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Death at the Dacha

Author : Paul M. Levitt

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 177 pages

File Size : 19,45 MB

Release : 2020-01-10

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1493050605

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Book Description

As Stalin lies dying, this novel records his last thoughts, which he renders as a movie about the people he believes envenomed his life, namely, Lenin and certain women. (A film devotee, Stalin so loved movies that some scholars have even suggested that he governed the Soviet empire by cinematocracy, rule by cinema.) He has suffered a stroke but will linger for three days before dying. As in a film, he revisits scenes and old arguments with Lenin, and then endures a trial over his charge that women have poisoned his life. At the conclusion of the trial, Stalin’s mind screen returns to V.I. Lenin. What follows then is Stalin’s concluding mockery and denunciation of Lenin; Lenin’s final assessment of Stalin; and the end of the novel: Stalin’s dying words.



Death on the Trans-Siberian Express

Author : C J Farrington

Publisher : Constable

Page : 336 pages

File Size : 21,82 MB

Release : 2021-11-25

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1472133110

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Book Description

'Quirky and colourful' Times Crime Club 'An absolute delight' L C Tyler 'This intriguing but charming murder mystery is packed with psychological depth and wonderfully-drawn characters' Eleanor Ray Welcome to Roslazny - a sleepy Russian town where intrigue and murder combine to disturb the icy silence... Olga Pushkin, Railway Engineer (Third Class) and would-be bestselling author, spends her days in a little rail-side hut with only Dmitri the hedgehog for company. While tourists and travellers clatter by on the Trans-Siberian Express, Olga dreams of studying literature at Tomsk State University - the Oxford of West Siberia - and escaping the sleepy, snow-clad village of Roslazny. But Roslazny doesn't stay sleepy for long. Poison-pen letters, a small-town crime wave, and persistent rumours of a Baba Yaga - a murderous witch hiding in the frozen depths of the Russian taiga - combine to disturb the icy silence. And one day Olga arrives at her hut only to be knocked unconscious by a man falling from the Trans-Siberian, an American tourist with his throat cut from ear to ear and his mouth stuffed with 10-ruble coins. Another death soon follows, and Sergeant Vassily Marushkin, the brooding, enigmatic policeman who takes on the case, finds himself falsely imprisoned by his Machiavellian superior, Chief-Inspector Babikov. Olga resolves to help Vassily by proving his innocence. But with no leads to follow and time running out, has Olga bitten off more than she can chew? Praise for Death on the Trans-Siberian Express 'The book is an absolute delight, evocative equally of the frozen steppes, bad vodka and worse sausage, and full of larger than life characters. Olga Pushkin is an endearing protagonist, who is hopefully set for a series as long as the Trans Siberian Railway.' L C Tyler 'Written with a warmth that would thaw Siberia, this intriguing but charming murder mystery is packed with psychological depth and wonderfully-drawn characters. It also features the best hedgehog I've met in a novel.' Eleanor Ray



The Dancer and the Devil

Author : John E. O'Neill

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 169 pages

File Size : 41,98 MB

Release : 2022-04-26

Category : History

ISBN : 1684512832

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Book Description

Communism must kill what it cannot control. So for a century, it has killed artists, writers, musicians, and even dancers. It kills them secretly, using bioweapons and poison to escape accountability. Among its victims was Anna Pavlova, history’s greatest dancer, who was said to have God-given wings and feet that never touched the ground. But she defied Stalin, and for that she had to die. Her sudden death in Paris in 1931 was a mystery until now. The Dancer and the Devil traces Marxism’s century-long fascination with bioweapons, from the Soviets’ leak of pneumonic plague in 1939 that nearly killed Stalin to leaks of anthrax at Kiev in 1972 and Yekaterinburg in 1979; from the leak of a flu in northeast China in 1977 that killed millions to the catastrophic COVID-19 leak from biolabs in Wuhan, China. Marxism’s dark past must not be a parent to the world’s dark future. COMMUNIST CHINA PLAYED WITH FIRE AND THE WORLD IS BURNING Nearly ten million people have died so far from the mysterious Covid-19 virus. These dead follow a long line of thousands of other brave souls stretching back nearly a century who also suffered mysterious “natural” deaths, including dancers, writers, saints and heroes. These honored dead should not be forgotten by amnesiac government trying to avoid inconvenient truth. The dead and those who remember and loved them deserve answers to two great questions. How? Why? The Dancer and the Devil answers these questions. It tracks a century of Soviet and then Chinese Communist poisons and bioweapons through their development and intentional use on talented artists and heroes like Anna Pavlova, Maxim Gorky, Raoul Wallenberg and Alexis Navalny. It then tracks leaks of bioweapons beginning in Saratov, Russia in 1939 and Soviet Yekaterinburg in 1979 through Chinese leaks concluding in the recent concealed leak of the manufactured bioweapon Covid-19 from the military lab in Wuhan, China. Stalin, Putin, and Xi, perpetrators of these vast crimes against humanity itself, should not be allowed to escape responsibility. This book assembles the facts on these cowardly murderers, calling them to account for their heartless crimes against man concluding in Covid-19.



Death of a Dissident

Author : Alex Goldfarb

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 386 pages

File Size : 24,92 MB

Release : 2010-05-11

Category : History

ISBN : 1416560769

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Book Description

The assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in November 2006 -- poisoned by the rare radioactive element polonium -- caused an international sensation. Within a few short weeks, the fit forty-three-year-old lay gaunt, bald, and dying in a hospital, the victim of a "tiny nuclear bomb." Suspicions swirled around Russia's FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the Putin regime. Traces of polonium radiation were found in Germany and on certain airplanes, suggesting a travel route from Russia for the carriers of the fatal poison. But what really happened? What did Litvinenko know? And why was he killed? The full story of Sasha Litvinenko's life and death is one that the Kremlin does not want told. His closest friend, Alex Goldfarb, and his widow, Marina, are the only two people who can tell it all, from firsthand knowledge, with dramatic scenes from Moscow to London to Washington. Death of a Dissident reads like a political thriller, yet its story is more fantastic and frightening than any novel. Ever since 1998, when Litvinenko denounced the FSB for ordering him to assassinate tycoon Boris Berezovsky, he had devoted his life to exposing the FSB's darkest secrets. After a dramatic escape to London with Goldfarb's assistance, he spent six years, often working with Goldfarb, investigating a widening series of scandals. Oligarchs and journalists have been assassinated. Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko was poisoned on the campaign trail. The war in Chechnya became unspeakably harsh on both sides. Sasha Litvinenko investigated all of it, and he denounced his former employers in no uncertain terms for their dirty deeds. Death of a Dissident opens a window into the dark heart of the Putin Kremlin. With its strong-arm tactics, tight control over the media, and penetration of all levels of government, the old KGB is back with a vengeance. Sasha Litvinenko dedicated his life to exposing this truth. It took his diabolical murder for the world to listen.



Stalin's Library

Author : Geoffrey Roberts

Publisher : Yale University Press

Page : 277 pages

File Size : 23,85 MB

Release : 2022-02-08

Category : History

ISBN : 030026559X

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Book Description

A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more.



Stalin

Author : Edvard Radzinsky

Publisher : Anchor

Page : 638 pages

File Size : 32,52 MB

Release : 2011-05-18

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0307754685

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Book Description

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 Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide. As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.



At the Abyss

Author : Thomas Reed

Publisher : Presidio Press

Page : 386 pages

File Size : 18,37 MB

Release : 2007-12-18

Category : History

ISBN : 0307414620

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Book Description

“The Cold War . . . was a fight to the death,” notes Thomas C. Reed, “fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort—save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons.” With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss. Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America’s fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict. Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers—the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria—the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall—the leader of America’s advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell—the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan—the “Queen of Hearts,” who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband’s White House. From Eisenhower’s decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the “Missile Gap” of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan’s vow to “lean on the Soviets until they go broke”—all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and in backrooms could know. Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, “those years . . . came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III.”



The Man Who Lost the War

Author : W. T. Tyler

Publisher : Open Road Media

Page : 392 pages

File Size : 26,82 MB

Release : 2014-12-23

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 149769700X

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Book Description

Set in post-war Berlin, a disillusioned former CIA operative and a Russian spy cross paths in their search for an elusive double agent.



Mikhail Botvinnik

Author : Andy Soltis

Publisher : McFarland

Page : 283 pages

File Size : 17,50 MB

Release : 2013-12-07

Category : Games & Activities

ISBN : 1476613583

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Book Description

The games of Mikhail Botvinnik, world chess champion from 1948 to 1963, have been studied by players around the world for decades. But little has been written about Botvinnik himself. This book explores his unusual dual career--as a highly regarded scientist as well as the first truly professional chess player--as well as his complex relations with Soviet leaders, including Josef Stalin, his bitter rivalries, and his doomed effort to create the perfect chess-playing computer program. The book has more than 85 games, 127 diagrams, twelve photographs, a chronology of his life and career, a bibliography, an index of openings, an index of opponents, and a general index.



Warped Mourning

Author : Alexander Etkind

Publisher : Stanford University Press

Page : 326 pages

File Size : 44,72 MB

Release : 2013-03-06

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0804785538

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Book Description

“[A] superb study of Russian cultural memory makes all too clear, ghosts of the unburied dead affect literature, art, public life and mental health too.” —The Economist After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book’s premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains “the land of the unburied”: the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious. Alexander Etkind shows how post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present. “Every page contains fresh, striking insights, not only in the intrinsic value of art itself, but more significantly in the process of mourning. . . . This brilliant book will be indispensable for scholars of mourning theories.” —Choice “There is undoubtedly much that is new and exciting in this study of the impact of state violence on the form and content of art and scholarship in post-Stalin Russia.” —Russian Review “A fascinating and haunting study of how successive Kremlin leaders and the intelligentsia have explained the Gulag and Stalin’s crimes” —Strategic Europe