Military Russia War

1941: almost four million Nazi troops marched on Moscow, with a brutal scorched-earth tactic that saw millions of Soviet citizens massacred. A level of brutality only paralleled after the Soviet's triumphed at Stalingrad and took mindless revenge as they marched back into Berlin. Beginning with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, to the appalling circumstances of the Fall of Berlin in April 1945 and told from the perspective of the people of Russia and Eastern Europe, Barbarossa is a heartrending story of tragedy, suffering and heroism.

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. Fallout dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didn't share their knowledge with the Americans, who in turn deceived the British about the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated their plans for the bomb.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest sieges in history and it inflicted some of the worst civilian casualties of World War Two. When Hitler declared his intention to obliterate the key city of Leningrad on 22 September 1941, he could not have foreseen the grim determination of its citizens. Over the course of 900 days, the city resisted the Germans pounding at its gates.

In the closing months of WW1, with the world exhausted and depleted by a long a brutal war, fifteen nations cobbled together an army of nearly 200,000 men and embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. The Intervention in Russia's civil war was spearheaded by Britain, her colonial forces and allies. It was designed to stop the Bolsheviks in their tracks, reinstate conservative regimes in the Russian Empire and ensure that Germany did not fill the power vacuum which the Russian Revolution had created.

The world is unraveling. John Caul is the last thread. In the explosive sequel to Rakehell, secret agent John Caul faces a brutal new reality: orchestrated violence is tearing down governments, and an unseen hand is shaping the future. The rules have changed—and survival means rewriting them. Pitted against Angel, a lethal assassin who matches him move for move, Caul must uncover a global conspiracy before it’s too late. Allies are scarce. Enemies are everywhere. And with winter closing in, every decision could be fatal. The wolves are hunting. Caul is running out of time. Praise for ...

Russia - An almost lawless country ruled by the FSB, dread successor to the KGB, criminal gangs and Pamyat, fanatical Russian nationalists. Organizations who will commit any crime, murder any civilian, even commit genocide, to further their cause. When a package of sensitive information is stolen in a well-organized robbery in Manhattan, it is soon tracked to the despotic hellhole that no sane person would want to navigate.

In 1944, there was still no united Yugoslavia, the Axis controlled most of Europe, and D-Day was only in the planning stages. In the Balkans, Tito was a beacon of hope against the advancing Nazis. He led a force of resistance fighters that bedeviled the occupying German army throughout Slavic regions and empowered people's committees to act as local government in all liberated areas. For observers on the political left, Tito seemed uniquely poised to unite the East and West against fascism - once and for all.

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.

In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the fourth century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity’s greatest empire. Constantinople would continue to serve as the capital of the Byzantine Empire even after the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth century.

During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane thirty-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin’s newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. In the back streets of Petrograd and Moscow, in nightclubs, in cells beneath Lubianka prison, the conspirators engaged in a deadly game of wits for the highest possible stakes.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich, read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman. What did it mean to grow up in the Soviet Union during the Second World War? In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich started interviewing people who had experienced war as children, the generation that survived and had to live with the trauma that would forever change the course of the Russian nation.

In the dog days of August 2008, a column of Russian tanks and troops rolled across the Republic of Georgia’s northern border and into South Ossetia, sparking a war that was over almost before it began. The war, while not insignificant, lasted all of five days. The number of casualties did not exceed one thousand, the threshold most political scientists use to classify a war, although thousands of Georgians were displaced. By historical comparison, when Soviet tanks entered Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan in 1979-89, the fatalities totaled 2,500 and roughly 14,000 respectively.

The sacrifices that enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 are sacrosanct. The foundation of their eventual victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. For Germany, the catastrophic defeat was the beginning of their eventual demise that would see the Red Army two years later flying their flag of victory above the Reichstag. Stalingrad is seen as the pivotal battle of the Second World War.

To most observers, it seemed clear that Japan and Russia were destined to come into conflict in Korea and Manchuria. However, Russia’s vastly larger population, army, and navy seemed to make it inevitable that Japan would lose if the conflict escalated into war. Few could have foreseen that when war came, it would reveal that Russian power was largely an illusion. That would be underscored by one of the war’s most famous events, a bizarre battle that involved a makeshift Russian fleet under the command of an irascible and unstable admiral sailing around the world to meet its fate.

Partly out of dire circumstances and partly from a cultural worldview, it was the Soviet Union who first pressed female pilots into direct combat when Hitler invaded Russia. Ahead of Stalingrad, Stalin publicly declared that “women should be given the right to fly and fight for their country.” As a result, more than 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during the war years.

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.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

History describes the 872-day Siege of Leningrad as the most devastating siege in history. The German army had made its way to Leningrad before the city had the opportunity to prepare for an assault, and the consequences were lethal. Accompanied by one of the worst famines in history, as well as a brutally cold winter in 1941-1942, the civilians were doomed. It’s a harrowing saga of bravery and brutality, but one that must be told.

Последняя патриотическая — это книга о ненастной военной осени 2014 года в Донецкой Народной Республике. Автор, непосредственный участник описываемых событий, рассказывает о судьбах людей, с которыми он жил и сражался плечом к плечу. О тех, кто в 2014 году оставил семью, работу и мирную жизнь, взял автомат и пошел защищать Родину. Это для таких, как они, за ЦУМом в центре Макеевки висел огромный, замытый дождями плакат — бородатый ополченец в тельняшке, с автоматом наперевес, и, точно огонь, слова: "Стань легендой! Армия Донецкой Республики".

In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Despite Stalin's obvious reservations about the presence of foreign troops in Russia, he was persuaded, and in early 1944 and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated as B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region in today's Ukraine.