"Fifteen-year-old Lina is a Lithuanian girl living an ordinary life--until Soviet officers invade her home and tear her family apart. Separated from her father and forced onto a crowded train, Lina, her mother, and her young brother make their way to a Siberian work camp, where they are forced to fight for their lives. Lina finds solace in her art, documenting these events by drawing. Risking everything, she imbeds clues in her drawings of their location...

"In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration. In this compact book Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-held dream for 'socialism with a human face'. The neo-liberal...

"Impressive."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Spanning 1800 years of Russia's history, people, poltics, and culture, Edward Rurtherford, author of the phenomenally successful SARUM: THE NOVEL OF ENGLAND, tells a grand saga that is as multifaceted as Russia itself. Here is a story of a great civilization made human, played out through the lives of four families who are divided by ethnicity but united in shaping the destiny of their land.
"Rutherford's...

"For whales, the twentieth century was a time of tragedy, with several species nearly completely annihilated by industrial whaleships. The impacts of that history still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones shows the unique role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries-- especially the United...

This classic Soviet Union history traces the USSR from 1917 to its fall, offering “a master class in understanding the structures and intricate workings of the Soviet system” (Ian Kershaw, historian and Hitler biographer).
Today, the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary but tragic attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long time proved impossible to write.
In The Soviet...

History of the Russian Revolution is a two-volume book by Leon Trotsky on the Russian Revolution of 1917. The first volume is dedicated to the political history of the February Revolution and the second to that of October Revolution, with the intention of explaining the relations between these two events.

"A revelatory and pathbreaking account of the highly secretive world of the Soviet intelligence services. A uniquely comprehensive and rich account of the Soviet intelligence services, Jonathan Haslam's Near and Distant Neighbors charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet intelligence from the October Revolution to the end of the Cold War. Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service--which specialized...

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime is the sequel to Richard Pipes's classic The Russian Revolution, and covers the time from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to the death of Lenin in 1924, when all the institutions and nearly all the practices of future Stalinism were in place. In the first history of the period to make use of the recently opened Russian archives, the author traces the formative years of the Communist state, when the Bolshevik...

Claire L. Shaw asks what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of human perfectibility. Shaw reveals how fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project were negotiated?both individually and collectively - by a vibrant and independent community of deaf people who engaged in complex ways with Soviet ideology. Deaf in the USSR engages with a wide range of sources from both deaf...

"Musicologist Pauline Fairclough explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state policy of repression, censorship, and dissonance that existed in all areas of Soviet artistic endeavor. Newly opened archives from the Leninist and Stalinist eras have shed new light on Soviet concert life, demonstrating how the...