Soviet Union

Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know provides fundamental information about the origins, evolution, and current affairs of the Russian state and society. The story begins with Russia's geographic endowment, proceeds through its experiences as a kingdom and empire, and continues through the USSR's three-quarters of a century, and finally the breakup of that regime a generation ago. Drawing on trends within Russia and on ratings and rankings compiled by international organizations, Colton discusses the challenges facing the country and the realistic options for coping with them.

This thoughtful account of Patrice Lumumba provides an insight into why the swift elimination of the legend from the geopolitical developments involving his country plunged Congo into turmoil that it is yet to recover from. Janvier T. Chando highlights Congo's deep trauma as the private possession of King Leopold of Belgium, later as a Belgian colony, and afterward, as a so-called independent state that got disarrayed by a tug-of-war between the cold war rivals. That resulted in the inhuman dictatorship of pro-Western Mobutu Sese Seko, in wars during which millions of Congolese died, in the...

It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world, and dominates Western media coverage of it to an extraordinary extent. In Russia itself, he is likewise the centre of attention for detractors and supporters alike. But as Tony Wood argues, this overwhelming focus on the president and his personality means that we understand Russia less than we ever did before.

MiGs Over Nevada (CIA Area 51 Chronicles – Book 4) By TD Barnes Captured Soviet fighters. Top-secret dogfights. The CIA’s covert air war at Area 51. With the retirement of the A-12 reconnaissance plane, Area 51 seemed destined for a quieter existence. But instead, it became the center of a groundbreaking intelligence operation that would transform U.S. aerial warfare forever. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in partnership with the CIA, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Navy, launched an unprecedented program to exploit captured Soviet MiG aircraft, revealing enemy capabilities and ...

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: What can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight—and from her attempts to get US congress to act—make for essential listening.

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 ...

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions imposed by the West transformed European politics. The conflict did not escalate to the levels originally feared but nor was either side able to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Ukraine suffered a loss of territory but was not forced into changing its policies away from the Westward course adopted as a result of the EuroMaidan uprising of February 2014. President Putin was left supporting a separatist enclave as Russia's economy suffered significant damage.

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.

Stop Struggling to Study and Pass Your Exam Today! Transform pre-exam panic into confidence, one page at a time with the Crunch Time Review for the History of the Soviet Union - your ultimate guide to acing your course and exams. Crafted with the understanding that time is of the essence, this series is meticulously designed to streamline your review process. Elevate your exam game with 'Crunch Time Review' – your key to confident, last-minute mastery. Simplify your last-minute prep with the condensed wisdom of the top-performing student in the class Say goodbye to stress and hello to ...

On Friday evening, February 22nd, 1980, lightning struck in the tiny village of Lake Placid, New York. For, on that night, the absolute impossible happened. The United States' men's Olympic Hockey Team defeated the vaunted Soviet Union 4 to 3 in the tournament's semi-final match. It was the single greatest upset in the history of sports. Up until that point in time, the Soviets had dominated the sport of international hockey in every way, manner, shape, and form possible. Ever since 1954, with only slight interruption, they had spent their mornings, afternoons, and evenings, systematically ...

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.

In Stalin’s Russia, when prison sentences stretched ten, fifteen, and twenty-five years, the future Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found himself incarcerated in its genocidal “corrective” labor camps (the so-called Gulag of the Soviet Union). His crime: expressing anti-Stalinist opinions in a letter to a friend. A devout Communist at his arrest, condemned to be worked to death in the frozen wastelands of Russia, he underwent instead a profound psychological transformation, broke free of his Marxist ideology—and survived. This full biography of one of the most influential ...

A gripping true-life story about an extraordinary destiny of a young man, forced to make the choice of life: sell his soul to serve the devil, or preserve his dignity by taking a new path to a new world. The book chronicles the remarkable adventure of a foreign student who finds himself at the center of an action-packed spy thriller while studying in Moscow. Being eyewitnesses to the events, relying on solid documentary research and historical facts, the Grigorov Brothers authentically recreate the life of foreigners in the Soviet capital at the height of the Cold War, while masterfully ...

The men of Lieutenant Colonel Ketterle's battle group see that the fall of France did not mean the end of the war. Instead, they are sent east to take part in Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union - fighting in battles of the first two Eastern Front campaigns of the game Maneuver Warfare: Panzergrenadier Battle Group. In this book, follow them – and their opponents – as they cross the Soviet border and fight in battles that culminate in the massive encirclement of Soviet troops at Kiev. Then, when that fails to deliver a final victory, the battle group is sent to ...

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

An Auschwitz survivor is sentenced to a Siberian Gulag for crimes against the state after suffering abuse at the hands of a passing KGB unit. From the Arctic Circle, she writes of the injustices of fascism and the savage extremes of Stalinist socialism in a series of mysterious letters that surface in Cold War Berlin. An IRA assassin determines to rescue her no matter the cost to him or those around him. He enlists a sworn enemy, the British Army soldier recently captured by a Republican cell in Armagh, Northern Ireland. Despite the political divide that separates them, the two men find ...

Four Soviet armies have invaded. Outnumbered more than ten to one by the most powerful military on earth, the Finnish Army is forced into retreat. Their last hope is the Mannerheim Line—a frozen wall of trenches and resolve. But if it falls, so does Finland. Behind enemy lines, Hale Karhonen faces an impossible mission. Cut off from his unit and hunted by Soviet forces, Hale must lead his family, his mother, sister, pregnant wife, and unborn child, through a gauntlet of snow and steel to reach safety. Every step is a battle. With the Soviet juggernaut pressing deeper into Karelia, the ...

Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.

The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens.