Both realism and justice demand that efforts to conserve biological diversity address human needs as well. The most promising hope of accomplishing such a goal lies in locally based conservation efforts -- an approach that seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of conservation efforts.Natural Connections focuses on rural societies and the conservation of biodiversity in rural areas. It represents the first systematic analysis of locally based...

This monograph provides a detailed yet concise narrative of the history of the ethnic Germans in the Russian Empire and USSR. It starts with the settlement in the Russian Empire by German colonists in the Volga, Black Sea, and other regions in 1764, tracing their development and Tsarist state policies towards them up until 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet policy towards its ethnic Germans varied. It shifted from a generally favorable policy in the 1920s to a much more oppressiv...

The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: "a major achievement" ( New Republic).Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses we...

An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others.Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. ...

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his worldIt has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terr...

**“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book ReviewPulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history**In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist mode...

"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of RivalsRobert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissenger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963...

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West.At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and po...

**An Economist Best Book of the YearAFinancial TimesBest Book of the YearWinner of the the Pushkin House Russian Book PrizeFinalist for the Lionel Gelber PrizeAn Amazon Best Book of the Month (History)One of the world’s leading scholars offers a fresh interpretation of the linked origins of World War I and the Russian Revolution"Lieven has a double gift: first, for harvesting details to convey the essence of an era and, second, ...

From the accliamed authority on Russia and the Russian Revolution—the final volume in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution, covering the period from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924"Offers a penetrating analysis of the making of the Soviet system.... [It is] a passionate book whose outstanding scholarship is rooted in universal values like truth, honor, responsibility and the sacredness of human life." —Philadelphia In...

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the emancipation of mankind from past oppression" or "a crime and a disaster." Some things are clear. After the implosion of the three-hundred-...

The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. His crowning achievement is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure.Having utilized his still-unequaled access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and secret Presidential Archive, Volkogonov sheds new light on some of the m...