Russia Great

Considered one of the finest tanks of WWII, the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger tank killed 11.52 tanks for every one Tiger destroyed in battle. Tigers suffered a large number of non-combat losses, however, as the chaos of wartime and the Tiger’s mechanical reliability reduced the number of deployable tanks, then along with frequent breakdowns the Tiger managed only 5.25 enemy tanks killed for every lost Tiger. The Second World War began with the lightning German Blitzkrieg as their Wehrmacht raced across Europe, spearheaded by the most dreaded weapon of the 20th century. No German tank better ...

World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the 20th century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War's origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened.

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact....

Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage. In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison recreates Tchaikovsky's complex world.

Catherine the Great is one of the most influential rulers in Russian history. Though born in Prussia, she endeavored to gain the throne of Russia and went on to be the longest-ruling empress in Russian history. She ruled as an enlightened despot, promoting the principles of the European Enlightenment as she sought to modernize her beloved country. She reformed the educational system of Russia, creating a national system that utilized modern educational theory in a co-educational setting.

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.

On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.

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.

Harold Lamb's superb story-telling and clear, sharp scholarship are focused on Peter the Great, his gigantic labors to raise Russia in one generation to cultural equality with Europe, and his efforts to mold and shape a sprawling empire. At the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the city of Moscow had extended its sway eastward through the Asiatic continent. People began to ask, "Will the city control the continent?" or "Will the continent control the city?" These were crucial questions...questions that continue to bedevil Russians to this day.

The spy novel emerged from the intrigues of the mid-20th century for good reason. The war with the Third Reich involved an unseen cloak-and-dagger struggle between the participants, but beyond that, an even larger and longer contest took place in the shadows. The men responsible for this unprecedented leaking of life-or-death information would enter history as the Cambridge Five - though in fact, they may have been only the core of a much larger group.

Wolf Messing: The True Story of Russia’s Greatest Psychic by Tatiana Lungin is the first comprehensive biography of the renowned psychic Wolf Messing. This fascinating memoir recounts Messing’s rise to fame in Europe, his escape from Nazi persecution, and his incredible career in the USSR, where he became a psychic sensation even under Stalin’s scrutiny. In this, the first biography and personal memoir of Wolf Messing to appear in the West, Tatiana Lungin limns a revealing portrait of one of the greatest psychic performers of the twentieth century.

French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was not a man made for peacetime. By 1812 he had succeeded in subduing most of his enemies - though in Spain the British continued to be a perpetual thorn in his flank that drained the Empire of money and troops - but his relationship with Russia, never more than one of mutual suspicion at best, had now grown downright hostile.

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.

At the end of September 1941, more than a million German soldiers lined up along the frontline just 180 miles west of Moscow. They were well trained, confident, and had good reasons to hope that the war in the East would be over with one last offensive. Facing them was an equally large Soviet force, but whose soldiers were neither as well trained nor as confident. When the Germans struck, disaster soon befell the Soviet defenders.

Cast between the 17th and 18th centuries, this gigantic, Pulitzer prize-winning biography is as impressive as the man himself. Peter the Great was an extraordinary ruler - impulsive and stubborn, cruel yet generous, tender and forgiving.

All chess games end in a murder... It's 1920, the murders of a trade unionist, a knight and a bishop shock Britain. The finger of blame seems to point to Russia. As the body count rises, Kit Aston plays a deadly game of chess with a Russian grandmaster where checkmate is a matter of life or death. The latest Kit Aston whodunnit is a gripping historical crime thriller, full of twists and hilarious one liners which fuses classic murder mystery with a spy novel. The Kit Aston mysteries mix real life historical characters and events with crime thrillers full of red herrings. No books are the ...

This book collects a magnificent set of works by Russian classical authors: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov. Each original story, springing from a common creative heritage, delivers a glimpse of the immortal Russian Soul and has influenced modern literary trends. These stories are interesting to their core and will bring pleasure to readers. Get ready to immerse yourself within these immortal works that have long been counted among the best of classic world literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.

Forty years after the "Miracle on Ice" captivated the world, this book deeply examines the impact that singular event had on the people who played and coached in it and how that game changed the trajectory of American hockey. Seasoned journalist John Gilbert was there every step of the way, and thanks to his detailed recordkeeping, allows listeners to reexamine the game against the Soviets, what made it the upset it was, why it still resonates today, and what it did to the lives of the players.

The Resurrection of the Romanovs draws on a wealth of new information from previously unpublished materials and unexplored sources to probe the most enduring Romanov mystery of all: the fate of the Tsar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, whose remains were not buried with those of her family, and her identification with Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be the missing Grand Duchess.