Author : Steve LeVine
Publisher : Random House (NY)
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 35,69 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Documents that bloodshed that has stained Putin's two terms as president, while examining the perplexing question of how Russians manage to negotiate their way around the ever-present danger of violence.
Author : Olga Bertelsen
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 22,47 MB
Release : 2022-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1793608938
2024 Winner, Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize, King's College Centre for the Study of Intelligence This book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s–1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.
Author : Catherine Belton
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 405 pages
File Size : 23,30 MB
Release : 2020-06-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0374712786
A New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a best book of the year by The Economist | Financial Times | New Statesman | The Telegraph "[Putin's People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism." —Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic "This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades." —Peter Frankopan, Financial Times Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it? In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche—a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad. Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach—and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match—Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
Author : Milt Bearden
Publisher : Random House
Page : 818 pages
File Size : 50,22 MB
Release : 2003-05-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1588363066
A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose through the ranks to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War. The clandestine operations they masterminded took them from the sewers of Moscow to the back streets of Baghdad, from Cairo and Havana to Prague and Berlin, but the action centers on Washington, starting in the infamous "Year of the Spy"—when, one by one, the CIA’s agents in Moscow began to be killed, up through to the very last man. Behind the scenes with the CIA's covert operations in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden led America to victory in the secret war against the Soviets, and for the first time he reveals here what he did and whom America backed, and why. Bearden was called back to Washington after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and was made chief of the Soviet/East Euro-pean Division—just in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe, and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Laced with startling revelations—about fail-safe top-secret back channels between the CIA and KGB, double and triple agents, covert operations in Berlin and Prague, and the fateful autumn of 1989—The Main Enemy is history at its action-packed best.
Author : Christopher Andrew
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 504 pages
File Size : 34,14 MB
Release : 2014-01-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0141977981
The second sensational volume of 'One of the biggest intelligence coups in recent years' (The Times) When Vasili Mitrokhin revealed his archive of Russian intelligence material to the world it caused an international sensation. The Mitrokhin Archive II reveals in full the secrets of this remarkable cache, showing for the first time the astonishing extent of the KGB's global power and influence. 'The long-awaited second tranche from the KGB archive ... co-authored by our leading authority on the secret machinations of the Evil Empire' Sunday Times 'Stunning ... the stuff of legend ... a unique insight into KGB activities on a global scale' Spectator 'Headline news ... as great a credit to the scholarship of its author as to the dedication and courage of its originator' Sunday Telegraph 'There are gems on every page' Financial Times
Author : Nigel West
Publisher : Frontline Books
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 17,33 MB
Release : 2021-06-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1526792168
On Monday, 4 March 2019, Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia collapsed in the centre of Salisbury in Wiltshire. Both were suffering the effects of A-234, a third-generation Russian-manufactured military grade Novichok nerve agent. As three suspects, all GRU officers, were quickly identified, it was also established that the door handle to the Skripals’ suburban home had been contaminated with the toxin. Whilst the Skripals had lived in the cathedral city for the past seven years, what Sergei’s neighbours did not know was that he had once been a colonel in the Russian Federation’s military intelligence service. Back in July 1996, he had been posted under diplomatic cover to Madrid where he was subsequently cultivated by Pablo Miller, an MI6 officer operating as a businessman under the alias Antonio Alvares de Idalgo. Sergei’s recruitment by Miller was one of many successes achieved by Western agencies following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These counter-intelligence triumphs had their origins in a joint FBI/CIA project codenamed COURTSHIP which was based on the rather risky tactic of making an approach to almost any identified KGB or GRU officer, in almost any environment – a technique known as a ‘cold pitch’. It soon yielded results; within five years COURTSHIP had netted about twenty assets. Codenamed FORTHWITH, Sergei was betrayed in December 2001. Arrested in 2004, he was convicted of high treason in Russia, but was subsequently included in a prisoner swap in July 2010 and brought to the UK. The journey to the attempt on his life had begun. The Vienna spy swap was the culmination of a CIA plan to free a specific individual, Gennadi Vasilenko, who had been the Agency’s key mole inside the KGB since March 1979. To acquire the necessary leverage, the FBI swooped on a large network in the United States, bringing to an end a surveillance operation, codenamed GHOST STORIES, that lasted ten years. Anxious to avoid further embarrassment over the arrests, Vladimir Putin personally authorised an exchange, unaware of Vasilenko’s true status. It was only after the transaction had been completed, and two further Russian spies were exfiltrated from Moscow, that the Kremlin learned of Vasilenko’s value, and the scale of the deception. For the very first time, a Russian government had been persuaded to release four traitors and send them to the West. The humiliation was complete. As Spy Swap reveals, Putin’s retribution would manifest itself in a quiet Wiltshire market town.
Author : David C. Martin
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 26,85 MB
Release : 2018-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 151072219X
At the dawn of the Cold War, the world’s most important intelligence agencies—the Soviet KGB, the American CIA, and the British MI6—appeared to have clear-cut roles and a sense of rising importance in their respective countries. But when Kim Philby, head of MI6’s Russian division and arguably the twenty-first century’s greatest spy, was revealed to be a Russian mole along with British government heavyweights Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, everything in the Western intelligence world turned upside down. Here is the true story of how the American James Bond—the colorful, foulmouthed, pistol-packing, alcoholic ex-FBI agent William “King” Harvey—put the finger on Philby; how James Jesus Angleton, the chain-smoking poet of Yale University and the CIA’s supposed “master spy” in charge of counterintelligence, began his descent into a paranoid wilderness of mirrors upon learning of family friend Kim Philby’s ultimate betrayal; and the devastating consequences of the loss of MI6 prestige and the CIA’s subsequent self-defeating witch hunts. Every revelation, every stranger-than-fiction twist and turn is all the more intriguing as truths become lies and unlikely scenarios are revealed as reality. With impeccable sourcing and the use of thousands of pages of declassified research, David C. Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors is widely recognized as a masterpiece of intelligence literature.
Author : Victoria A. Malko
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 50,67 MB
Release : 2021-10-19
Category : History
ISBN : 1498596797
This study focuses on the first group targeted in the genocide known as the Holodomor: Ukrainian intelligentsia, the “brain of the nation,” using the words of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and enshrined it in international law. The study’s author examines complex and devastating effects of the Holodomor on Ukrainian society during the 1920–1930s. Members of intelligentsia had individual and professional responsibilities. They resisted, but eventually they were forced to serve the Soviet regime. Ukrainian intelligentsia were virtually wiped out, most of its writers and a third of its teachers. The remaining cadres faced a choice without a choice if they wanted to survive. The author analyzes how and why this process occurred and what role intellectuals, especially teachers, played in shaping, contesting, and inculcating history. Crucially, the author challenges Western perceptions of the all-Union famine that was allegedly caused by ad hoc collectivization policies, highlighting the intentional nature of the famine as a tool of genocide, persecution, and prosecution of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia, clergy, and grain growers. The author demonstrates the continuity between Stalinist and neo-Stalinist attempts to prevent the crystallization of the nation and subvert Ukraine from within by non-lethal and lethal means.
Author : Michael T. Westrate
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 30,55 MB
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1498523412
What the world is now witnessing in Ukraine is the cumulative effect of history and memory in the lives of the people of the region—and this book directly addresses those subjects. Although the majority of scholarship on the Soviet Union focuses on top-level political and intellectual elites, these groups were only tiny minorities. What was life like for the rest of society? What was it like for the vast population that usually supported the regime, mostly accepted the rules, essentially internalized the ideology, and generally made the same choices as their neighbors and friends? What was it like to live Soviet as the USSR hit its peak as a superpower and then fell apart? What was it like to live Soviet in Ukraine in the decade after independence? This book answers those questions. It is an oral history of a group of military colonels and their wives, children, and contemporaries, covering their lives from childhood to the present. During this period, these military families went from comfortable economic circumstances, professional prestige, and political influence as part of the Soviet upper stratum, to destitution and disgrace in the 1990s. Today, many of them are part of Europe’s largest ethnic minority—Russians in Ukraine. The geographic focus is Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Europe’s second-largest country, a Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine. Based on 3,000+ pages of interview transcripts and supplemented with materials gleaned from unprecedented access to personal, family, and institutional archives, the book investigates how families endured shifting social, cultural, and political realities. By analyzing the lives of individuals in context, Westrate provides insights at the grassroots level. He reveals how ideological, professional, gender, ethnic, and national imperatives—as developed and transmitted by elites—were internalized, transformed, or rejected by the rank and file. He reveals how the subjective identities of individuals and small groups developed and changed over time, and how that process relates to the parallel projects pursued by the leaders of their countries. In the process, he shows what those experiences have to offer the study of Soviet, post-Soviet, and transnational history, bridging the boundaries created by the collapse of the USSR and exploring the foundations of both twenty-first-century Ukraine and today’s conflicts.
Author : Lonny Harrison
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 33,56 MB
Release : 2020-12-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1498597998
Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm is a panoramic history of the Russian intelligentsia and an analysis of the language and ideals of the Russian Revolution, from its inception over the long nineteenth century through fruition in early Soviet society. This volume examines metaphors for revolution in the storm, flood, and harvest imagery ubiquitous in Russian literary works. At the same time, it considers the struggle to own the narrative of modernity, including Bolshevik weaponization of language and cultural policy that supported the use of terror and social purging. This uniquely cross-disciplinary study conducts a close reading of texts that use storm, flood, and agricultural metaphors in diverse ways to represent revolution, whether in anticipation and celebration of its ideals or in resistance to the same. A spotlight is given to the lives and works of authors who responded to Soviet authoritarianism by reclaiming the narrative of revolution in the name of personal freedom and restoration of humanist values. Hinging on the clashes of culture wars and class wars and residing at the intersection of ideas at the very core of the fight for modernity, this book provides a critical reading of authoritarian discourse and investigates rare examples of the counter narratives that thrived in spite of their suppression.
