Using a wealth of new material, Moynahan tells the story of the cruelties inflicted by Stalin and Hitler on a city of exquisite beauty and rich cultural history, and the symphony that inspired its survival.

    After turning from Marxism toward Christianity, his 1913 criticism of the Orthodox Church led him to be charged with blasphemy, a crime for which he would have been liable to permanent Siberian exile, though WWI and the 1917 Revolution prevented his coming to trial.While at odds with the Bolsheviks after the revolution, Berdyaev gained appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow in 1920, only to be expelled from the country in 1922 (in the famous “philosophers’ ships”), eventually settling in Paris where he remained till his death in 1948. His corpus includes some 483 signed books and articles, many still unavailable in English.Of his “The Origin of Russian Communism”, Inna Naletova, now at the University of Vienna, wrote in 2001:“In his study of the origin of Russian Communism, Nikolai Berdyaev presented a now classic thesis that the Russian religious mentality and communist ideology have much in common. This commonality, according to Berdyaev, takes its roots not in the Russian Orthodox faith but in Russian sectarian and schismatic psychology. […]“Although Berdyaev’s analysis was focused on Russia of the beginning of the twentieth century (the time of transition between Tsarist rule and the Soviet regime), it provides a valuable illustration to Russia’s contemporary problems. The revolutionary mass movement of the beginning of the last century found its inspiration not only in Western socialist ideas and the misery of Russia’s economic situation, but also in Russian messianic spirituality, in people’s readiness for an apocalyptic solution to social problems, and in their hope for a radical transformation of the whole society and creation of a ‘kingdom on earth.’” (Inna Naletova, Orthodoxy and Gnosticism in Russia; Extraordinary Times, Vol. 11, Vienna 2001; http://www.iwm.at/wp-content/uploads/... )

    Can democracy survive there? What does the future hold for the once expansive, still powerful, Russian nation? Is Soviet Communism truly dead? Top diplomats struggle daily with questions like these. With this course, you can begin investigating them for yourself.LECTURES16 Lectures1. Nicholas II and the Russian Empire2. The Failure of Constitutional Government3. Russia and the First World War4. Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism5. Lenin Comes to Power6. Lenin and the Making of a Bolshevik State7. The Twenties8. Stalin and the "Second October Revolution"9. Stalin and the "Great Terror"10. Stalin, Hitler and the Road to War11. The USSR at War12. Stalin's Last Years13. De-Stalinization14. Gorbachev and Perestroika15. The Disintegration of the USSR16. Rebirth of Russia or the Rebirth of the USSR?

    It was the beginning of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, one of the most brutal campaigns in the history of warfare. Four years later, the victorious Red Army has suffered a loss of seven million lives. Alan Clark's incisive analysis succeeds in explaining how a fighting force that in one two-month period lost two million men was nevertheless able to rally to defeat the Wehrmacht. The Barbarossa campaign included some of the greatest episodes in military history: the futile attack on Moscow in the winter of 1941-42, the siege of Stalingrad, the great Russian offensive beginning in 1944 that would lead the Red Army to the historic meeting with the Americans at the Elbe and on to victory in Berlin.Barbarossa is a classic of miltary history. This paperback edition contains a new preface by the author.

    Now, drawing on sources newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, historian and journalist Chris Bellamy presents the first full account of this deadly conflict.Bellamy outlines the lead-up to the war—in which the fragile alliance between Hitler and Stalin was unceremoniously broken—and takes us headlong into the hostilities. He presents a shocking picture of battle in which the traditional restraints of “civilized” warfare were shed. He makes clear how the Soviets quickly rallied against Hitler, choosing homegrown despotism over foreign domination in a struggle that the Russian people call the Great Patriotic War.Bellamy charts the early gains of the German army, whose advances into Soviet territory were brought to a halt in Moscow in the winter of 1941, and whose defeat was sealed in the Battle of Stalingrad, the most merciless campaign of the bloodiest front. He shows how Soviet men—and women—joined to fight a war whose casualties were later steeply underestimated by their government, and how even the true death toll, at 27 million, does not take into account the millions of lives on both sides that lay shattered in the aftermath.Finally, Bellamy examines the far-reaching consequences of the battle’s outcome—the reverberations of which are still felt today—and argues that the cost of victory was ultimately too much for the Soviet Union to bear.A magisterial study, and an essential addition to our understanding of contemporary world history.

    Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community.Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life.Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.

    Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just seventeen-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit. On arrival at the Eastern Front in late summer 1941, Erwin was assigned to a frontline communications squad attached to 4.Kompanie and soon discovered that survival was a matter of luck - or the protection of a guardian angel. Good fortune finally deserted Erwin on 11 July 1943 when shrapnel sizzled through his lung during the epic Battle of Kursk-Prokhorovka. Following a period of recovery, and promotion to Unterscharfuhrer, Erwin took up a post as machine-gun instructor with the Ausbildung und Ersatz Bataillon, a training unit based close to the eastern section of the Berliner Ring Autobahn. When the Red Army launched its massive assault on the Seelow Heights, Erwin's unit, now incorporated into Regiment Falke, was deployed to the southern flank of the Berlin-Frankfurt Autobahn, close to the River Oder. The German defenses soon crumbled and with the end of the Reich inevitable, Erwin was forced to choose between a struggle for personal survival and the fulfillment of his SS oath of 'loyalty unto death'. From the war on the southern sector of the Eastern Front to a bomb-shattered Berlin populated largely by old men and demoralized lonely women, this candid eyewitness account offers a unique and sometimes surprising perspective on the life of a young Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler volunteer.

    Over steaming samovars, in cramped flats, and on dirt-floors, he has spoken to peasants and bureaucrats, artists and officials. He has studied their customs and their governments and shares his fascinating insights and fresh perspectives with us.

    But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics.In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivanthe Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palaceintrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance.Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for theBolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy intothe future?Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the liquor question remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka'sdevastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges. In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

    van Amerongen - van Straten.

    Between Russia and Germany lay Poland, a nation that had only just recovered its independence after more than a century of foreign oppression. But it was economically and militarily weak and its misguided offensive to liberate the Ukraine in the spring of 1920 laid it open to attack. Egged on by Trotsky, Lenin launched a massive westward advance under the flamboyant Marshal Tukhachevsky. All that Great Britain and France had fought for over four years now seemed at risk. By the middle of August the Russians were only a few kilometers from Warsaw, and Berlin was less than a week's march away. Then the Miracle of the Vistula occurred: the Polish army led by Jozef Pilsudski regrouped and achieved one of the most decisive victories in military history. As a result, the Versailles peace settlement survived, and Lenin was forced to settle for Communism in one country. The battle for Warsaw bought Europe nearly two decades of peace, and communism remained a mainly Russian phenomenon, subsuming many of the autocratic and Byzantine characteristics of Russia's tsarist tradition.

    With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport?Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.

    Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience; and yet there was at one time a danger that his name would disappear altogether from history. Isaac Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography was the first major publication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda machine, and in this definitive work Trotsky emerges in his real stature, as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian revolution.This first volume of the trilogy, originally published in 1954, traces Trotsky’s political development: his early activities, the formation and crystallization of his distinctive and motivating idea—the permanent revolution— his long feud and final reconciliation with Lenin and Bolshevism, and his role in the October insurrection of 1917. The volume ends in the year 1921, when Trotsky, then at the climax of his power, unwittingly sowed the seeds of his own defeat.

    The world’s ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia. He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past—and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today. One of Asia’s mightiest rivers, the Amur is also the most elusive. The terrain it crosses is legendarily difficult to traverse. Near the river’s source, Ziegler travels on horseback from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga, and later he is forced by the river’s impassability to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through the four-hundred-mile valley of water meadows inland. As he voyages deeper into the Amur wilderness, Ziegler also journeys into the history of the peoples and cultures the river’s path has transformed. The known history of the river begins with Genghis Khan and the rise of the Mongolian empire a millennium ago, and the story of the region has been one of aggression and conquest ever since. The modern history of the river is the story of Russia's push across the Eurasian landmass to China. For China, the Amur is a symbol of national humiliation and Western imperial land seizure; to Russia it is a symbol of national regeneration, its New World dreams and eastern prospects. The quest to take the Amur was to be Russia’s route to greatness, replacing an oppressive European identity with a vibrant one that faced the Pacific. Russia launched a grab in 1854 and took from China a chunk of territory equal in size nearly to France and Germany combined. Later, the region was the site for atrocities meted out on the Russian far east in the twentieth century during the Russian civil war and under Stalin. The long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other—and toward the outside world. To understand Putin’s imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia’s relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.