom to travel throughout the world and the end to an over-centralised political system, it also brought with it unemployment, social breakdown and loss of hope, particularly in the once thriving rural areas.

    Wells visited the Soviet Union in 1934 and on July 23 he interviewed Joseph Stalin. The conversation, lasting from 4 p.m. to 6:50 p.m., was recorded by C. Oumansky, head of the Press Bureau of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. The text here has been approved by Mr. Wells. -- Note to the original print edition

    Traumatic upheavals--war, economic collapse, famine--transformed local society and brought new groups to positions of power and authority in Central Asia, just as the new revolutionary state began to create new institutions that redefined the nature of power in the region. This was also a time of hope and ambition in which local actors seized upon the opportunity presented by the revolution to reshape their society. As the intertwined passions of nation and revolution reconfigured the imaginations of Central Asia's intellectuals, the region was remade into national republics, of which Uzbekistan was of central importance.Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.

    Surveying the great power rivalry between the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for control over the Western and Far Eastern boundaries of Eurasia, Alfred J. Rieber provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of Soviet policy from the Revolution through to the beginning of the Cold War. Paying particular attention to the Soviet Union, the book charts how these powers adopted similar methods to the old ruling elites to expand and consolidate their conquests, ranging from colonisation and deportation to forced assimilation, but applied them with a force that far surpassed the practices of their imperial predecessors.

     The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia.             The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.

    In it, researchers found evidence that Leon Trotsky deliberately lied many times and about many people and events. Other evidence of Trotsky's lies comes from his own writings and in documents from former Soviet archives.Drawing upon primary sources from the Harvard Trotsky Archive and from former Soviet archives Grover Furr subjects the testimony of Moscow Trials defendants to a source-critical check and verification. His conclusion: their testimony is genuine, reflecting what the defendants chose to say. The same primary sources, plus Trotsky's own writings, demonstrate that Trotsky lied about virtually everything concerning the Soviet Union in his writings about the three Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938, his writings on the assassination of Sergei Kirov, and in his testimony to the Dewey Commission in 1937.This book will revolutionize the understanding of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky’s writings and activities during the 1930s must be seen in an entirely new light.The results of this research reveal much about Trotsky’s conspiracies in the 1930s.

    Memoirs have been produced not only by politicians – first-hand participants in the events, Yeltsin himself penned three volumes of recollections – but also assistants, press secretaries, political analysts, journalists, MPs, retired members of Gorbachev’s Politburo, public figures now long forgotten, generals of special services and security service staff. Boris Minaev started working on Boris Yeltsin’s biography when the politician was still alive. In his work the author has used not only publicly accessible documents that have been printed or otherwise made accessible but also interviews that are published for the first time. In this unique biography of the first President of the Russian Federation author consistently describes events of Yeltsin's life, capturing and conveying his unique personality with all the contradictions of his character and principles that determined public attitude towards Yeltsin. Some saw him as an outstanding builder of the new Russia, others - as a destroyer of the great state. But whoever he was de facto, the decade of his rule shook the world. *** Boris Minayev is a Russian writer and correspondent. Minayev has worked for many Russian venues and is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Medved. Boris Minayev is known for his children’s books and novels for mature readers. One of the most famous works of his that is being widely quoted in the media is his biography of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin, first published in the series ‘Lives of Extraordinary People’. This title has been realised by a team of the following dedicated professionals: Translated by Svetlana Payne, Maxim Hodak - Максим Ходак (Publisher), Max Mendor - Макс Мендор (Director), Yana Kovalskaya and Camilla Stein.

    This book is a reevaluation of the history of this alliance and is the first book published in English to examine it from a Chinese perspective.

    Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

    When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition.Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.