Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe." Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

    Petersburg on the brink of revolution, Sandro Ruzsky, the city’s chief police investigator, returns from exile in Siberia only to be assigned a grisly case: the bodies of a young couple found on the ice of the frozen River Neva, just outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace. Ruzsky’s investigation leads him dangerously close to the royal family and to the woman he loves, and he finds himself confronting both a ruthless killer and the ghosts of his past as he fights desperately to save all that he cares for. With meticulous research and narrative skill Tom Bradby brilliantly re-creates the gilded salons and squalid tenements of St. Petersburg in the last days of the tsars. Evocative and thrilling, The White Russian is a tumultuous story of murder and betrayal in a city at the crossroads of history.

    Russia experts Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Putin is in fact a man of many and complex identities. Drawing on a range of sources, including their own personal encounters, they describe six that are most essential: the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the Case Officer. Understanding Putin's multiple dimensions is crucial for policy-makers trying to decide how best to deal with Russia.Hill and Gaddy trace the identities back to formative experiences in Putin's past, including his early life in Soviet Leningrad, his KGB training and responsibilities, his years as deputy mayor in the crime and corruption-ridden city of St. Petersburg, his first role in Moscow as the "operative" brought in from the outside by liberal reformers in the Kremlin to help control Russia's oligarchs, and his time at the helm of a resurgent Russian state. The authors examine the nature of the political system Putin has built, explaining it as a logical result of these six identities.Vladimir Putin has his own idealized view of himself as CEO of "Russia, Inc." But rather than leading a transparent public corporation, he runs a closed boardroom, not answerable to its stakeholders. Now that his corporation seems to be in crisis, with political protests marking Mr. Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, will the CEO be held accountable for its failings?

    Focusing on the Russian Revolution in its widest sense, Fitzpatrick covers not only the events of 1917 and what preceded them, but the nature of the social transformation brought about by the Bolsheviks after they took power. Making use of a huge amount of previously secret information in Soviet archives and unpublished memoirs, this detailed chronology recounts each monumental event from the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918-1920, through the New Economic Policy of 1921 and the 1929 First Five-Year Plan, to Stalin's revolution from above at the end of the 1920s and the Great Purge of the late 1930s. Lucid and concise, this classic study makes comprehensible the complex events of the revolution.

    Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, and the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over the Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe that no country on earth has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores the belief in exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and shows how Russians have forged a distinct identity rooted in war.While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights off one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior―of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself―and Russia’s victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. Even its defeats, always suffered on behalf of just causes in this telling, have become a source of pride.War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, the factor that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative Russian Empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the pseudo-democratic Russian Federation. Today, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the nation’s war-torn past inflects its self-image is essential to understanding Russia’s sense of place in history and in the world.

    A prophetic play from pre-Revolutionary Russia.

    Churchill called the Eastern Front 'the unknown war' and there is still no Soviet official history of the army's role during the First World War.It was in the East, with Russia in turmoil, that many decisive engagements took place. Norman stone believes that 'the outcome of the battles was dictated by factors that do not always figure in works of military history'. Using a wide range of sources from European and American research centers, he describes the battles of the Eastern Front. Tannenberg, Austria-Hungary's entry into the war, the Russian retreat in the summer of 1915, the role of Lundendorff, the Brusilov offensive - all are carefully examined and substantially reinterpreted.Traditional accounts of the Russian war effort describe an army crippled by shortages of shells and war materials. Norman Stone's analysis shows that German economic superiority has been greatly overestimated. The Russians suffered from a shortage of organizational and administrative ability. Their economy suffered a crisis not of decline but of growth; as a result capitalism, as Western Europe knew it, was killed off in Russia in 1915-16, not in 1917-18. In his final chapter, the author reviews the connection between war and revolution in Tsarist Russia, and suggests new approaches to our understanding of this complex problem.Norman Stone never loses sight of his greater themes and places the conflict in a larger context. He explains the mechanics of revolutionary development and the downfall of the Tsar and thereby throws new light on our interpretation of the war in the West. The book is carefully documented and there are maps of the campaign. As the author writes: 'the book travelled a long way from the battlefields where it began; it may even have become three different books. But total war needs total history, as far as can be managed.'

    These years of civil war in Russia were years when the West strove to understand the new communist regime whilst also seeking to undermine it. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution across Europe at the same time they were seeking trade agreements that might revive their collapsing economy. This book tells the story of these complex interactions in detail, revealing that revolutionary Russia was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars, certainly, but also diplomats, reporters, and dissidents, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen, and casual travelers. This is the story of these characters: everyone from the ineffectual but perfectly positioned Somerset Maugham to vain writers and revolutionary sympathizers whose love affairs were as dangerous as their politics. Through this sharply observed exposé of conflicting loyalties, we get a very vivid sense of how diverse the shades of Western and Eastern political opinion were during these years.

    Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.

    Earning his PhD in 1966 at the age of 24 and publishing his influential history, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, at 30, Rodney became a leading force of dissent throughout the Caribbean and a lightning rod of controversy. The 1968 Rodney Riots erupted in Jamaica when he was prevented from returning to his teaching post at the University of the West Indies. In 1980, Rodney was assassinated in Guyana, reportedly at the behest of the government. In the mid-’70s, Rodney taught a course on the Russian Revolution at the Universtiy of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. A Pan-Africanist and Marxist, Rodney sought to make sense of the reverberations of the October Revolution in a decolonizing world marked by Third World revolutionary movements. He intended to publish a book based on his research and teaching. Now historians Jesse Benjamin, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Vijay Prashad have edited Rodney’s polished chapters and unfinished lecture notes, presenting the book that Rodney had hoped to publish.The Russian Revolution is a signal event in radical publishing, and will inaugurate Verso Books's standard edition of Walter Rodney’s works.

    While Sputnik immediately shocked the world, its long-term impact was even greater, for it profoundly changed the shape of the twentieth Century.Washington journalist Paul Dickson chronicles the dramatic events and developments leading up to and emanating from the Sputnik's launch a story that can only now be fully told with the recent release of previously classified documents. Sputnik offers a fascinating profile of the early American and Soviet space programs and a strikingly revised picture of the politics and personalities behind the facade of American's fledgling efforts to get into space.Although Sputnik was unmanned, its story is intensely human. Sputnik owed its success to many people, from the earlier visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose rocket theories were ahead of their time, to the Soviet spokesmen strategically positioned around the world on the day the satellite was launched, who created one of the greatest public-relations events of all time. It’s chief designer, however the brillant Sergei Korolev remained a Soviet state secret until after his death.Equally hidden from view was the political intrigue dominating America's early space program, as the military services jockeyed for control and identity in a peacetime world. For years, former Nazi Wernher von Braun, who ran the U.S. Army's missile program, lobbied for his rocket team to be handed responsibility for the first Earth-orbiting satellite. He was outraged that Sputnik beat him and America into space. President Eisenhower, though, was secretly pleased that the Russians had launched first, because by orbiting over the United States, Sputnik established the principle of “freedom of space” that could justify the spy satellites he thought essential to monitor Soviet missile buildup. As Dickson reveals, Eisenhower was, in fact, much more a master of the Sputnik crisis than he appeared to be at the time and in subsequent accounts.

    An intensely private man, Nabokov was uprooted first by the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. Transformed into a permanent wanderer, he did not achieve fame until late in life, with the success of "Lolita." In this first of two volumes, Brian Boyd vividly describes the liberal milieu of the aristocratic Nabokovs, their escape from Russia, Nabokov's education at Cambridge, and the murder of his father in Berlin. Boyd then turns to the years that Nabokov spent, impoverished, in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee, with wife and son, to the U.S.This volume stands on its own as a fascinating exploration of Nabokov's Russian years and Russian worlds, pre-revolutionary and emigre. In the course of his 10 years' work on the biography, Boyd traveled along Nabokov's trail everywhere from Yalta to Palo Alto. The only scholar to have had free access to the Nabokov archives in Montreux and the Library of Congress, he also interviewed at length Nabokov's family and scores of his friends and associates.For the general reader, Boyd offers an introduction to Nabokov the man, his works, and his world. For the specialist, he provides a basis for all future research on Nabokov's life and art, as he dates and describes the composition of all Nabokov's works, published and unpublished. Boyd investigates Nabokov's relation to and his independence from his time, examines the special structures of his mind and thought, and explains the relations between his philosophy andhis innovations of literary strategy and style. At the same time he provides succinct introductions to all the fiction, dramas, memoirs, and major verse; presents detailed analyses of the major books that break new ground for the scholar, while providing easy paths into the works for other readers; and shows the relationship between Nabokov's life and the themes and subjects of his art.

    Now, in Mud and Stars, Wheeler takes us into the heart of Russia. Bypassing the major cities as much as possible, she instead goes to the places that produced Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other giants of Russia's Golden Age. We see the fabled Trigorskoye ("three hills") estate that Pushkin frequented during his exile, now preserved in his honor. We look for Dostoevsky along the waters of Lake Ilmen, site of the only house the restless writer ever owned. We pay tribute to the single stone that remains of Tolstoy's birthplace. The authors' lives and works are woven into Wheeler's descriptions of their historical homes, giving us full, rich portraits of the many diverse Russias from which these writers spoke. As Wheeler travels, she follows local guides, boards with families in modest homestays, eats roe and pelmeni and cabbage soup, invokes recipes from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, learns the language, and observes the weighty pattern of outcry and silence that characterizes life under Putin. Illustrated with both historic images and contemporary snapshots of the people and places that shaped Wheeler's journey, Mud and Stars gives us timely, stunning, deeply personal and wickedly funny insight into a country that has become more important than ever.

    S. Lewis, whose constant aim was to show the twentieth century reader how to read and how to understand old books and manuscripts.

    Religion and philosophy, not economics or politics, determine history and society. Berdyaev takes up the story in the nineteenth century. He traces the lineage of such powerful artists and thinkers as Chaadev, Khomyakov, Kireevksy, Leontyev, Aksakov, Hertzen, Bakunin, all of whom struggled to integrate the polarities of East and West, spirit and matter, and male and female in the Russian soul. This soul, however, is so immense, boundless, and vague that it is incapable of settling for "the halfway kingdom of culture." Demanding all or nothing, alternatively apocalyptic and nihilistic, Russians strove to justify culture and discover Russia's mystical mission. Impatient with the slow processes of history, distrusting all authority and yet haunted by a vision of unity, thinkers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Federov, and Solovyov created an original and vital religious philosophy that culminated in the Russian Renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. The fruit of these great figures, of whom Berdyaev was one (others included Florensky, Bulgakov, Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Blok, and Bely), was cut short by the 1917 Revolution. In recent years, however, their works have been available in self-published (Samizdat) editions. Underground, a great philosophical and spiritual rebirth was occuring. Now they are available again, and the next installment of the Russian idea is being prepared. This book is therefore essential reading for an understanding of the new Russia.