Eastern Russia

Journalist and author, Marc Miles Vaughn, gives you an insight into history unlike any history professor’s. Having studied Ukraine from its earliest roots as a Viking pirate kingdom to its latest TikTok war, he takes you, step by step, through 12 centuries of destruction and mayhem, and shows you what the official statutes of Ukraine are hiding: the inextinguishable Ukrainian heart.

Making use of the extensive memoirs of German and Russian soldiers to bring their story to life, the narrative follows on from On A Knife's Edge, which described the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the offensives and counter-offensives that followed throughout the winter of 1942-43.

The Shadow Empire: How Authoritarians Built a Parallel World Order While America was fighting the war on terror, China and Russia were building something far more dangerous: an alternative to the entire Western system. The "rules-based international order" is crumbling. Not from external attack, but from internal rot and external alternatives. While Western leaders still speak as if American dominance is eternal, authoritarian powers have quietly constructed a shadow empire—complete with parallel financial systems, trade networks, and political alliances that make Western sanctions ...

From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prizewinning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine - only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

Mansur Abdulin fought in the front ranks of the Soviet infantry against the German invaders at Stalingrad, Kursk, and on the banks of the Dnieper. This is his extraordinary story. His vivid firsthand account of a ruthless war on the Eastern Front gives rare insight into the reality of the fighting and into the tactics and mentality of the Red Army's soldiers.

This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic. How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the geopolitics, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the plough and the internet – it is all here, in prose, as provocative and vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it. From "The Mind of Darkness": "'The Balkans' – I say – 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that the repressed memories of ...

To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II were sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the Volga River. To Russians, it is a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded, or captured during the bitter fighting from September 1942 to February 1943. Both sides endured terrible conditions in brutal, relentless house-to-house fighting.

Ukraine is a geographically diverse country with the unfortunate fate of being sandwiched between empires. Though this is frequently explored no further than the global conflicts of the 20th century, in reality, Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination has far deeper roots than most people realize. See the splendor of the Kyivan Rus, gallop with the Golden Horde across the Ukrainian steppe, encounter the legendary Cossacks, and witness the terror of the tsars. From the Romans to the Mongols to the Russians, Ukraine has seen it all and remained uniquely Ukrainian through it all.

Discover the remarkable history of the Crimean War...The Crimean War was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 19th century, but it is also one of the least remembered. More men died in the Crimean War than in the American Civil War which followed soon after. Yet the Crimean War is important for a number of reasons. Although it did not change the map of Europe and did not directly cause the fall of any of the combatants, it did indirectly shape the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the twentieth century in Europe.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

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.

La Revolución rusa es un ejemplo perfecto de cómo la historia puede reducirse hasta volverse excesivamente pesada y compleja. Para desentrañar la Revolución rusa (de hecho, las revoluciones rusas) hay que empezar por considerar acontecimientos que sucedieron siglos antes de febrero de 1917. Solo así podremos comprender la cantidad de acontecimientos comprimidos en los breves meses del decisivo año 1917.

Ukraine expert Adrian Karatnycky provides an eyewitness account of the history of the modern Ukrainian state and of the nation through the tenures of the six presidents who have led Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR, including Volodymyr Zelensky. Karatnycky shows how—despite the influence of corrupt oligarchs, pressures from Russia, and the legacies of Soviet rule—an inclusive and united Ukrainian nation has emerged that inspires the world as it defends the principle that states and peoples have the right to their national sovereignty.

The massive offensives on the Eastern Front during 1915 are too often overshadowed by the events in Western Europe, but the scale and ferocity of the clashes between Imperial Germany, Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, and Tsarist Russia were greater than anything seen on the Western Front and ultimately as important to the final outcome of the war. Now, with the work of internationally renowned Eastern Front expert Prit Buttar, this fascinating story of the unknown side of the First World War is finally being told.

Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary.

Deceived: When Prophets Lie tackles one of the most devastating betrayals in the Christian faith; when those who claim to speak for God become instruments of deception. This powerful piece explores the heart-wrenching reality of prophets who dishonor the very Lord they profess to serve, either through deliberate falsehoods spoken in His holy name or through the subtle corruptions that flow from their positions of spiritual authority. Rather than simply talking about the motivations behind such betrayal, this book boldly addresses the critical question of when these deceptions occur and ...

Fair warning. This is not a page-turning memoir. Marshal Rokossovskiy (who is editor, not author) and the gang of military men who helped him produce this tome did not set out to write a novel. This is a compendium of military reports, and analysis of those reports, dealing with the entire campaign of which Stalingrad was the centerpiece. It is an exhaustive detailing of events taking place between July 1942 and February 1943 as far north as Voronezh Oblast', as far west as Ukraine and as far south as Dagestan. In translating other books dealing with Stalingrad, I was left wondering why I ...

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides - Pushkin and Tolstoy, among others - Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Wheeler follows local guides; boards with families in modest homestays; eats roe, pelmeni, and cabbage soup; invokes recipes from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking; learns the language; and observes the pattern of outcry and silence that characterizes life under Vladimir Putin.

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.