Soviet Communism

“A Maior das Lições–Memórias do Comunismo Soviético” conta a história real de João Cisman, um brasileiro que se mudou com a família para a URSS no começo da década de 1960 para viver na terra onde nasceram seus pais e irmãos mais velhos. Lá, conheceu a realidade imposta aos cidadãos comuns do sistema, muito diferente daquela que havia experimentado meses antes, enquanto membro de uma comitiva de sindicalistas brasileiros simpáticos ao regime comunista.

From the chaos of a collapsing empire, three men emerged to forge a new world in fire and blood. Vladimir Lenin, the revolution's architect; Leon Trotsky, its brilliant commander; and Ioseb Stalin, its patient and ruthless administrator, would see their fates intertwined in a struggle that defined the twentieth century. This book meticulously traces their journey from comrades in arms to mortal enemies fighting for the soul of the state they built. Drawing on extensive historical records, the narrative first explores their rise to power amidst the storms of the October Revolution and the ...

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this best-selling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.

An Auschwitz survivor is sentenced to a Siberian Gulag for crimes against the state after suffering abuse at the hands of a passing KGB unit. From the Arctic Circle, she writes of the injustices of fascism and the savage extremes of Stalinist socialism in a series of mysterious letters that surface in Cold War Berlin. An IRA assassin determines to rescue her no matter the cost to him or those around him. He enlists a sworn enemy, the British Army soldier recently captured by a Republican cell in Armagh, Northern Ireland. Despite the political divide that separates them, the two men find ...

Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the 20th century.

Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post-Soviet Russia.

Dear America! is the incredible first-hand account about how a young American teenager, Thomas Sgovio (1916-1997), miraculously survived 10 years in Stalin’s brutal concentration labor camps in Northern Siberia. After being released, he was forced to spend an additional 5 years in the timber regions of central Siberia as the Russian government would not allow him to leave the country, or live in any major city. After the death of Stalin, Thomas was finally released. It took him an additional 5 years working as a commercial artist in Moscow before he finally succeeded in extricating ...

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages.

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.

During the 1970s the continent of Africa was consumed by conflict. The many wars which were being fought attracted ex soldiers from far and wide who were prepared to fight for money. This is one man’s story. Blood Money is a sensational account of mercenary warfare at its most brutal, you are led on a heart-stopping journey through African civil war zones to the Rhodesian bush war. The author pulls no punches in his description of those times. It’s a terrific roller-coaster of a book which will leave the reader breathless as they are plunged headlong into the action. “The fear in the ...

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

Charlie Wilson's War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the rise of militant Islam. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the agency's history.

"Narrators Anna Fikhman, Christopher Gebauer, and Jesse Vilinsky combine talents in this compelling historical fiction, which takes place during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s."- AudioFile Author's note read by the author. From the author of Nowhere Boy—called “a resistance novel for our...

In Stalin’s Russia, when prison sentences stretched ten, fifteen, and twenty-five years, the future Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found himself incarcerated in its genocidal “corrective” labor camps (the so-called Gulag of the Soviet Union). His crime: expressing anti-Stalinist opinions in a letter to a friend. A devout Communist at his arrest, condemned to be worked to death in the frozen wastelands of Russia, he underwent instead a profound psychological transformation, broke free of his Marxist ideology—and survived. This full biography of one of the most influential ...

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.

Born in Ukraine in 1879, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (known as Leon Trotsky) became one of the most significant figures in the crowded history of the twentieth century. Simon Webb’s biography, written after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, places particular emphasis on Trotsky as a Ukrainian, and sets his life against the background of Ukrainian, Russian and British history and culture, and the story of Russian colonialism.

Edge of Eternity is the epic, final novel in Ken Follett's captivating and hugely ambitious Century trilogy. On its own or in sequence with Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, this is an irresistible and spellbinding epic about the fight for personal freedom set during the Cold War. A Fight...

Step into the shadowy realm of Soviet economics with "Red Economics: An Accessible Journey Through Soviet Economic History." This captivating exploration pulls back the Iron Curtain, revealing the inner workings of one of history's most controversial economic experiments. From the fiery days of the Bolshevik Revolution to the tumultuous collapse of the USSR, "Red Economics" guides you through the triumphs and tribulations of the Soviet economic machine. Discover how Stalin's Five-Year Plans reshaped an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse, and uncover the hidden costs of this ...

Putin's World examines the country's turbulent past, how it has influenced Putin, the Russians' understanding of their position on the global stage and their future ambitions—and their conviction that the West has tried to deny them a seat at the table of great powers since the USSR collapsed.