Book picks similar to
Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since World War II by David MacFadyen
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Mea Culpa: The Election Essays
Michael Cohen - 2020
For the first time, fans of Cohen’s hit podcast, Mea Culpa, can now read the very best of his essays and political analysis from the show all in once place. This book serves as a snapshot of an incredibly dark 50 days in the run up to the most divisive election in modern history. With his signature wit and New Yawk sensibility, get inside the head of Donald J. Trump from the man who knew him best.
God, Trump, and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What's at Stake for Christians if He Loses
Stephen E. Strang - 2020
Evangelicals who recognized this backed him more than any other presidential candidate in history. Heading into 2020, the stakes in his reelection are even higher. This election, nine months after this book releases, is a new fight for the soul of America. Stephen E. Strang makes the case that God wants America to be great because God has raised up America—beginning with our Founding Fathers—to be a beacon of light and hope for the world. We’ve been the nation with religious liberty that has supported those who have spread the gospel around the world.In this book Strang looks at the election, Trump, and America from a spiritual perspective and helps Christians (and others) see God’s hand at work. This book is as much about God and His purposes as about Donald Trump. But it is also an articulate, impassioned apologetic about why all Christians must support this imperfect president, because he has God’s blessing and because the destiny of America is riding on his reelection. This book also explores why he might lose, if his base is overconfident and doesn’t vote or if his opponents are dishonest enough to steal the election.God, Trump, and the 2020 Election is an inside look at how the political climate is affected by spiritual warfare—an important subject for Bible-believing Christians. The satanic schemes are so brazen on key issues that the book was written to explain what’s at stake. Strang believes that the intersection of faith and politics needs to be part of the national discussion about the division in our country.Other Books By Stephen E. Strang:God and Donald Trump (2017) ISBN-13: 978-1629994864Trump Aftershock (2018)ISBN-13: 978-1629995557
The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Walter Rodney - 2018
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.
The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020
Tim Weiner - 2020
With vivid storytelling and riveting insider accounts, Weiner traces the roots of political warfare – the conflict America and Russia have waged with espionage, sabotage, diplomacy and disformation – from 1945 until 2020. America won the cold war, but Russia is winning today. Vladimir Putin helped to put his chosen candidate in the White House with a covert campaign that continues to this moment. Putin’s Russia has revived Soviet-era intelligence operations gaining ever more potent information from—and influence over—the American people and government. Yet the US has put little power into its defense. This has put American democracy in peril. Weiner takes us behind closed doors, illuminating Russian and American intelligence operations and their consequences. To get to the heart of what is at stake and find potential solutions, he examines long-running 20th century CIA operations, the global political machinations of the Soviet KGB around the world, the erosion of American political warfare after the Cold War, and how 21st century Russia has kept the cold war alive. The Folly and the Glory is an urgent call to our leaders and citizens to understand the nature of political warfare – and to change course before it’s too late.
Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War
Stephen F. Cohen - 2009
Cohen challenges conventional wisdom about the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Reexamining leaders from Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin's preeminent opponent, and Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and his rival Yegor Ligachev, Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives and that their tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today. Cohen's ramifying arguments include that Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; that the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and that the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. This is revisionist history at its best, compelling readers to rethink fateful events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the possibilities ahead.In his new epilogue, Cohen expands his analysis of U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia, tracing its development in the Clinton and Obama administrations and pointing to its initiation of a "new Cold War" that, he implies, has led to a fateful confrontation over Ukraine.
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
Dmitri Volkogonov - 1989
This book, the first of a trilogy written by Volkogonov on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, takes advantage of the author's discoveries to reveal much heretofore unknown knowledge about Stalin's reign of terror in the early days of the Soviet Union. Photos.
A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union
Rick Smolan - 1987
As the Soviet people looked back on decades of war and famine, conquest and achievement, and forward to sweeping changes during a time of new leadership and openness, the photographers were granted unprecedented access to homes, factories, schools and even prisons. They traveled to all 15 Soviet republics and across 11 time zones. They ventured into areas that have been closed to outsiders for centuries, and they came back with candid images of the daily life of the people behind the headlines, capturing a lost Soviet era, the twilight of a country.
The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943
Ivan Maisky - 2015
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.
The Memory Stones: Forgiveness is a Journey in Time
Lewis Pennington - 2021
As guilt and remorse overtake him, he seeks atonement through death on the battlefield. With the help of an ordinary-looking stone given to him by Spoon’s mother, he is transported through time. When he realizes he can redeem himself by altering his actions, he suddenly has hope. The reality-bending journey that ensues takes him to present-day New York City and then back to Civil War-era South Carolina, requiring him to navigate a myriad of desperate challenges. With more than a century of guilt weighing him down, he battles himself, Yankee troops, nature’s elements, and a nemesis that follows him through time. Set against an ominous ticking clock counting toward a deadly showdown that could cost him the love of his life, all odds are stacked against him.
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Catherine Merridale - 2005
They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan -- as the ordinary Russian soldier was called -- remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Soviet Union Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure.A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.
Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia
Chris Miller - 2018
In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles have guided Putin's economic policies? What patterns can be discerned? In this new analysis of Putin's Russia, Chris Miller examines its economic policy and the tools Russia's elite have used to achieve its goals. Miller argues that despite Russia's corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin's economic strategy has been surprisingly successful.Explaining the economic policies that underwrote Putin's two-decades-long rule, Miller shows how, at every juncture, Putinomics has served Putin's needs by guaranteeing economic stability and supporting his accumulation of power. Even in the face of Western financial sanctions and low oil prices, Putin has never been more relevant on the world stage.
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him
Donald Rayfield - 2004
The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin’s secret police. Now, in his harrowing new book, Donald Rayfield probes the lives, the minds, the twisted careers, and the unpunished crimes of Stalin’s loyal assassins.Founded by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka–the Extraordinary Commission–came to life in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Spreading fear in a time of chaos, the Cheka proved a perfect instrument for Stalin’s ruthless consolidation of power. But brutal as it was, the Cheka under Dzerzhinsky was amateurish compared to the well-oiled killing machines that succeeded it. Genrikh Iagoda’s OGPU specialized in political assassination, propaganda, and the manipulation of foreign intellectuals. Later, the NKVD recruited a new generation of torturers. Starting in 1938, terror mastermind Lavrenti Beria brought violent repression to a new height of ingenuity and sadism.As Rayfield shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists. Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mandelstam were all caught in Stalin’s web–courted, toyed with, betrayed, and then ruthlessly destroyed. In bringing to light the careers, personalities, relationships, and “accomplishments” of Stalin’s key henchmen and their most prominent victims, Rayfield creates a chilling drama of the intersection of political fanaticism, personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power spanning half a century.Though Beria lost his power–and his life–after Stalin’s death in 1953, the fundamental methods of the hangmen maintained their grip into the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Rayfield argues, the tradition of terror, far from disappearing, has emerged with renewed vitality under Vladimir Putin. Written with grace, passion, and a dazzling command of the intricacies of Soviet politics and society, Stalin and the Hangmen is a devastating indictment of the individuals and ideology that kept Stalin in power.
Ukraine: A History
Orest Subtelny - 1988
In the years since we have seen the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the restoration of Ukraine's independence - a time of celebration for Ukrainians throughout the world, and of tumultuous change for those in the homeland.With this new edition of "Ukraine: A History," Subtelny revises the story up to the spring of 2000. A new chapter focuses on the achievements and failures of the new state and society in international affairs, internal politics, and economic and social development.Third edition: ISBN 0-8020-4871-4 / 9780802048714 (cloth)Third edition: ISBN 0-8020-8390-0 / 9780802083906 (paper)Third edition: ISBN 1282033956 / 9781282033955 / 9786612033957 (mass market hardcover)Third edition: ISBN 6612033959 / 1442682825 / 9781442682825 (mass market paperback)
The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
S.A. Smith - 2002
It examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole--on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, youth. Its centralconcern is to understand how one structure of domination was replaced by another. The book registers the primacy of politics, but situates political developments firmly in the context of massive economic, social, and cultural change. Since the fall of Communism there has been much reflection on thesignificance of the Russian Revolution. The book rejects the currently influential, liberal interpretation of the revolution in favor of one that sees it as rooted in the contradictions of a backward society which sought modernization and enlightenment and ended in political tyranny.
Faisal
Rebecca Stefoff - 1989
A biography of the Saudi Arabian king who ruled from 1964 until his assassination in 1975 and who became, during his reign, an important world leader through his control of his country's vast oil resources.