Soviet History

In the early years of World War II, Josef Stalin issued an order that made the Soviet Union the first country in the world to allow female pilots to fly in combat. This is the story of Marina Raskova’s three regiments, women who enlisted and were deployed on the front lines of battle as navigators, pilots, and mechanics. It is the story of 1,000 young women who wanted to take flight to defend their country and the woman who brought them together in the sky.

In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI's nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies - an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.

Stingray’s memoir vividly shows how the energy of youth culture and an international love affair with rock ‘n’ roll forged alliances among a new generation who brought an end to the U.S.S.R.

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.

When Reagan and Gorbachev sat down in Reykjavik in 1986, George Shultz said that it was “the poker game with the highest stakes ever played”. It was the last time the world had a chance to do away entirely with nuclear weapons. This is the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable summit conference. An Impossible Dream is the first exploration of recently available archives of both sides - top-secret archives of the Kremlin, the personal papers of Gorbachev, as well as Reagan's archives.

After an insightful introduction on Tolstoy and his writing, Part 1 begins with Bradley Jersak's essay on Tolstoy's Confessions, a nonfiction memoir of Tolstoy's faith journey. Jersak (author of Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, 2022) presents what he describes as an "Anatomy of a Great Deconstruction." He offers a description of each bend on the Tolstoy's spiritual path, along with some reflection questions that ask listeners to ponder their own spiritual progress or regress.

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.

April of 1958 - the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit. This is the story of what unfolded that spring - for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome.

On May 31, 1988, President Ronald Reagan stood before a packed audience at Moscow State University. He delivered a speech that would go down in history, as it was the first time an American president had given an address about human rights on Russian soil. The importance of this speech was largely overlooked at the time, yet the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, leaving the United States the sole superpower on the world stage.

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.

Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for consumers of every political persuasion.

Lenin's work and influence have often been written off as no longer relevant, and many today consider this to be so. Lenin has, they claim, had his day, even though he is still revered in China, the world's most populous country. However, Lenin, like his mentor Marx, has had a tendency to rise from apparent decline and oblivion to renewed force and influence.

In 2014, Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians' idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression.

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved - activists and border guards, escapees and secret police, as well as the last Communist prime minister of Hungary - Matthew Longo reconstructs not only this remarkable event but also its complex and bittersweet aftermath.

This audiobook offers the first systematic analysis of Putin's two wars, placing the Second Chechen War and the War with Georgia of 2008 in their broader historical contexts. Drawing on extensive original Russian sources, Marcel H. Van Herpen analyzes in detail how Putin's wars were prepared and conducted and why they led to allegations of war crimes and genocide.

Leonid Brezhnev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in late 1964 after a plot to oust Khrushchev. Little is remembered in the public imagination about Brezhnev in comparison to Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Lenin, or Joseph Stalin, despite the fact Brezhnev ruled the USSR from 1964-1982, longer than any Soviet leader other than Stalin. In fact, he held power during a tumultuous era that changed the world in remarkable ways, and that era has been favorably remembered by many former Soviet citizens.

Society gossip and life in the slum, life's tragedies and comedies, the sacred, the profane, the admirable, the ridiculous, and much more - mixed thoroughly and presented for your listening pleasure by one of the most delightful old gossips of Russian literature, Vladimir Odoyevsky.

A mother is a dissident, a refusenik, and a prisoner in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her daughter, eleven years old, is left without a family. A grandmother is in the USA, waiting for her daughter and granddaughter and not knowing if she'll ever see them again. "I am fine," the three of them write to each other in their letters. How can you be "fine" when you have to fight to survive? When you must be silent? When the place that you love turns against you?

From the early fall of 1941 until the winter of 1944, the Soviet city of Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) was almost completely surrounded by the forces of Nazi Germany and Finland. Though the siege lasted just under 900 days, to the citizens of the Soviet Union (and Russia today), this event is referred to as the “900-Day Siege”. The losses in Leningrad (both civilian and military) amounted to over one million deaths, according to American military historian David Glantz. If you want to discover the captivating history of the Siege of Leningrad, buy this book today.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Cold War and Space Race, then pay attention. Two captivating manuscripts in one audiobook: The Cold War: A Captivating Guide to the Tense Conflict Between the United States of America and the Soviet Union Following World War II and The Space Race: A Captivating Guide to the Cold War Competition Between the United States and Soviet Union to Reach the Moon. So if you want to learn more about the Cold War and Space Race, get this audiobook now!