Showing titles in Russia

When Germany’s Sixth Army advanced to Stalingrad in 1942, its long-extended flanks were mainly held by its allied armies - the Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians. But as history tells us, these flanks quickly caved in before the massive Soviet counter-offensive which commenced that November, dooming the Germans to their first catastrophe of the war. However, the historical record also makes clear that one allied unit held out to the very end, fighting to stem the tide - the Italian Alpine Corps.

Considering that he has gone down in history as Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar of Russia could hardly have been a boy scout. As his name suggests, Ivan had an utterly terrifying presence during his 37-year-long reign. Ivan's story is not only one of brutality, it is also a tale of great suffering.

Why do the USA, UK and Europe so hate Russia? How it is that Western antipathy, once thought due to anti-Communism, could be so easily revived over a crisis in distant Ukraine, against a Russia no longer communist? Why does the West accuse Russia of empire-building, when 15 states once part of the defunct Warsaw Pact are now part of NATO, and NATO troops now flank the Russian border? What is the source of the Trump-Russia probe?

Аудионига посвящена проблемам, с которыми сталкиваются авторитарные режимы в поли­этнических государствах, чья экономика в значительной степени зависит от непредска­зуемых колебаний цен на топливно-энергетические ресурсы.

‘Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker ‘Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago...

"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago. -- Kirkus Reviews "A short, haunting and beautifully written book." -- The Wall Street Journal The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than...

From two of the world’s leading intelligence and espionage historians comes the definitive—and most unsettling—account of the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Exiled from the Soviet Union and living under constant threat, Leon Trotsky believed that by 1937 he had found sanctuary in Mexico...

The Russo-Ukraine War is a vital learning opportunity for military strategists across the globe. The first and clearest lesson to be gleaned from it is this: the soundness of a military's strategy and the nimbleness with which it can adapt to unforeseen circumstances are the two most important factors in deciding victory or defeat. The War for Ukraine analyzes the war through these twin lenses of strategy and adaptation, detailing how each army has succeeded or failed to plan for and adapt to this twenty-first century war.

În acest eseu de o impresionantă luciditate, Mihail Șișkin demontează mitul conform căruia Rusia este o „enigmă învăluită într-un mister" și susține că pur și simplu nu știm suficiente lucruri despre ea. Așadar, care este adevărata poveste din spatele regimului autocratic al lui Putin și al invaziei sale în Ucraina? Șișkin urmărește rădăcinile problemelor Rusiei, pornind de la „Rutenia (Rusia Kieveană)", trecând prin Marele Ducat al Moscovei, imperiu, revoluție și Războiul Rece, până la Federația Rusă creată acum mai bine de treizeci de ani.

As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, “Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics.” In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky’s life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

Using historical archives and primary documents, former Library of Congress historian Andrei Znamenski reveals the strange accounts of the Bolsheviks’ clandestine quest for ultimate power. Red Shambhala details the attempts of Marxist revolutionary and cryptographer Gleb Bokii and occult writer Alexander Barchenko to create a divine era of Communism by tapping into the power of Shambhala, a mythic land of pure bliss where inhabitants enjoyed god-like capabilities.

On a freezing night in January 2013, an assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, Sergei Filin. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions into scandal. Under Vladimir Putin, the Bolshoi Theatre has been...

Uranium is best known for the destructive power of the atom bombs, which ushered in the nuclear era at the end of World War II, but given the effectiveness of nuclear power, plants like those at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania were constructed to generate energy for Americans during the second half of the 20th century. While nuclear power plants were previously not an option and thus opened the door to new, more efficient, and more affordable forms of energy for domestic consumption, the use of nuclear energy understandably unnerved people.

Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. Through the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan, scientist, and global women's activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of radicals.

Bloomsbury presents Russia’s Wars in Chechnya by Mark Galeotti, read by Jonathan Oliver. Written by a leading expert on modern Russia, this is an introduction to the bitter campaigns in Chechnya. In this new edition of his popular 2014 work, Mark Galeotti traces the progress of the wars in...

The assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in November 2006 -- poisoned by the rare radioactive element polonium -- caused an international sensation. Within a few short weeks, the fit forty-three-year-old lay gaunt, bald, and dying in a hospital, the...

In September 1984, Lisa Paul, an American college student and nanny living in Moscow, entered Inna Meiman’s house for her first Russian language lesson. And so began a two–year friendship and a fight for Inna’s life. In Swimming in the Daylight, Lisa chronicles her friend’s struggle to shed her refusenik status, obtain a visa to America, and find medical treatment for her malignant cancer. Inna endured a perverse reality as a citizen of the Soviet Union....

In his timely new audiobook, Mikhail Shishkin, argues that Russia is not a 'riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma': we just don't know enough about it. So what is the real story behind Putin's autocratic regime and its invasion of Ukraine? In My Russia: War or Peace? Shishkin traces the roots of Russia's problems, from the 'Kievan Rus' via the Grand Duchy of Moscow, empire, revolution and Cold War, to the now thirty-year-old Russian Federation. 

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over a thousand years this multifaceted nation of shifting borders has been known as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago, it was reinvented as the Russian Federation. Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality.