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


...

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

...

In January 1928 Stalin the ruler of the largest country in the world boarded a train bound for Siberia where he would embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life He was about to begin uprooting & collectivization of agriculture & industry across the entire Soviet Union Millions would die & many more would suffer Where did such great monstrous power come from? The first of three volumes the product of a decade of intrepid research this landmark book offers the most convincing explanation yet of Stalin's power ...

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 ...

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 ...

Please note this is a region 2 DVD & will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play Stalingrad
- a
...

The Great Terror (1937-38) in the Soviet Union occupies a central role in the history of twentieth-century mass violence During a sixteen-month period the Stalin regime arrested over 15 million people mostly on trumped-up charges of "counterrevolutionary" & "anti-Soviet" activity of whom about half were summarily executed & the rest were sent to the Gulag While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims we know almost nothing about the perpetrators One explanation for this lacuna is that there were no public trials-no equivalent of the postwar prosecution of Nazi war criminals-of Soviet perpetrators Yet there were secret trials of NKVD (secret police) officials the subject of this new book by eminent Soviet historian Lynne Viola In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers" almost one thousand secret police officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts for violations of Soviet criminal procedure They were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence falsification of interrogation protocols use of torture to secure "confessions" & murders during pre-trial detention of "suspects" As a rule these trials were held in strict observance of the norms of Soviet criminal procedure & resulted in conviction with sentences ranging from administrative reprimand to execution The documentation generated by these trials include verbatim interrogation records & written confessions signed by perpetrators in 1937-38; testimony by victims witnesses & experts; & stenographic transcripts of court sessions Arguably these heretofore unused documents constitute the holy grail of the documentation on the Great Terror & the single most valuable source of information on Soviet perpetrators Although the FSB (formerly KGB) archives in Moscow forbid researchers from accessing these files the Ukrainian archives include the criminal files of secret police officials at every level of the hierarchy in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic a multiethnic borderland where the Great Terror was at its worst The documents illuminate one of the darkest corners of Soviet history-the inner world of Stalin's terror & the mental cosmos of Soviet perpetrators They allow us to eavesdrop on the conversations of NKVD men as they discuss the practices of the Great Terror amongst themselves They permit us to listen in on the top-secret operational meetings of the NKVD at different regional levels as it set out to launch the Great Terror They show the preparation of false confessions They reveal the macabre violence of the execution chamber in the blood-spattered basements of the NKVD Most importantly they bring us directly into the interrogation room to witness the questioning & torture of victims where the extraction of confessions was the ultimate goal Viola presents a series of micro-histories of the terror based on the criminal files of NKVD investigators who found themselves behind bars She details the most prolific perpetrators of Soviet mass violence & contextualizes the secret trials Like Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men Viola is able to build the backgrounds of these perpetrators & to interrogate their statements as the accused These were no " but men (and at least one woman) who chose a career in the NKVD & spent years within its cloistered culture of violence often moving them from lower-class backgrounds up the social ladder They were children of the Revolution & participants of the Civil War or of the forced collectivization which conditioned them to see the violent internal purge as normal Their trials expose the state crimes of Stalin & the NKVD in a manner never expected to be public & that will fascinate & shock even those familiar with the works on Soviet oppression ...