Winner of the British Book Awards History Book of the Year Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize This thrilling biography of Stalin & his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of Stalin as Soviet dictator Marxist leader & Russian tsar Based on groundbreaking research Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals in captivating detail the fear & betrayal privilege & debauchery family life & murderous cruelty of this secret world Written with extraordinary narrative verve this magnificent feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing Showing how Stalin's triumphs & crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism & his gifted but flawed character this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated & human as he was brutal & chilling ...

A chilling reassessment of the Soviet Union's advances in biological warfare & the West's inadvertent contributions 240 pages Rimmington Anthony ...

Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A painstakingly researched revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators
- her father Josef Stalin Born in the early years of the Soviet Union Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation & purges that haunted Russia but she did not escape tragedy
- the loss of everyone she loved including her mother two brothers aunts & uncles & a lover twice her age deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death Svetlana could no longer keep quiet & in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States
- leaving her two children behind But although she was never a part of her father's regime she could not escape his legacy Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently married disastrously shunned other Russian exiles & ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green Wisconsin With access to KGB CIA & Soviet government archives as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana's incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy Epic in scope it's a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father's name Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story in the process opening a closed brutal world that continues to fascinate us


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Compassionate & compelling this is not a political story but a quest for love in the heart of darkness' Simon Sebag Montefiore A biography on an epic scale with a combination of tragedy & history worthy of a Russian novel' Independent Superbly well told' Sunday Times Who was Svetlana Alliluyeva?A little girl her father's only daughter his "little sparrow"; instructed to bury her secrets in her heart by her mother who shot herself soon after An observer as her relatives were mercilessly killed & her first love exiled A woman who tore through relationships with men joined & abandoned various religions & became the most famous defector to the United States The victim of an inescapable truth " You are Stalin's daughter You can't live your own life You can't live any life You exist only in reference to a name" ...

Winner of the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year Award ' One of the great biographies of 2015' The Times Fully updated edition including recently released information A Guardian Book of the Year The Times Best Biography of the Year Mail on Sunday Biography of the Year Daily Mail Biography of Year Spectator Book of the Year BBC History Book of the Year 'A remarkable & definitive portrait ' Frederick Forsyth' Andrew Lownie's biography of Guy Burgess Stalin's Englishman shrewd thorough revelatory' William Boyd' In the sad & funny Stalin's Englishman Lownie manages to convey the charm as well as the turpitude' Craig Brown Guy Burgess was the most important complex & fascinating of ' The Cambridge Spies'
- Maclean Philby Blunt
- all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union An engaging & charming companion to many an unappealing utterly ruthless manipulator to others Burgess rose through academia the BBC the Foreign Office MI5 & MI6 gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers In this first full biography Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration & betrayal of the British Intelligence Service Even when he was under suspicion the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally many of whom have never spoken about him before & the discovery of hitherto secret files Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing chilling colourful tragi-comic wonder

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A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017'A brilliant compelling propulsively written magnificent tour de force' Simon Sebag Montefiore Evening Standard' The second volume of what will surely rank as one of the greatest historical achievements of our age The War & Peace of history a book you fear you will never finish but just cannot put down' Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times Well before 1929 Stalin had achieved dictatorial power over the Soviet empire but now he decided that the largest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity whatever it took What it took & what Stalin managed to force through transformed the country & its ruler in profound & enduring ways Rather than a tale of a deformed or paranoid personality creating a political system this is a story of a political system shaping a personality Building & running a dictatorship with power of life or death over hundreds of millions in conditions of capitalist self-encirclement made Stalin the person he became Wholesale collectivization of agriculture some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia but Stalin did not flinch; the resulting mass starvation & death elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism By 1934 when the situation had stabilized & socialism had been built in the countryside too the internal praise came for his uncanny success in anticapitalist terms But Stalin never forgot & never forgave with bloody consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite Stalin had revived a great power with a formidable industrialized military But the Soviet Union was effectively alone with no allies & enemies perceived everywhere The quest to find security would bring Soviet Communism into an improbable pact with Nazi Germany But that bargain did not work out as envisioned The lives of Stalin & Hitler & the fates of their respective countries drew ever closer to collision Stalin Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941 is like its predecessor Stalin Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 nothing less than a history of the world from Stalin's desk It is also like its predecessor a landmark achievement in the annals of the biographer's art Kotkin's portrait captures the vast structures moving global events & the intimate details of decision-making ...

Please note this is a region 2 DVD & will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play From the same production team as the critically acclaimed & Das Boot& this film brings the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare to the screen
- the legendary battle of Stalingrad With German forces following Hitler&s orders to neither retreat or surrender over 2 million Russians & Germans lost their lives in what came to be a turning point in the defeat of Germany in the Second World War Pulling no punches in revealing the gritty reality of combat the viewer is put in the trenches with the young soldiers as they face the harsh elements & brutal fighting conditions Considered in the company of such anti-war classics as & Paths Of Glory& & Platoon& & & Apocalypse Now& & Stalingrad& stands alone in its searing unforgettable imagery Actors Dana Vavrova Martin Benrath Sylvester Groth Karel Hermanek Dominique Horwitz Sebastian Rudolph Jochen Nickel & Thomas Kretschmann Director Joseph Vilsmaier Certificate 15 years & over Year 1992 Screen Fullscreen (1771) Languages English (Dubbed)
- Dolby Digital (20) Stereo Duration 2 hours & 12 minutes (approx)

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Game of the Axis Fall Blau offensive across the breadth of southern Ukraine &38; the Caucasus Mountains June-Dec 1942 3 detailed &38; colorful maps 3 countersheets 5 scenarios 4-7daysturn 10mihex Reg Brig Div level Mark Simonitch'19 Game following in the Barbarossa series by GMTCovers all of the Axis Fall Blau offensive across the breadth of southern Ukraine & the Caucasus Mountains (effectively ending at Stalingrad)3 detailed &38; colorful maps 3 countersheets 5 scenarios 4-7 daysturn 10mi hex regtbrigdivision level ...

The classic international bestseller recounting the epic turning point of the second world war In October 1942 a Panzer officer wrote ' Stalingrad is no longer a town Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure' The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler & Stalin's determination to win the gruesome vicious war on the eastern front The citizens of Stalingrad endured unimaginable hardship; the battle with fierce h&-to-hand fighting in each room of each building was brutally destructive to both armies But the eventual victory of the Red Army & the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe & the start of his decline An extraordinary story of tactical genius civilian bravery & the nature of war itself which changed how history is written Stalingrad is a testament to the vital role of the Soviet war effort'A superb re-telling Beevor combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with the narrative techniques of a novelist This is a book that lets the reader look into the face of battle' Orlando Figes Sunday Telegraph 'A brilliantly researched tour de force of military history' Sarah Bradford The Times Antony Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad which won the Samuel Johnson Prize the Wolfson Prize for History & the Hawthornden Prize for Literature & Berlin which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award His books have sold nearly four million copies ...

Please note this is a region 2 DVD & will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play Stalingrad is an epic look at the battle that turned the tide of World War II A band of determined Russian soldiers fight to hold a strategic building in their devastated city against a ruthless German army & in the process become deeply connected to two Russian women who have been living there Actors Mariya Smolnikova Yanina Studilina Pyotr Fyodorov Thomas Kretschmann Sergey Bondarchuk Dmitriy Lysenkov Andrey Smolyakov Aleksey Barabash Oleg Volku Heiner Lauterbach Polina Raykina Anna von Abler Yuriy Nazarov & Mariya Sittel Director Fedor Bondarchuk Year 2013 Languages Russian Additional Languages English ...