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 ...

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 ...

Predator 2 expanded the universe that the original film touched upon introducing us to new yautja such as the City Hunter & more importantly the Lost Tribe that appeared at the end of the film 30 years after its release NECA is celebrating Predator 2's anniversary with the return of each Lost Tribe Predator in Ultimate form The Stalker Predator is given an upgrade with an all new body loaded with articulation an assortment of interchangeable hands & two heads one of which is a never before seen ...

Please note this is a region 2 DVD & will require a region 2 or region free DVD player in order to play The psychological thriller & Stalker& follows Oliver (played by John Connors) a homeless man who wanders around Dublin where he meets & befriends a teenager named Tommy (Barry Keoghan) Tommy is bullied by not only the boys who live in his area but also by his uncle (Peter Coonan) an upper class drug dealer & he has a drug-addict mother to take care of A victim of abuse himself Oliver sees Tommy&s innocence & desperately wants to preserve it to the point that he becomes increasingly involved in the young boy&s life Actors Barry Keoghan John Connors Peter Coonan Format PALLanguage English Region Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe Read more about DVD formats) Number of discs 1 ...

You thought you were alone Think again The groundbreaking fifth thriller in Lars Kepler's bestselling series featuring Joona Linna Perfect for fans of Stieg Larsson & Jo Nesbo CLOSE THE CURTAINSA film arrives at Stockholm's National Crime Investigation Department showing a woman in her own home plainly unaware she is being watched The police don't take it seriously until she is found murdered LOCK THE DOORWhen the next video arrives Detective Margot Silverman frantically attempts to identify the victim But it's already too late Because at the time the video was sent the killer was already inside their house BEFORE IT'S TOO LATESoon Stockholm is in the grip of terror Who will the Stalker target next? ...

The 16th series of our longest running figure collection is an homage to the classic Kenner Expanded Universe Predators of the early 1990s! Taking inspiration from those designs our team has applied modern sculpting detail & articulation to upgrade these vintage Predators for the new millennium ...