Book picks similar to
Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia by Ellen Mickiewicz
movies-television
russia
russian-and-soviet-studies
ww-university-courses
Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People's Game
Marc Bennetts - 2008
But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.
The Russian Affair: The True Story of the Couple who Uncovered the Greatest Sporting Scandal
David Walsh - 2020
The candour...is rare and gripping' Matt Dickinson, The TimesIt was the story that shocked the world: Russian athletics was revealed to be corrupt from top to bottom, with institutionalised doping used to help the nation's athletes win medals they did not deserve. But the full story of the couple who blew the whistle has never been told - until now. When Russian anti-doping official Vitaly Stepanov met the young 800m athlete Yuliya Rusanova, for him it was love at first sight. Within two months, they were married. But there was a problem – in fact, there were lots of problems. She admitted she was doping and that everyone else was doping, and she let him know that she came from a dark place … It could all have brought a very swift end to a very hasty marriage, but gradually the Stepanovs began to realise that whatever you did, the system in Russia was stacked against you. In the end, the only ones they could rely upon were each other. Fully aware of the risks they were taking, they decided to turn the tables on those who had manipulated them and cheated the sporting world. The result of their investigative work sent shockwaves around the planet and led to Russia’s athletes being banned from world sport, while the Stepanovs themselves had to go into hiding. The Russian Affair is a gripping true-life drama that at times reads like a spy novel and at others like an epic love story. But, at the centre of it all, is a quietly determined couple who knew that if they stood together they could shine a light on a corrupt system and bring it crashing to the ground.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion
Alexis Klimoff - 1997
Also included are fascinating primary sources and background materials, an annotated bibliography, and discussions of the work by leading scholars Robert Louis Jackson, Richard Tempest, and Dariusz Tolczyk. Combining scholarship with accessibility, this critical companion--part of the acclaimed AATSEEL series--illuminates a great work of literature and will enhance its appreciation by students and teachers.
The Beria Papers
Alan Williams - 1973
He was Stalin’s closest henchman. At one time he had a million armed men under his direct personal command. He was a sadist and a mass murderer. And he was also a vicious rapist with a compulsive appetite for young girls. This is possible: Beria may have kept a private diary in which he lovingly recorded his sexual activities, his murders, various scandals involving men now highly placed in the Soviet hierarchy — and the true facts of Stalin’s death. This is certain: The publication of Beria’s diary would cause the greatest political scandal the world has ever known — and set off a deadly manhunt for those responsible for its release … The private diaries of Beria — Stalin’s notorious chief of secret police — are a lurid, shattering indictment of Russian political methods and contain a new account of what really happened at Stalin’s death. They confirm Beria as one of the greatest human monsters of our time, both in his personal life and in his political manipulations of top Soviet politicians, some of whom are in power today. The Beria Papers are sold to an American publisher for three million dollars. On publication they are an immediate, sensational bestseller. They cause panic in Moscow and outrage everywhere — even in the upper echelons of the U.S. government, where there is fear that such revelations will create a dangerous precedent in smear campaigns against world leaders. So the world’s two most powerful secret services — the Soviet KGB and the American CIA — are ordered to track down the book’s origin. Their investigations range from New York to Washington, to London, Moscow, Munich, Budapest, Vienna and finally to a small island in the Indian Ocean where the activities of the two secret agencies come horrifically together. But can The Beria Papers possibly be a hoax? Praise for The Beria Papers: ‘Intriguing and gripping … compulsively exciting’ -
Sunday Express
‘Both exciting and really convincing … fascinating. Part adventure, part thriller, part a documentary of might-have-been history, The Beria Papers is the best thing of its kind for a long time.’ -
Sunday Times
‘The most interesting and original thriller since The Odessa File … a sharp and intelligent thriller that cries out for filming.’ -
Daily Mail
‘Intriguing and gripping … not merely compulsively exciting entertainment, it is also so well researched and the background appears so absolutely authentic that the whole fantastic story could just be true.’ -
Sunday Express
Alan Emlyn Williams(born 1935) is an ex-foreign correspondent, novelist and writer of thrillers. He was educated at Stowe, Grenoble and Heidelberg Universities, and at King's College, Cambridge where he graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in modern languages. His father was the actor and writer Emlyn Williams.
Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life
Alexander V. Pantsov - 2015
Two years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng became the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the prime architect of China's post-Mao reforms. Abandoning the Maoist socio-economic policies he had long fervently supported, he set in motion changes that would dramatically transform China's economy, society, and position in the world. Three decades later, we are living with the results. China has become the second largest economy and the workshop of the world. And while it is essentially a market economy (socialism with Chinese characteristics), Deng and his successors ensured the continuation of CCP rule by severely repressing the democratic movement and maintaining an iron grip on power. When Deng died at the age of 92 in 1997, he had set China on the path it is following to this day.Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine's new biography of Deng Xiaoping does what no other biography has done: based on newly discovered documents, it covers his entire life, from his childhood and student years to the post-Tiananmen era. Thanks to unprecedented access to Russian archives containing massive files on the Chinese Communist Party, the authors present a wealth of new material on Deng dating back to the 1920s. In a long and extraordinary life, Deng navigated one epic crisis after another. Born in 1904, Deng, like many Asian revolutionary leaders, spent part of the 1920s in Paris, where he joined the CCP in its early years. He then studied in the USSR just as Stalin was establishing firm control over the Soviet communist party. He played an increasingly important role in the troubled decades of the 1930s and 1940s that were marked by civil war and the Japanese invasion. He was commissar of a communist-dominated area in the early 1930s, loyal henchman to Mao during the Long March, regional military commander in the anti-Japanese war, and finally a key leader in the 1946-49 revolution. During Mao's quarter century rule, Deng oscillated between the heights and the depths of power. He was purged during the Cultural Revolution, only to reemerge after Mao's death to become China's paramount leader until his own death in 1997.This objective, balanced, and unprecedentedly rich biography changes our understanding of one of the most important figures in modern history.
The Red Passport
Katherine Shonk - 2003
From My Mother's Garden, the parable of an old woman who refuses to accept the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, to The Young People of Moscow, which describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling antiquated Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar, these intricately woven narratives provide unforgettable slices of a Russia that is at once both exotic and disconcertingly familiar.
The Tragic Empress: The Authorized Biography of Alexandra Romanov
Sophie Buxhoeveden - 2017
Additionally, as a lady-in-waiting, Countess Buxhoeveden attended on the Empress for much of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, only leaving her side when the Imperial Family was removed to Tobolsk after the Tsar’s abdication in 1917. Thereafter, she followed the Empress to Tobolsk, and then to Ekaterinburg, where the entire Imperial Family, some of the Court suite and some of their servants met their deaths on July 17, 1918. The portrait the Countess paints of the Empress is of a warm, shy, kind and generous woman, devoted to Russia, her husband and her children, deeply charitable in word and deed, and a committed friend and mistress, but ill-starred, physically sick, maligned, misunderstood and much plotted against. The character descriptions in this book also include those for Tsar Nicholas, each of the children – OTMA and the Tsarevitch – Grand Duchess Ella (the Empress’ sister), Ania Vyrubova (the Empress’ most intimate friend), Rasputin and Kerensky (the Head of the Provisional Government that took power after the abdication of the Tsar and before the ascendancy of the Bolsheviks). The narrative also describes in detail the daily domestic life of the Imperial Family, and each of their trips to other parts of Russia and abroad in peace and war. It is rare for the author of any authorized biography to know her subject so familiarly and for so long, and to have been a first-hand witness to almost everything that happened for much of her life, and it is this that makes ‘The Tragic Empress’ such an intriguing and compelling book.
Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War
Robert Gellately - 2013
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader. Even astute observers like George F. Kennan concluded that the United States and Great Britain should view Stalin as a modern-day tsarist-like figure whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, not in ideology. Now Robert Gellately uses recently uncovered documents to make clear that, in fact, the dictator was an unwavering revolutionary merely biding his time, determined as ever to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond, and that his actions during these years (and the poorly calculated Western responses) set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Gellately takes us behind the scenes. We see the dictator disguising his political ambitions and prioritizing the future of Communism, even as he pursued the war against Hitler. Along the way, the ascetic dictator’s Machiavellian moves and bouts of irrationality kept the Western leaders on their toes, in a world that became more dangerous and divided year by year. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of the Soviet dictator.
In Defense of Marxism: The Social & Political Contradictions of the Soviet Union
Leon Trotsky - 1942
Cannon 9/12/39The USSR in War 9/25/39to Sherman Stanley 10/8/39Again & Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR 10/18/39The Referendum & Democratic Centralism 10/21/39to Sherman Stanley 10/22/39to James P. Cannon 10/28/39to Max Shachtman 11/6/39to James P. Cannon 12/15/39A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the SWP 12/15/39to John G. Wright 12/19/39to Max Shachtman 12/20/39to Nat'l Comm. Majority 12/26+27/39, 1/3+4/40to Joseph Hansen 1/5/40Open Letter to Cde Burnham 1/7/40to James P. Cannon 1/9/40to Farrell Dobbs 1/10/40to John G. Wright 1/13/40to James P. Cannon 1/16/40to Wm F. Warde 1/16/40to Joseph Hansen 1/18/40From a Scratch to the Danger of Gangrene 1/24/40 to Martin Abern 1/29/40to Albert Goldman 2/10+19/40Back to the Party 2/21/40Science & Style 2/23/40to James P. Cannon 2/27/40to Joseph Hansen 2/29/40to Farrell Dobbs 3/4, 4/4+16/40Petty-Bourgeois Moralists & the Proletarian Party 4/23/40Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events 4/25/40to James P. Cannon 5/28/40to Albert Goldman 6/5/40On the Workers Party 8/7/40to Albert Goldman 8/9/40to Chris Andrews 8/17/40
The Empire of Russia From the Remotest Periods to the Present Time
John S.C. Abbott - 2011
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
The Plummeting Old Women
Daniil Kharms - 1989
These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.
The Naked Voice: A Wholistic Approach to Singing
W. Stephen Smith - 2007
Stephen Smith invites all singers to improve their vocal technique through his renowned and time-tested wholistic method. Focusing not only on the most important technical, but also on the often overlooked psychological and spiritual elements of learning to sing, his book allows readers to develop their own full and individual identities as singers. With philosophies and techniques drawn from a lifetime of teaching voice, Smith demonstrates how one can reveal the true unique sound of one's own voice by singing with the whole self. The master's method, presented in concrete and comprehensible terms with helpful illustrations, is enhanced by a CD containing exercises performed by singers from Smith's own studio-singers whose talent and training bring them across the country and around the world. The clear and easy style of The Naked Voice welcomes the reader into Smith's teaching studio, and into conversation with Smith himself as he presents the six simple and elegant exercises that form the core of his method. These exercises provide a foundation for free singing, and lead singers through the step-by-step process of mastering the technique. Throughout, Smith speaks sympathetically and encouragingly to the singer in search of an unencumbered and effective approach to the art. The Naked Voice is a must-read for all singers, giving teachers and students, amateurs and professionals, access to the methods and concepts that have earned Smith his reputation as one of the most highly-sought-after vocal instructors in the international arena today.
Tiger Battalion 507: Eyewitness Accounts from Hitler's Regiment
Helmut Schneider - 2020
The resulting account is a treasure trove of first-hand material, from personal memories, diary entries and letters to leave passes, wartime newspaper cuttings, Wehrmacht bulletins and more than 160 photographs.The account follows the unit from its formation in 1943 and the catastrophic events on the Eastern Front, through battles on the Western Front and engagements against the American 3rd Armoured Division to the confusion of retreat, panic-stricken flight and Soviet captivity in the closing stages of the war. Honest and unflinching, this remarkable collection of autobiographies offers a glimpse into life in Hitler's panzer division and is a stark testimony of a generation that sacrificed its best years to the war.This is the first English-language translation of the work.
The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings
Friedrich Nietzsche - 2005
This volume combines, for the first time in English, five of these works: The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and The Case of Wagner. Nietzsche takes on some of his greatest adversaries in these works: traditional religion, contemporary culture, and above all, his one-time hero, Richard Wagner. His writing is simultaneously critical and creative, revealing his alternative philosophical vision, which, after more than a hundred years, still retains its audacious originality.