This bonus piece was never published in English and comes exclusively on Amazon.com!Note: This is a standalone epilogue that has nothing to do with the comic bookA new chapter that turns upside down the entire story of Metro 2033 and that promise a continuation to the breathtaking story of survival and struggle for a future set in the catacombs of the subway system in post-apocalyptic Moscow. This epilogue is a link to the upcoming METRO: LAST LIGHT video game, to the yet untranslated METRO 2034 and to-be-written METRO 2035! An absolute must-read for all those who loved the book and the game! The original story that inspired both the METRO 2033 and METRO: LAST LIGHT video games! An international bestseller, translated into 35 languages.Set in the shattered subway of a post apocalyptic Moscow, Metro 2033 is a story of intensive underground survival where the fate of mankind rests in your hands.In 2013 the world was devastated by an apocalyptic event, annihilating almost all mankind and turning the earth’s surface into a poisonous wasteland. A handful of survivors took refuge in the depths of the Moscow underground, and human civilization entered a new Dark Age.The year is 2033. An entire generation has been born and raised underground, and their besieged Metro Station-Cities struggle for survival, with each other, and the mutant horrors that await outside.Artyom was born in the last days before the fire. Having never ventured beyond his Metro Station-City limits, one fateful event sparks a desperate mission to the heart of the Metro system, to warn the remnants of mankind of a terrible impending threat. His journey takes him from the forgotten catacombs beneath the subway to the desolate wastelands above, where his actions will determine the fate of mankind.

    David King, an expert on Soviet art and an internationally acclaimed graphic designer, selected the more than 165 posters reproduced here from his own unparalleled collection. Constructivist posters, socialist advertising, 1920s film posters, classic photomontage, the heroic posters of the Great Patriotic War, biting political satire, and the cult of personality of the Stalin years are all represented, as are artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, Dimitri Moor, Viktor Deni, and Nina Vatolina. King sets the posters in context and profiles the art directors and creative directors whose vision played such a vital role in creating these striking works.

    It follows his emergence from Marxism, but draws on Marxist sources and arguments. It precedes his move to Thomism, but already draws on Augustine and Aquinas. Because of its watershed nature, it has gained a wide readership in various fields but it treats a variety of issues in ways that are unfamiliar either to Marxists schooled in the social sciences or to Thomists schooled in medieval metaphysics.   Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue provides a commentary that will be accessible to students, valuable to scholars, and useful to teachers. Students will find help to navigate the two main arguments of After Virtue, to understand its interpretation of history, and to engage its proposal for a form of ethics and politics that returns to the tradition of the virtues. Scholars will find the book useful as a general guide to MacIntyre's ethics. Teachers will find a book that can help to direct their students' reading and keep classroom discussions focused on the book's central concerns.

    Drawing on extensive archival research, Laura Pontieri reconstructs the dynamics inside Soviet animation studios and the relationships between the animators and the political establishment. Pontieri offers a meticulous study of Soviet animated films of the period, using the world of Soviet animation as a lens for viewing the historical moment of the thaw from a fresh and less conventional point of view.

    Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht's [Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Despite destroying two of these armies outright, severely damaging two others, and encircling the remnants of three of these armies in the Smolensk region, quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly-mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage "softer targets" in the Kiev region. The 'derailment" of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa.This groundbreaking new study, now significantly expanded, exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. The structure of the study is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume, and perhaps a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle.Within the context of Guderian's southward march toward the Kiev region, volume 2 in this series describes in unprecedented detail the Red Army's attempts to thwart German offensive plans by defeating Army Group Center in the Smolensk region with a general counteroffensive by three Red Army fronts. This volume restores to the pages of history two major military operations which, for political and military reasons, Soviet historians concealed from view, largely because both offensives failed. This volume includes: The Northern Flank: Group Stumme's (Third Panzer Group) Advance to Velikie Luki, Toropets, and Zapadnaia Dvina, 22 August-9 September 1941; German Strategic Planning, the Tilt toward Kiev, and Second Panzer Group's Advance Across the Desna River, 22-28 August 1941; The Third Soviet Counteroffensive, including the Western Front's Dukhovshchina Offensive, 26 August-6 September1941, the Reserve Front's El'nia Offensive, 30 August-10 September 1941, and the Briansk Front's Roslavl'-Novozybkov Offensive, 29 August-14 September 1941.Based on the analysis of the vast mass of documentary materials exploited by this study, David Glantz presents a number of important new findings, notably: Soviet resistance to Army Group Center's advance into the Smolensk region was far stronger and more active than the Germans anticipated and historians have previously described; The military strategy Stalin, the Stavka, and Western Main Direction Command pursued was far more sophisticated than previously believed; Stalin, the Stavka, and Timoshenko's Western Main Direction Command employed a strategy of attrition designed to weaken advancing German forces; This attrition strategy inflicted far greater damage on Army Group Center than previously thought and, ultimately, contributed significantly to the Western and Kalinin Fronts' victories over Army Group Center in December 1941.Quite simply, this series breaks new ground in World War II Eastern Front and Soviet military studies.

    This book analyses the politics and economics of the state's efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens' relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project.The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet 'mature socialism' between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of 'stagnation', arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.

    This pathbreaking synthesis reveals a striking continuity in negative stereotypes of Jews, contempt for Judaism, and negation of Jewish national self-determination from the days of Karl Marx to the current left-wing intellectual assault on Israel. World-renowned expert on the history of antisemitism Robert S. Wistrich provides not only a powerful analysis of how and why the Left emerged as a spearhead of anti-Israel sentiment but also new insights into the wider involvement of Jews in radical movements.There are fascinating portraits of Marx, Moses Hess, Bernard Lazare, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and other Jewish intellectuals, alongside analyses of the darker face of socialist and Communist antisemitism. The closing section eloquently exposes the degeneration of leftist anti-Zionist critiques into a novel form of “anti-racist” racism.

    How did the circus—an institution that dethroned figures of authority and refused any orderly narrative structure—become such a cultural mainstay in a state known for blunt and didactic messages? Miriam Neirick argues that the variety, flexibility, and indeterminacy of the modern circus accounted for its appeal not only to diverse viewers but also to the Soviet state. In a society where government-legitimating myths underwent periodic revision, the circus proved a supple medium of communication.     Between 1919 and 1991, it variously displayed the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, the beauty of the new Soviet man and woman, the vulnerability of the enemy during World War II, the prosperity of the postwar Soviet household, and the Soviet mission of international peace—all while entertaining the public with the acrobats, elephants, and clowns. With its unique ability to meet and reconcile the demands of both state and society, the Soviet circus became the unlikely darling of Soviet culture and an entertainment whose usefulness and popularity stemmed from its ambiguity.

    But in 1932, at the outset of the 'socialist realist' period, a new Stalinist music culture was emerging. Between these two dates lies a turbulent period of change which this book charts year by year. It sheds light on the vicious power struggles and ideological wars, the birth of new aesthetic credos, and the gradual increase of Party and state control over music, in the opera houses, the concert halls, the workers' clubs, and on the streets. The book not only provides a detailed and nuanced depiction of the early Soviet musical landscape, but brings it to life by giving voice to the leading actors and commentators of the day. The vibrant public discourse on music is presented through a selection of press articles, reviews and manifestos, all supplied with ample commentary. These myriad sources offer a new context for our understanding of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, while also showing how Western music was received in the USSR. This, however, is only half the story. The other half emerges from the private dimension of this cultural upheaval, traced through the letters, diaries and memoirs left by composers and other major players in the music world. These materials address the beliefs, motivations and actions of the Russian musical intelligentsia during the painful period of their adjustment to the changing demands of the new state. While following the twists and turns of official policies on music, the authors also offer their own explanations for the outcomes. The book offers unprecedented access to primary sources that have been unavailable in English, or which lay unknown on archival shelves. Music and Soviet Power offers cultural history told through documents - both colourful and representative - with an extensive commentary and annotation throughout. MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER is Reader in Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. JONATHAN WALKER, who has a PhD in Musicology, is a freelance writer, teacher and pianist.

    A sophisticated, multidimensional account based on prodigious, cutting edge research, this volume convincingly portrays Eisenhower's private belief that close relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China were inevitable and that careful consideration of the PRC should constitute a critical part of American diplomacy.Tucker provocatively argues that the Eisenhower Administration's hostile rhetoric and tough actions toward China obscure the president's actual views. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, pursued a more nuanced approach, one better suited to China's specific challenges and the stabilization of the global community. Tucker deftly explores the contradictions between Eisenhower and his advisors' public and private positions. Her most powerful chapter centers on Eisenhower's recognition that rigid trade prohibitions would undermine the global postwar economic recovery and push China into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Tucker finds Eisenhower's strategic thinking on Europe and his fear of toxic, anticommunist domestic politics constrained his leadership, making a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward China difficult if not impossible. Consequently, the president was unable to engage congress and the public effectively on China, ultimately failing to realize his own high standards as a leader.

    But that promise remains unfulfilled. Economic collapse, secessionist challenges, civil war and the failure to escape the legacy of Soviet rule - culminating in the 2008 war with Russia - characterize a two-decade struggle to establish democratic institutions and consolidate statehood. Here, Stephen Jones critically analyses Georgia's recent political and economic development, illustrating what its 'transition' has meant, not just for the state, but for its citizens as well. An authoritative and commanding exploration of Georgia since independence, this is an essential read for those interested in the post-Soviet world.