_______________'Curtis spent a decade trying to negotiate her way past possessive Soviet archivists, and the result of her persistence is the most comprehensive selection of personal documents so far available in any language' - Simon Franklin, Times Literary Supplement'Ingeniously structured ... an absorbing and, at times, uplifting book' - Robert Russell, Modern Language Review'An engagin...

The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over ti...

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) has become the most popular Russian writer of the twentieth century, even though his works were banned for decades after his death due to the repressive Soviet censorship of literature. His great novel, The Master and Margarita (published only in 1973), was written in complete secrecy during the 1930s for fear of the writer being arrested and shot. In her revelatory new biography J.A.E. Curtis provides a fresh account of Bulgakov’s idyllic childhood an...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.Arguably no person in history had such a direct and negative impact on the lives of so many as Joseph Stalin. Under the Red Tsar terror knew no limits, it did not discriminate; no one was safe, no institution, no single town or village was immune. Yet, following his death in 1953, Stalin was deeply mourned. He had ‘received the country with a wooden plough, and left it with a nuclear missile shield’. And no-one else, some claime...

**A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.**It is also a spellbind...

Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a combination of political savvy and cold-blooded brutality. He crushed the spirit of his own people while conquering half of Europe. What made the greatest murderer of the twentieth century tick?

For over seventy years the Kremlin was the bastion of the all-powerful Soviet rulers. A great deal is known about the men who held millions of fates in their iron grip, yet little is known about the women-the wives and mistresses-who shared their lives. They took part in the Revolution and its aftermath, bore children, and suffered abuse; some were arrested and sent to Siberia, driven to suicide, or even murdered. In 1991 the KGB granted the author access to its secret files, which, togeth...

Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivag...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From thebestselling author of The Romanovs.“The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review**Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Mo...

"A definitive treatment of one of the Soviet Union's most significant writers."—The Russian ReviewVasily Grossman (1905–64), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, served for over 1,000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern front. He was present during the street-fighting at Stalingrad, and his 1944 report "The Hell of Treblinka," was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp. Though he finished the war as a decorated l...

It seems at first commonplace: a group photograph of peasants at harvest time, after hard work well done, resting contentedly with their tools behind the fruits of their labor. But when one finally notices the "crops" scattered in front of the group, what seemed innocent on first view become horrific skulls and bones. Where are we? Who are the people in the photograph, and what are they doing? The starting pointof Jan Tomasz and Irena Grudzinska Gross's Golden Harvest, this haunti...

'A fresh, powerful portrait of Lenin' Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine'Richly readable ... An enthralling but appalling story' Francis Wheen, author of Karl MarxThe cold, one-dimensional figure of Lenin the political fanatic is only a partial truth. Drawing on extensive material that has only recently become available, Sebestyen's gripping biography casts an intriguing new light on the character behind the politics....