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"My Life in the Red Army" by Fred Virski offers a rare, firsthand account of a soldier's experiences within the Soviet military machine during a critical period of the 20th century. Through the lens of Virski's personal journey, the book sheds light on the inner workings, struggles, and day-to-day life of the Red Army from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar takes listeners inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and the impact they had on international broadcasting, United States-Soviet relations, Russian history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the East Berlin zoo was spacious and lush, a socialist utopia where everything was perfectly planned...and then rarely successfully finished. Berlin’s two zoos quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race - rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, competing to have the most pandas and hippos.

From learning about Lenin and the Red Army to discovering how and why Stalin rose to power and his eventual leadership during World War II and beyond, this book provides an essential look at one of the most important periods in Russian history. Listeners will be enthralled by this fascinating tale that delves into every aspect of Russia's struggles and successes.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future. When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release.

The State and Revolution (1917), by Vladimir Lenin, describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin began the composition of an early draft of State and Revolution while in exile in Switzerland in 1916, under the title "Marxism on the State". "Soviets", legislative bodies of workers and peasants were the de facto governments of Petrograd and many smaller cities. 

Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.

In a forgotten chapter of history, 1.5 million Polish civilians - arbitrarily arrested by Stalin as enemies of the people following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 - were deported to slave-labor camps throughout the most inhospitable forests and steppes of the Soviet Union. The Ice Road is the gripping story of young Stefan Waydenfeld and his family, deported by cattle car in 1940 to the frozen wastes of the Russian arctic north.

"Беседы о русской культуре" — уникальный труд, посвященный жизни русского дворянства XVIII — начала XIX века. Написанная увлекательным и доступным даже неподготовленному читателю языком, книга открывает перед нами завораживающий мир чинов, балов, карточных игр, дуэлей, политических интриг и, наконец, взаимоотношений людей ушедших эпох — мир особого культурного кода, без которого невозможно понять классическую отечественную литературу, многие важные вехи истории России, наше прошлое и, следовательно, наше будущее.

Volume one of the two-volume encyclopedia of Secret Societies. First written in 1875, this University Press edition duplicates the second edition of 1893, which was completely revised and rewritten. A fascinating work, to which any serious researcher of Secret Societies must eventually turn, the modern-day student of history must remember the scholarly and archeological limitations of the day when it was written.

In early 2022, life in the port city of Mariupol, Ukraine was safe and predictable for Adoriana Marik. The thirty-one-year-old tattoo artist loved walking her dog by the seaside and meeting friends at cafés and public gardens. But all that changed on February 24, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation.”

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

The 17th century was marked by multiple pro-democratic revolutions exploding in both hemispheres. In Europe and its neighbors to the east, border-changing wars were fought incessantly. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the underlying premises of political, governmental and social structures within several European and Asian states were shaken to the core after centuries of royalty and one-family rule.

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region.

It was the most spectacular display of brinkmanship in the Cold War era. In October 1962, President Kennedy risked inciting a nuclear war to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing missile bases in Cuba. The risk, however, was far greater than Kennedy realized.

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.

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on August 9, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the city. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the city. Already many thousands had died of their wounds, the cold, and most of all, starvation.

La historia de Rusia ha cautivado al público durante generaciones. Desde las hazañas de Iván el Terrible hasta el asesinato de la familia real Románov, hay mucha historia que explorar. ¿Cómo se ganó el título Iván el Terrible? ¿Quiénes eran los Románov y qué llevó al brutal final de su dinastía? Siga la historia de Rusia y descubra los principales acontecimientos históricos que dieron forma a este país.

At the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviets were so caught by surprise at the start of the attack that the Germans were able to push several hundred miles into Russia across a front that stretched dozens of miles long, reaching the major cities of Leningrad and Sevastopol in just three months. The first major Russian city in their path was Minsk, which fell in only six days. In order to make clear his determination to win at all costs, Stalin had the three men in charge of the troops defending Minsk executed for their failure to hold their position.

Grigori Rasputin began life as a peasant in the poorest reaches of Siberia and ended his life as the virtual second-in-command of Tsarist Russia. How did he achieve such a rapid change in fortunes? Was it through palace intrigue or magic and mind control? Or perhaps, the causes were a combination of hypnosis and hemophilia? The tsar’s son Nicholas had been born with the dreaded “royal disease” otherwise known as the blood clotting deficiency named hemophilia. The self-proclaimed healer managed to convince the royal family that he was the only way that their son would stay alive.