Goulden, Washington Times   “Satter . . . persuasively supplies evidence for his claim that a series of residential bombings in 1999 were part of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, who used them as a smoke screen to invade Chechnya and catapult himself to the presidency.”—Publisher’s Weekly   In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. The Moscow Times said it was not surprising he was expelled, “it was surprising it took so long.” Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechens and brought Putin to power, were actually carried out by the Russian FSB security police.   In this book, Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his successor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appearance of a pluralist state. As the threat represented by Russia becomes increasingly clear, Satter’s description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.

    Locked in a complex, uniquely Russian partnership, Berezovsky and Abramovich battled their way through the “Wild East” of Russia with Berezovsky acting as the younger man’s krysha — literally, his roof, his protector.Written with the heart-stopping pacing of a thriller—but even more compelling because it is true—this story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a rarefied world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky’s krysha, Abramovich built one of Russia’s largest oil companies from the ground up and in exchange made cash deliveries—including 491 million dollars in just one year. But their relationship frayed when Berezovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin in the media—and had to flee to the UK. Abramovich continued to prosper. Dead bodies trailed Berezovsky’s footsteps, and threats followed him to London, where an associate of his died painfully and famously of Polonium poisoning. Then Berezovsky himself was later found dead, declared a suicide.Exclusively sourced, capturing a momentous period in recent world history, Once Upon a Time in Russia is at once personal and political, offering an unprecedented look into the wealth, corruption, and power behind what Graydon Carter called “the story of our age.”

    The Russian command structure was hopelessly confused, their generals old and incompetent, the Tsar cautious and uncertain. The Russian naval defeat at Tsushima was as farcical as it was complete. The Japanese had defeated a big European power, and the lessons for the West were there for all to see, had they cared to do so. From this curious war, so unsafely ignored for the most part by the military minds of the day, Richard Connaughton has woven a fascinating narrative to appeal to readers at all levels.

    Its uniquely qualified author, a diplomat and historian who represented this country as our Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan believes like Thucydides that the history of the past is our best source of guidance for the present. Mr. Kennan’s narrative takes the reader through three decades of the most profound violence and change, tracing diplomatic relations between the Western powers and the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the end of World War II. At every stage of the story Mr. Kennan points up the successive dilemmas, sometimes leading to tragedy, which grew out of ignorance and mutual distrust. From the deposition of the Russian Tsar in 1917 to the illusions and errors of 1945, one confrontation after another has expanded from misunderstanding to hostility. The Allied intervention in Russia, into which we muddled ourselves in 1918 while our gaze was fixed on winning the first World War in Europe; the Russian fixation on their domestic revolution at the expense of waging the war against Germany; the conflicting and short-sighted aims of the Western statesmen at the Versailles conference in 1919; the incredible Western stuffiness (the only word for it) which drove a renascent Germany into Russia’s arms at Rapallo in 1922; Stalin’s bottomless mistrust, not only of foreign statesmen, but of his own most intimate colleagues in Moscow, which hurled Russia into the bloody purges of 1934-1938; the Russian cupidity in China; the fantastic yet grimly tragic story of events leading up to the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939, and the cynical piracy which Hitler and Stalin practised on each other thereafter; and the unquenchable innocence governing the actions of Roosevelt and the Western military leaders during World War II and culminating in Yalta — all of these episodes serve Mr. Kennan as the raw material for lessons for the present day. As he takes us with him on this dangerous dramatic path of frustration and misunderstanding, Mr. Kennan pauses to illuminate the hazards attendant upon all summit meetings; to speculate on the perennial fantasy inherent in Western notions about China; to question the extent to which world events can be controlled from any central point, whether it be Moscow or Washington; to comment on the havoc raised by the conduct of two World Wars with the objective of unconditional surrender; to etch brilliant portraits of such figures as Woodrow Wilson, Rathenau, Lenin, Curzon, Chicherin, Stalin, Molotov, Hitler, Ribbentrop, Roosevelt and those others who on both sides have been entrusted with our destinies for the last forty-five years. The result is a narrative which the publishers are proud to present as a world-significant contribution to history. It will be read with fascination and with profit by both the specialist and the intelligent general reader—and it is urgently needed at a time when the Soviet historians are fabricating their interpretations of these very years in a way that is deeply discreditable to the free world.

    A barbarous, volatile feudal tsar with a taste for torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government and science; a statesman of vision and colossal significance: Peter the Great embodied the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Russia while being at the very forefront of her development.Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend - including his 'incognito' travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, unscrupulous prince who rose to power through Peter's friendship. Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life.

    In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.

    Its reign ended with the execution of Nicholas II and Alexandra in the early 20th century. Noted Russian scholar W. Bruce Lincoln has portrayed the achievement, significance and high drama of the Dynasty as no previous book has done. His use of rare archival materials has allowed him to present a portrait of the Romanovs based on their own writings and those of the persons who knew them.PrefaceAcknowledgmentsA Note on Russian Names and DatesPrologueMuscovite beginnings (1613-1689)Tsars and tsarinas In the eye of the storm The politics of Muscovy The rise of an empire (1689-1796) Eighteenth-century emperors & empresses An imperial city in the makingFrom debauchery to philosophy Imperial aspirations Empire triumphant (1796-1894) The imperial dynasty The new faces of St. PetersburgFrom golden age to iron ageThe colossus of the north The last emperor (1894-1917) Nicky and Sunny: the last Romanovs The approach of disaster Days of war and revolution The last days of the RomanovsNotes and ReferencesWorks CitedIndex

    The relentless and unstoppable German advances that had seen the panzers sweep hundreds of miles into Russia was finally brought to a halt. The elite German 6th Army was first fought to a standstill, then surrounded and forced to surrender.Over 1.5 million people lost their lives during the six months of fighting, many of them civilians caught up in the campaign. For the first time in the war, the German army had been defeated on the field of battle. Before Stalingrad the Russians never won; after Stalingrad they could not lose.This book looks at the titanic struggle that ended in the total destruction of the second city of the Soviet Union, the greatest battle the world has ever seen.

    How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year, of their intrigues, negotiations, conflicts and catastrophes. From familiar names like Lenin and Trotsky to their opponents Kornilov and Kerensky; from the byzantine squabbles of urban activists to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire; from the revolutionary railroad Sublime to the ciphers and static of coup by telegram; from grand sweep to forgotten detail.Historians have debated the revolution for a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of literature can be daunting. But here is a book for those new to the events, told not only in their historical import but in all their passion and drama and strangeness. Because as well as a political event of profound and ongoing consequence, Miéville reveals the Russian Revolution as a breathtaking story.From the Hardcover edition.

    Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

    The dreamer behind this great Imperial vision was Nikolai Rezanov – diplomat, adventurer, courtier, millionaire and gambler. His quest to plant Russian colonies from Siberia to California led him to San Francisco, where he was captivated by Conchita, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor, who embodied his dreams of both love and empire. From the glittering court of Catherine the Great to the wilds of the New World, Matthews conjures a brilliantly original portrait of one of Russia's most eccentric Empire-builders.

    From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Russian Revolution, the tsarist regime exiled more than one million prisoners and their families beyond the Ural Mountains to Siberia.Daniel Beer's new book, The House of the Dead, brings to life both the brutal realities of an inhuman system and the tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it. This is the vividly told history of common criminals and political radicals, the victims of serfdom and village politics, the wives and children who followed husbands and fathers, and of fugitives and bounty-hunters.Siberia served two masters: colonisation and punishment. In theory, exiles would discover the virtues of self-reliance, abstinence and hard work and, in so doing, they would develop Siberia's natural riches and bind it more firmly to Russia. In reality, the autocracy banished an army not of hardy colonists but of half-starving, desperate vagabonds. The tsars also looked on Siberia as creating the ultimate political quarantine from the contagions of revolution. Generations of rebels - republicans, nationalists and socialists - were condemned to oblivion thousands of kilometres from European Russia. Over the nineteenth century, however, these political exiles transformed Siberia's mines, prisons and remote settlements into an enormous laboratory of revolution.This masterly work of original research taps a mass of almost unknown primary evidence held in Russian and Siberian archives to tell the epic story both of Russia's struggle to govern its monstrous penal colony and Siberia's ultimate, decisive impact on the political forces of the modern world.

    April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile—originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead—and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour—ten times faster than a rifle bullet—Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet. Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire.Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama of one of humanity’s greatest adventures – to the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.

    Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise. Some muster cunning and cynicism to extract all manner of benefits and privileges from those in power. Others, finding themselves to be less adept, are left broken and demoralized. What binds them together is the tangled web of dilemmas and contradictions they face.Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best--or only--realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country's main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood. By showing how citizens shape their lives around the demands of a capricious and frequently repressive state--as often by choice as under threat of force--Yaffa offers urgent lessons about the true nature of modern authoritarianism.

    For the first time, seven Soviet admirals, along with leading naval historian Dr. Gary Weir, reveal the successful spying missions, the technological breakthroughs, the confrontations with U.S. forces, and the undersea disasters that killed many hundreds of sailors.With decades of experience on submarines or commanding submarine fleets, these seven senior admirals, many highly decorated, give us the inside stories. They detail the undersea successes such as the blockade of the U.S. submarine base in Bangor, Washington, and the innovative surveillance techniques they developed to trail the U.S. Sixth fleet in the Mediterranean. They reveal the development of the first nuclear submarines, profiling Dr. Peregudov, the father of the Soviet nuclear submarine and the internecine battles among Soviet bureaucrats that led to the deaths of many Russian sailors. And they give first hand accounts of deadly confrontations, such as the sinking of K-219, off Bermuda and the collision of USS Taurog and the Soviet K-108, including unpublished photos of the incident's aftermath. Rising Tide also reveals the many catastrophes and the occasional heroic rescues, and answers many questions surrounding the sensational loss of the Kursk, the most advanced vessel in the Russian fleet.Covering submarines from the first advanced diesel subs in the 1950s to the Kursk in 2000, with the authority only senior naval officials could deliver, Rising Tide is the complete story of the Soviet side of the gripping, secret life of the submariners in the Cold War.