In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security-from Nazi fifth columnists to Soviet spies and today's domestic extremists. Yet, working from official documents released to the National Archives,distinguished historian Caute discovers that suspicion also fell on those who merely exercised their civil liberties, posing no threat to national security. In reality, thi...

David Cautes wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War,the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War. Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the god that failed pessimism tha...

Rancorous and highly public disagreements between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher escalated to the point of cruel betrayal in the mid-1960s, yet surprisingly the details of the episode have escaped historians’ scrutiny. In this gripping account of the ideological clash between two of the most influential scholars of Cold War politics, David Caute uncovers a hidden story of passionate beliefs, unresolved antagonism, and the high cost of reprisal to both victim and perpetrator....

A gripping history of the Security Service and its covert surveillance on British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth centuryIn the popular imagination, MI5—or the Security Service—is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pose a threat to the country’s national security, from Nazi fifth columnists during the Second World War to Soviet spies during the Cold War and today’s domestic extremists. Yet, aided by the...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors“[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie WieselFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK W...

Hundreds of thousands of people from all continents visit Dachau Memorial Site each year. Any visitor to the Memorial Site will find that the Memorial Site bookshop stocks two publications worthy of particular mention, both deal at length with the history of the former concentration camp; Stanislav Zamecnik's ,outstanding, That Was Dachau and the superb Catalogue for the Exhibition: The Dachau Concentration Camp edited by Barbara Distel. Notwithstanding, there is little, recently written a...

From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers, Koestler is the definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure. Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon

This book depicts the crime against humanity committed by Lenin and Stalin through Secret Police and espionage agencies and slave labor camps in the USSR. To run the minority dictatorial government serving the interest of the aristocrats and intellectuals turned communists, both Lenin and Stalin had to terrorize the people through mass killing and other repressive means. Moreover a large number of the political opponents were sent to Gulags (forced labor camps) which played a crucial role ...

There are few more divisive names in modern history than that of the diehard revolutionary Leon Trotsky. To some he was a hypocritical totalitarian, while to many others he was a revolutionary liberator, an idealist determined to crush an outdated, oppressive dynasty in order to replace it with a proletarian socialist commonwealth. But one thing is agreed: his impact as a leader in the Russian Revolution and his widely read polemical books and articles make Trotsky one of the most influent...

The second edition of a best-selling pamphlet, Stalin and Stalinism has been fully updated to take in new debates and controversies which have emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union.Considering the ways in which Stalin's legacy still affects attitudes in and towards post-Soviet Russia, Stalin and Stalinism examines Stalin's ambiguous personal and political legacy, his achievements, and his crimes - all now the subject of major reappraisal both in the West ...

This is the separately-published introduction to a book which, uniquely, traces the decisive political divisions within the broadly-defined Trotskyist movement by presenting key texts from both sides of the political debate as it happend. The book's overall thesis, argued in this introduction, is that by the late 1940s there were two Trotskyisms. They had separated, fundamentally, through their different responses to events neither "side" expected: the transition of the Stalinist USSR from...

This profile looks at how Stalin, despite being regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world, achievieving divine-like status as a dictator.Through recently uncovered research material and Stalin’s archives in Moscow, Kuromiya analyzes how and why Stalin was a rare, even unique, politician who literally lived by politics alone. He analyses how Stalin understood psychology campaigns well and how he used this un...