Download or read book Russia s Life saver written by Albert Loren Weeks and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The United States is a country of machines. Without the use of these machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war." --Josef Stalin (1943), quoted in W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, Random House, N.Y., 1975, p. 277 The United States shipped more than $12 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Stalin's Russia during World War II. Materials lent, beginning in late 1941 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, included airplanes and tanks, locomotives and rails, construction materials, entire military production assembly lines, food and clothing, aviation fuel, and much else. Lend-Lease is now recognized by post-Soviet Russian historians as essential to the Soviet war effort. Wielding many facts and statistics never before published in the U.S., author Albert L. Weeks keenly analyzes the diplomatic rationale for and results of this assistance. Russia's Life-Saver is a brilliant contribution to the study of U.S.-Soviet relations and its role in World War II.
Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History.
Download or read book Bitter Waters written by Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1998-08-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on life and work after the author's release in 1935 from a Soviet labor camp, his story is told chronologically, and begins with his difficulties finding a job in the Russian provinces. This memoir may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society and economy and the indomitable creativity with which ordinary people sustained both their lives.
Download or read book Life on the Russian Country Estate written by Priscilla R. Roosevelt and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Om livet på de russiske godser indtil revolutionen
Download or read book Russians written by Gregory Feifer and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer comes an incisive portrait that draws on vivid personal stories to portray the forces that have shaped the Russian character for centuries-and continue to do so today. Russians explores the seeming paradoxes of life in Russia by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his decade as a journalist in Russia, Feifer corrects pervasive misconceptions by showing that much of what appears inexplicable about the country is logical when seen from the inside. He gets to the heart of why the world's leading energy producer continues to exasperate many in the international community. And he makes clear why President Vladimir Putin remains popular even as the gap widens between the super-rich and the great majority of poor. Traversing the world's largest country from the violent North Caucasus to Arctic Siberia, Feifer conducted hundreds of intimate conversations about everything from sex and vodka to Russia's complex relationship with the world. From fabulously wealthy oligarchs to the destitute elderly babushki who beg in Moscow's streets, he tells the story of a society bursting with vitality under a leadership rooted in tradition and often on the edge of collapse despite its authoritarian power. Feifer also draws on formative experiences in Russia's past and illustrative workings of its culture to shed much-needed light on the purposely hidden functioning of its society before, during, and after communism. Woven throughout is an intimate, first-person account of his family history, from his Russian mother's coming of age among Moscow's bohemian artistic elite to his American father's harrowing vodka-fueled run-ins with the KGB. What emerges is a rare portrait of a unique land of extremes whose forbidding geography, merciless climate, and crushing corruption has nevertheless produced some of the world's greatest art and some of its most remarkable scientific advances. Russians is an expertly observed, gripping profile of a people who will continue challenging the West for the foreseeable future.
Download or read book The Last Man in Russia written by Oliver Bullough and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia is dying from within. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline—and near-certain economic collapse—driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale of a lone priest to give life to this national crisis. Father Dmitry Dudko, a dissident Orthodox Christian, was thrown into a Stalinist labor camp for writing poetry. Undaunted, on his release in the mid-1950s he began to preach to congregations across Russia with little concern for his own safety. At a time when the Soviet government denied its subjects the prospect of advancement, and turned friend against friend and brother against brother, Dudko urged his followers to cling to hope. He maintained a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems. But as Bullough reveals, this courageous group of believers was eventually shattered by a terrible act of betrayal—one that exposes the full extent of the Communist tragedy. Still, Dudko’s dream endures. Although most Russians have forgotten the man himself, the embers of hope that survived the darkness are once more beginning to burn. Leading readers from a churchyard in Moscow to the snow-blanketed ghost towns of rural Russia, and from the forgotten graves of Stalin’s victims to a rock festival in an old gulag camp, The Last Man in Russia is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nation—one that, Bullough shows, might yet be saved.
Download or read book Letters from Russia written by Marquis de Custine and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marquis de Custine's unique perspective on a vast, fascinating country in the grip of oppressive tyranny In 1839, encouraged by his friend Balzac, Custine set out to explore Russia. His impressions turned into what is perhaps the greatest and most influential of all books about Russia under the Tsars. Rich in anecdotes as much about the court of Tsar Nicholas as the streets of St Petersburg, Custine is as brilliant writing about the Kremlin as he is about the great northern landscapes. An immediate bestseller on publication, Custine's book is also a central book for any discussion of 19th century history, as - like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America - it dramatizes far broader questions about the nature of government and society.
Download or read book Dangerous Thoughts written by Yuri Orlov and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1991 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly personal memoir, Yuri Orlov, celebrated scientist and human rights activist, recalls his life in pre-Glasnost Russia. He describes his days as a young man under Stalin, the persecution of his friends Sakharov and Scharansky, and his release from exile, in the famous spy for dissident swap arranged by the U.S., which generated international headlines.
Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Download or read book Tales of Imperial Russia written by Francis W. Wcislo and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and biography meet in Tales of Imperial Russia, a study of the late-Romanov Russian Empire, told through the figure of Sergei Witte. Like Bismarck or Gorbachev, Witte was a European statesman serving an empire. He was the most important statesman of pre-revolutionary Russia. In the Georgia, Odessa, Kyiv, and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, he inhabited the worlds of the Victorian Age, as young boy, student, railway executive, lover of divorcees and Jews, monarchist, and technocrat. His political career saw him construct the Tran-Siberian Railway, propel Russia towards Far Eastern war with Japan, visit America in 1905 to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth concluding that war, and return home to confront revolutionary disorder with the State Duma, the first Russian parliament. The book is based on two memoir manuscripts that Witte wrote between 1906 and 1912, and includes his account of Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, and the machinations of a Russian imperial court that he believed were leading the country to revolution. Telling the story both of a life and of the last days of the Tsarist empire, Tales of Imperial Russia will delight and inform all those interested in biography, literature, and history, as well as readers interested in the history of modern Russia.
Download or read book Tolstoy written by Rosamund Bartlett and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the brilliant author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina “should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject” (Booklist, starred review). In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, more revered than the tsar, with a growing international following. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy spent his existence rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state. In “an epic biography that does justice to an epic figure,” Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including fascinating material that has only become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Library Journal, starred review). She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived.
Download or read book Putin s Russia written by Anna Politkovskaya and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was killed while working on an exposé of Chechnya's Russian-backed leader. Long hailed as "a lone voice crying out in a moral wilderness" ... [she] made her name with her fearless reporting on the war in Chechnya. More recently, she turned to Vladimir Putin himself, focusing on the multiple threats his regime poses to Russian stability and on the state of terror that in the end cost Politkovskaya her life."--Back cover.
Download or read book Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia written by ChaeRan Y. Freeze and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.
Download or read book The Russian Job written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing, little-known story of an American effort to save the newly formed Soviet Union from disaster After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine—and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin. For two years, a small, daring band of Americans fed more than ten million men, women, and children across a million square miles of territory. It was the largest humanitarian operation in history—preventing the loss of countless lives, social unrest on a massive scale, and, quite possibly, the collapse of the communist state. Now, almost a hundred years later, few in either America or Russia have heard of the ARA. The Soviet government quickly began to erase the memory of American charity. In America, fanatical anti-communism would eclipse this historic cooperation with the Soviet Union. Smith resurrects the American relief mission from obscurity, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey from the heights of human altruism to the depths of human depravity. The story of the ARA is filled with political intrigue, espionage, the clash of ideologies, violence, adventure, and romance, and features some of the great historical figures of the twentieth century. In a time of cynicism and despair about the world’s ability to confront international crises, The Russian Job is a riveting account of a cooperative effort unmatched before or since.
Download or read book Waking the Tempests written by Eleanor Randolph and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book by veteran journalist Eleanor Randolph offers a startling picture of life in Russia in the wake of the Soviet collapse, where the chaos that followed engulfed everything and everybody
Download or read book Ivan Pavlov written by Daniel Philip Todes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and is the first scholarly biography to be published in any language. The book is Todes's magnum opus, which he has been working on for some twenty years. Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov's personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his "training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell"); rather, he sought to explain not simply external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. This book is also a traditional "life and times" biography that weaves Pavlov into some 100 years of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia--from the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin's time. Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Ryazan before the serfs were emancipated, made his home and professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917- 1921, rebuilt his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works
Download or read book Moscow St Petersburg 1900 1920 written by John E. Bowlt and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published in hardcover by The Vendome Press in 2008"--Copyright page.
