High Soviet

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR.

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. 

As Anatole Broyard of the New York Times has so aptly said, "If le Carr├ is the Henry James of suspense fiction, Buckley, if he chose, might be the Waugh." Bill Buckley has created a handsome American hero, Blackford Oakes, who happens to be an irreverent Yale-and-CIA-trained superspy. The...

Nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground.

In 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin defected to England and brought along an extensive archive of military intelligence from the Soviet Union. A career KGB officer who served as chief archivist for its foreign operations, Vasili Mitrokhin became disillusioned with the Soviet system and its constant repression of dissidents at home and abroad. Determined to preserve the truth, he secretly compiled a detailed record of the agency's worldwide espionage network...

'Thrillingly compelling' Daily Telegraph 'A compelling combination of betrayal, catastrophe, starvation, madness, mutiny, murder and revenge' Spectator 'Extraordinary ... An eye-opening, twist-filled epic of heroism, hardship and weapons-grade narcissism' The Times 'A fabulous tale of ambition...

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.

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.

One Navy admiral called it "one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era". To this day, the U.S. Navy officially describes it an inexplicable accident. For decades, the real story of the disaster has eluded journalists, historians, and the family members of the lost crew. But a small handful of Navy and government officials knew the truth from the very beginning: the sinking of the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Scorpion and its crew of 99 men, on May 22, 1968, was an act of war.

He was a KGB colonel. Then he became MI6’s most valuable spy. And in 1983, his warning saved the world. Oleg Gordievsky, the highest‑ranking Soviet intelligence officer ever to work for the West, lived a lie for eleven years. This is his definitive account – a story of betrayal, courage, and the spycraft that ended the Cold War. History class taught you the dates of the Cold War. The textbooks told you about missiles and summits. But they left out the one man who, from inside the KGB, saw that the Kremlin genuinely believed NATO was about to launch a nuclear first strike. In November ...

The incredible true story of the world's deepest-diving military submarine, a catastrophic fire beneath the Arctic, and a crew trapped in a desperate fight to survive. Soviet submarine K-278 Komsomolets was the crown jewel of the Cold War undersea arms race—a titanium-hulled nuclear attack...

A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany. With monumental fairness and balance, The...

In the 1970s, a group of astronomers tracking a fragment from the Kohoutek comet obtained authorization to enter a remote region of the Soviet Union. The truth about what happened to that expedition remains hidden among myths and rumors.

A thin, balding, and reclusive middle-aged Russian by the name of Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was one of the Soviet Union's most renowned spies during the Cold War of the 1950s . . . . until his cover was blown by an incompetent colleague who wanted to defect to the United States. This is the full account of Abel's espionage work, his dramatic apprehension, his eventual conviction and its affirmation by the United States Supreme Court, and finally, his surprising release back to Russia.

'Stand by for fireworks as it hits the shelves' SUNDAY TIMES 'If Orwell were with us today, he'd be writing books like this' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE 'Breath-taking and jaw-dropping' PETER FRANKOPAN 'A true-life thriller' ANNE APPLEBAUM From the bestselling author of Kleptopia comes a true story...

This latest pulse-pounding installment in Vince Flynn's #1 New York Times bestselling series takes Mitch Rapp back to his fledgling assassin days, completing the trilogy begun with American Assassin and Kill Shot. The Central Intelligence Agency is in crisis. Following the collapse of the Soviet...

This book explores the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 from the end of the Second World War to 1964. It argues that MI5 acted with neither statutory authority nor statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources.

Explore the unlikely friendship between 17-year-old Nick and his elderly Greek neighbor, Petrakis, in the old man's final days. Nick, too Russian for his schoolmates and too American for his immigrant friends, searches for guidance that no one but Petrakis can offer.

A stolen Soviet relic. A rogue state's terrifying order. And a countdown to global devastation. Sol, a ruthless Syrian arms dealer with deep terrorist ties, has just been handed the ultimate contract. Backed by Iran, she has successfully unearthed a long-forgotten, Soviet-era research project—the deadliest weapon ever created—hidden deep within an abandoned military facility. When a high-level cyber breach on Ukraine’s servers alerts British intelligence, MI6 Chief David Fox knows the clock is already ticking. Special Agent Mac and elite SAS Captain Kirkland Finn are deployed behind ...

Continua. The Bookmark Chronicles, Volume Two: Fighting Algorithms Across Time A ninth-grader types the same two words into her school library's catalog three times and gives up. The book she needs is on the shelf, forty feet away. For her, the search puts it eleventh. This spring a new layer sits on the Halvorsen High catalog: Signal Health, powered by Alderlight. Alex runs the same search and gets a different order. On Zoe's login the four covers recommended for her are all girls in distress. "Why are mine all sad girls on floors?" she asks. Nine days later Zoe is called out of chemistry ...