Barcelona Prose is a collection of autobiographical essays by the gifted translator, literary scholar, and dissident, Efim Etkind. These engaging, deeply psychological vignettes capture the reality of daily life and work in the Soviet Union. Unlike other memoirists who have faced hardships, Etkind's tone is never cruel or embittered. Told through the lens of a practiced scholar, he captures the absurdity of a cultural-political experiment that destroyed his family’s life, his own ...

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...

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?

**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...

From the author of The Last Tsar, the first full-scale life of Stalin to have what no previous biography has fully obtained: the facts. Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion.As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of S...

"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...

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destructionThe House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the ...

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...

Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin’s secret police. Now, in his harrowing new book, Donald Rayfield probes...

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 point of Jan Tomasz and Irena Grudzinska Gross's Golden Harvest, this haunting photo...

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience.Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of ...

This stirring collection of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust reflects a vast and diverse range of experiences-some of the writers were refugees, others were hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos. The book offers the first comprehensive collection of such writings, with extensive excerpts from fifteen diaries, ten of which have never before been translated and published in English. The diarists ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two; some...