In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life. From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate portrait of an era that make sense out of the fascinating, complicated, and profoundly influential years of the 1930s.

    But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes — starting with the British Empire.Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia whose mission was to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world. They were an eccentric cast of characters, led by Mansfield Cumming, a one-legged, monocle-wearing former sea captain, and included novelist W. Somerset Maugham, beloved children’s author Arthur Ransome, and the dashing, ice-cool Sidney Reilly, the legendary Ace of Spies and a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Cumming’s network would pioneer the field of covert action and would one day become MI6.Living in disguise, constantly switching identities, they infiltrated Soviet commissariats, the Red Army, and Cheka (the feared secret police), and would come within a whisker of assassinating Lenin. As Giles Milton chronicles for the first time, in a sequence of bold exploits that stretched from Moscow to the central Asian city of Tashkent, this unlikely band of agents succeeded in foiling Lenin’s plot for global revolution.

    After his father was brutally murdered, Frederick left the South and worked as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, andin a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the "Sultan of Jazz." However, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick s own extravagance landed him in debtor s prison. He died in Constantinople in 1928."

    As World War I drags on, political turmoil slowly paralyzes the Empire. The Czar abdicates. His replacements are ineffectual and incompetent. Violence sweeps the country. One by one, institutions collapse under the weight of chaos and terror. The Bolsheviks, a small group of communist radicals initially supported by German intelligence, launch a revolution that sends the country into a tailspin. The nation is plunged into a terrible civil war which by its end will leave over 10 million Russians dead, with millions more scattered across the globe.Leading the anti-communist "White" forces against the new "Red" army to the end was Pyotr Wrangel. Wrangel, a career cavalry officer who fought with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War and World War i, found himself at the center of various intrigues in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. After narrowly escaping death at the hands of a Bolshevik execution squad, Wrangel joined the Volunteer Army of General Denikin. Although Wrangel accomplished the impossible repeatedly, leading his tiny cavalry force to victory over communist units many times its size, he was unable to persuade Denikin to abandon an ill-planned assault on Moscow. After that offensive failed, the Volunteer Army collapsed.Widely recognized for his tactical brilliance and unimpeachable character, Wrangel accepted the burden of command over the last remnant of anti-communist forces. Under his leadership the outnumbered and out-gunned White Army launched a devastating counterattack, retaking Crimea and the surrounding area from the Reds. There, he and his remaining men staged a heroic defense while attempting to obtain international support. After Russia was abandoned by its former allies and his position became untenable, Wrangel personally directed the evacuation of his Army and thousands of civilian refugees.Wrangel published his memoirs in 1928, shortly before his death. Although the book was translated into English in 1929, it eventually fell out-of-print. For more than 60 years, no new copies were made. The few remaining used editions became unaffordable for the average reader. Mystery Grove Publishing Company is proud to make the memoirs of one of the greatest champions in the fight for civilization available to the public once again.