Russia Communism

Mikhail, one of the richest oligarchs on the planet, is kidnapped and held hostage in an unknown location. Captors' demands are something he's unable to meet. When the choice is between dying tortured or risking life to escape, there is no real choice. His people would spare no effort to release him, but they are clueless as to his whereabouts and need to investigate who's behind his sudden disappearance. Mikhail's desperate attempt to run away and his associates' endeavors to locate and free him lead to a climax that explodes in a series of breakneck shootouts and pursuits. Yet, the ...

Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. He told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed coeds in an Iowa home-economics class, and ogled Shirley MacLaine. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller and Marilyn Monroe. The trip took place in the 50s, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles.

Coming of age in America in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Weisberg was a Cold Warrior. After briefly studying Russian in Leningrad, he joined the CIA in 1990 - just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. But less than a decade after the first Cold War ended, a new one broke out. Russia changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might - more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But US sanctions have crippled Russia's economy; and Russia's interventions have exacerbated political problems in America.

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.

"I never told anybody but comrade Stalin and I were very close friends. For years we used to meet up in Central Park and talk about stuff. My mother would have been jealous so I never told her. I didn’t tell my sister either. She might have turned him in. And my father would have warned me not to mingle with such highfalutin folk. I would only get hurt. So I kept my secret for years. It was fun to have a secret anyway. I was a conspirator. Like the count of Monte Cristo or Jean Valjean." Eleanor Antin—creator of the world-renowned, picaresque, picture-postcard epic 100 BOOTS, the ...

The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking “bulldozer,” wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev’s authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin.

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.

Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, The Unwomanly Face of War is Svetlana Alexievich's collection of stories from Soviet women who lived through the Second World War: on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories. As Alexievich gives voice to women who are absent from official narratives - captains, sergeants, nurses, snipers and pilots - she shows us a new version of the war we're so familiar with, creating an extraordinary history from their private stories.

There have been many biographies of Stalin, but the court that surrounded him is untravelled ground. Simon Sebag Montefiore, acclaimed biographer of Catherine the Great's lover, prime minister, and general, Potemkin, has unearthed the vast underpinning that sustained Stalin. Not only ministers such as Molotov or secret service chiefs such as Beria, but men and women whose loyalty he trusted only until the next purge.

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.

In Fire and Lamentations, Janvier T. Chando offers readers succinct accounts of the lives, ideals, and untimely deaths of the towering political figures whose assassinations shocked American society, triggered domestic political transformations, and fundamentally altered America foreign policy, so that the United States of America lost its innocence forever. Spanning a century, the shooting deaths of four United States Presidents — Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, James A. Garfield, and John F. Kennedy — and the country’s soul and the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. brought...

The momentous new book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain. In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the 20th century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events.

After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine - and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin.

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged. Mark Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Una ventana a ideas revolucionarias. Aunque La Madre de Gorky tiene quiza un exceso de retorica, es sin embargo una ventana a las ideas revolucionarias, en especial en el conmovedor retrato de la madre que decide tomar los rumbos de su hijo, cuando este es encarcelado por sus ideas.

Young Stalin is a remarkable adventure story about an exceptional, turbulent young man, born in exoticism, raised in the church, fancying himself a poet, then embracing revolutionary idealism and thereby finding his romantic Messianic mission in life.

Democracy and capitalism can be painful, and you don't always like the outcomes. Some days, you win, but most days you lose. Under a dictatorship, life can be good for a time, but your ancestors will eventually starve and end up on a raft headed for a nearby capitalistic country. Marxism makes a lot of sense theoretically, but in practice, every time it has been tried it has failed. This can take a couple of decades, and the success of communism requires a parasitic relationship with a capitalistic system as it has to sell into this mixed market economy to meet the monetary needs of the ...

The book consist in a biography narrating author’s life since childhood in Havana City, Cuba after being born under a Socialist-Communist dictatorship, then the years on communist boarding schools with interesting and funny stories, later becoming a jet military fighter pilot in the ex Soviet Union including flight training narratives, some poems, and finally confronting the "Gestapo" of the Cuban dictator behind bars, with interviews and pictures. The title in English translates as "Born Motherland or Death" which was a common slogan used in society, even still today after many years, ...

What Is to Be Done? (1902) is a political tract written by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Lenin argues that the working class will not become politically aware simply by challenging employers about wages, hours, and working conditions. He contends that Marxists should form a political party of committed revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The tract was partly responsible for the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

After the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Christian colleges in the US seized the opportunity to begin strategic faculty and student exchanges with universities inside the Soviet Union. They could not have foreseen the doors that would open next. During a 1990 visit to Russia, John Bernbaum and his colleagues received a surprising invitation from a Russian government official: come help build a faith-based university in Moscow. Thus, after 70 years of fierce religious persecution under communism, the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) was born.