Download or read book At Spaso House written by Rebecca Matlock and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the USSR, the American ambassador has lived and entertained guests in a mansion located on Spasopeskovskaya ploshchadka, quite a mouthful for most Americans, so they shortened it to “Spaso House.” That is the locale Rebecca Matlock chose for her account of the interactions of American and Soviet people from the 1930s to 1991. She has drawn on the memoirs of diplomats and journalists and on her experience during eleven years as a diplomat’s wife in Moscow. As Spaso House hostess from 1987 to 1991, she entertained presidents, foreign ministers, diplomats of many countries, business tycoons, legislators, teachers and students, along with world-famous poets, artists and musicians. Her account of how Cold War hostility and suspicion yielded to understanding and growing cooperation contains important lessons for us today

Download or read book Soviet Life written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Moscow Summit written by Ronald Reagan and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Primarily remarks made by President Reagan on his May 25-June 30, 1988 trip to Helsinki, Moscow, and London. Also includes remarks by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Download or read book Reflections on a Life written by Bob Fulton and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ronald Reagan written by United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan) and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 1004 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States written by United States. President and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 984 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President", 1956-1992.

Download or read book Six Months in 1945 written by Michael Dobbs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler’s armies were on the run, and victory was imminent. The Big Three wanted to draft a blueprint for a lasting peace—but instead they set the stage for a forty-four year division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. After fighting side by side for nearly four years, their political alliance was beginning to fracture. Although the most dramatic Cold War confrontations such as the Berlin airlift were still to come, a new struggle for global hegemony had got underway by August 1945 when Truman used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Six Months in 1945 brilliantly captures this momentous historical turning point while illuminating the aims and personalities of larger-than-life political giants.

Download or read book Theremin written by Albert Glinsky and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LEON THEREMIN led a life of flamboyant musical invention laced with daring electronic stealth. A creative genius and prolific inventor, Theremin launched the field of electronic music virtually singlehandedly in 1920 with the musical instrument that bears his name. The theremin -- the only instrument that is played without being touched -- created a sensation worldwide and paved the way for the modern synthesizer. Its otherworldly sound became familiar in sci-fi films and even in rock music. This magical instrument that charmed millions, however, is only the beginning of the story. As a Soviet scientist, Theremin surrendered his life and work to the service of State espionage. On assignment in Depression-era America, he became the toast of New York society and worked the engines of capitalist commerce while passing data on U.S. industrial technology to the Soviet apparat. Following his sudden disappearance from New York in 1938, Theremin was exiled to a Siberian labor camp. He subsequently vanished into the top-secret Soviet intelligence machine and was presumed dead for nearly thirty years. Using the same technology that lay behind the theremin, he designed bugging devices that eavesdropped on U.S. diplomatic offices and stood at the center of a pivotal cold war confrontation. Throughout his life, Theremin developed many other electronic wonders, including one of the earliest televisions and multimedia devices that anticipated performance art and virtual reality by decades. In this first full biography of Leon Theremin, Albert Glinsky depicts the inventor's nearly one-hundred-year life span as a microcosm of the twentieth century. Theremin is seen at the epicenter of most of themajor events of the century: the Russian Revolution, two world wars, America's Great Depression, Stalin's purges, the cold war, and perestroika. His life emerges as no less than a metaphor for the divergence of communism and capitalism. Theremin blends the whimsical and the treacherous into a chronicle that takes in everything from the KGB to Macy's store windows, Alcatraz to the Beach Boys, Hollywood thrillers to the United Nations, Joseph Stalin to Shirley Temple. Theremin's world of espionage and invention is an amazing drama of hidden loyalties, mixed motivations, and an irrepressibly creative spirit.

Download or read book Watching Darkness Fall written by David McKean and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and groundbreaking account of how all but one of FDR's ambassadors in Europe misjudged Hitler and his intentions As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the U.S. Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau, an eighteenth Renaissance manse with a wine cellar of over 18,000 bottles, even though “we have only two revolvers in this entire mission with only forty bullets.” As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you.” As the fighting raged in France, across the English Channel, Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy wrote to his wife Rose, “The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the allies.” David McKean's Watching Darkness Fall will recount the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the road to war from the perspective of four American diplomats in Europe who witnessed it firsthand: Joseph Kennedy, William Dodd, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt, who all served in key Western European capitals—London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Moscow—in the years prior to World War II. In many ways they were America’s first line of defense and they often communicated with the president directly, as Roosevelt's eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, most of them underestimated the power and resolve of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich. Watching Darkness Fall is a gripping new history of the years leading up to and the beginning of WWII in Europe told through the lives of five well-educated and mostly wealthy men all vying for the attention of the man in the Oval Office.

Download or read book Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin written by Dennis J. Dunn and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov signed an agreement establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two days later Roosevelt named the first of five ambassadors he would place in Moscow between 1933 and 1945. Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin tells the dramatic and important story of these ambassadors and their often contentious relationships with the two most powerful men in the world. More than fifty years after his death, Roosevelt's foreign policy, especially regarding the Soviet Union, remains a subject of intense debate. Dennis Dunn offers an ambitious new appraisal of the apparent confusion and contradiction in Roosevelt's policy one moment publicizing the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter and the next moment giving tacit approval to Stalin's control of parts of Eastern Europe and northeast Asia. Dunn argues that "Rooseveltism," the president's belief that the Soviet Union and the United States were both developing into modern social democracies, blinded Roosevelt to the true nature of Stalin's brutal dictatorship despite repeated warnings from his ambassadors in Moscow. Focusing on the ambassadors themselves, William C. Bullitt, Joseph E. Davies, Laurence A. Steinhardt, William C. Standley, and W. Averell Harriman, Dunn details their bruising arguments with Roosevelt over the president's repeated concessions to Stalin. Using information uncovered during extensive research in the Soviet archives, Dunn reveals much about Stalin's policy toward the United States and demonstrates that in ignoring his ambassadors' good advice, Roosevelt appeased the Soviet leader unnecessarily. Sure to generate new discussion concerning the origins of the Cold War, this controversial assessment of Roosevelt's failed Soviet policy will be read for years to come.

Download or read book Moscow Stories written by Loren R. Graham and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Graham has brilliantly encapsulated and interwoven the major features of Soviet and post-Soviet history in his riveting stories.... a splendid and extraordinary work." -- Edward Grant, author of God and Reason in the Middle Ages "A very lively read, indeed a real page turner... Graham's discussion of pressing ethical dilemmas displays a sureness of hand and a refreshing candor about his own struggles with the issues." -- Susan Solomon, University of Toronto The distinguished American historian of Russian and Soviet science Loren R. Graham recounts with warmth and wit his experiences during 45 years of traveling and researching in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, from 1960 to 2005. Present for many historic events during this period, Graham writes not as a political correspondent or an analyst, but as an ordinary American living through these years alongside Russian friends and critics. Graham befriended some of the leading scientists and politicians in Russia, but his most touching stories concern average Russians with whom he lived, worked, suffered, and exchanged views. Graham also writes of the ethical questions he confronted, such as the tension between independence of thought and political loyalty. Finally, he depicts the ways in which Russia has changed -- visually, politically, and ideologically -- during the last 15 years. These gripping, sometimes humorous, always deeply personal stories will engage and inform all readers with an interest in Russia during this tumultuous period of history.

Download or read book The Kremlinologist written by Jenny Thompson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Kremlinologist chronicles major events of the Cold War through the prism of the life of one of its top diplomats, Llewellyn Thompson. His life went from the wilds of the American West to the inner sanctums of the White House and the Kremlin. As the ambassador to Moscow, he became an important advisor to presidents and a key participant in major twentieth-century events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. Yet, unlike his contemporaries McGeorge Bundy and George C. Marshall--who considered Thompson one of the most crucial actors in the Cold War and the "unsung hero" of the Cuban Missile Crisis--he has not been the subject of a major biography until now. Thompson's daughters Jenny Thompson Vukacic and Sherry Thompson set out to document their father's life as thoroughly as possible. Relying on primary sources and interviews, they received generous assistance from archivists, historians, and colleagues of their father. They also acquired documents and information from Russian archives, including the KGB archives. As family, they had unprecedented access to his FBI dossier, State Department personnel files, family archives, letters, diaries, speeches, and documents. Their original research brings new material to light including important information on the U-2, Kennan's containment policy, and Thompson's role in US covert operations machinery. The book refutes historical misinterpretations of events in the Berlin Crisis, the Austrian State Treaty, and the Cuban Missile Crisis."--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Moscow Embassy written by Thomas J. Mitchell and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2019-11-17 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of American construction workers who are recruited by the Russian KGB to plant listening devices and engage in other espionage activities while the new Moscow Embassy is under construction—and while US intelligence agencies working in concert with Britain’s MI6 are going to great lengths to neutralize the Russian threat. It is also the story of the men and women in the public and private sectors—the nomads who go from one country to the next, building these beautiful facilities for the US government. With a cast of colorful characters and a plot filled with danger and political intrigue, Moscow Embassy “The Angara Club” is a fascinating novel about an industry most people never think about.

Download or read book Uncovered written by John Sager and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovered is the life story of eighty-three-year-old cold war veteran John Sager. An operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, his postings to pre-revolutionary Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, and Nikita Khrushchev' s Soviet Russia thrust him into the midst of America's most tumultuous half-century since World War II. The author's memoir reveals an up-close vision of the nitty-gritty of cold-war intelligence work: recruiting and handling agents, devising ways to insert them into the hermetically sealed Soviet Union, managing the CIA's Moscow station, and running intelligence-gathering operations in the United States. Over his fifty-plus years of service, he experienced much of the CIA's silent struggle with America's principal adversary. Now he shares those reflections, through the eyes of a born-again Christian. But the story is more than that. Sager combines his spy craft with a passion for fly fishing, an avocation that took him to Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula, where he found the long arm of the Russian intelligence service waiting. And when he returned to the United States to stay put, he reconnected with the love of his life in a marriage that lasted barely five years, cut short by tragedy.

Download or read book Rockin the Kremlin written by David Junk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the true story of Universal Music Russia’s first CEO and his quest to bring Western popular music to post-Soviet Russia in an account that Publishers Weekly calls "an exciting and colorful look at a dynamic period in Russia’s cultural history," The Washington Post calls "a jaunty, picaresque memoir,” and Library Journal calls an "absorbing illustration of the mutuality of music and politics." When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia opened its borders, and Russian audiences were hungry for Western popular music and the values it espoused. David Junk was one of the first idealistic, young Americans to seize this opportunity. Rockin’ the Kremlin is the thrilling true story of how David became the first CEO of Universal Music Russia and built impactful cultural bridges with music—but also how that would all shatter with the rise of Vladimir Putin and invasions of Ukraine. There was no proper music industry in the USSR, and creating a modern music industry in Russia would be far more challenging than anyone had anticipated. David assembled a team of young and talented Russians, and they navigated a terrain filled with political chaos, organized crime, powerful oligarchs, bombings, and violence—with cultural clashes tinting many aspects. They captivated millions by bringing superstar acts to Russia for the first time ever, including Metallica, Mariah Carey, Sting, Eminem, and Enrique Iglesias, while developing local talent such as Alsou and t.A.T.u.—Russia’s greatest selling pop act of all time. Eventually, David would even build a music industry in Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. While Russia’s descent into authoritarianism and two invasions of Ukraine have tarnished this, the industry that David shepherded has birthed a newer generation of Russian musicians who are speaking out against the war and Putin. Filled with unique insights as well as gripping—and sometimes humorous—stories, this book reveals how it all happened.

Download or read book A Pope and a President written by Paul Kengor and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Singular Bond That Changed History Even as historians credit Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II with hastening the end of the Cold War, they have failed to recognize the depth or significance of the bond that developed between the two leaders. Acclaimed scholar and bestselling author Paul Kengor changes that. In this fascinating book, he reveals a singular bond—which included a spiritual connection between the Catholic pope and the Protestant president—that drove the two men to confront what they knew to be the great evil of the twentieth century: Soviet communism. Reagan and John Paul II almost didn’t have the opportunity to forge this relationship: just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, they took bullets from would-be assassins. But their strikingly similar near-death experiences brought them close together—to Moscow’s dismay. A Pope and a President is the product of years of research. Based on Kengor’s tireless archival digging and his unique access to Reagan insiders, the book reveals: The inside story on the 1982 meeting where the president and the pope confided their conviction that God had spared their lives for the purpose of defeating communism Captivating new information on the attempt on John Paul II’s life, including a ­previously unreported secret CIA investigation—was Moscow behind the plot? The many similarities and the spiritual bond between the pope and the president—and how Reagan privately spoke of the “DP”: the Divine Plan to take down communism New details about how the Protestant Reagan became intensely interested in the “secrets of Fátima,” which date to the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fátima, Portugal, starting on May 13, 1917—­sixty-four years to the day before John Paul II was shot A startling insider account of how the USSR may have been set to invade the pope’s native Poland in March 1981—only to pull back when news broke that Reagan had been shot Nancy Reagan called John Paul II her husband’s “closest friend”; Reagan himself told Polish visitors that the pope was his “best friend.” When you read this book, you will understand why. As kindred spirits, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II united in pursuit of a supreme objective—and in doing so they changed history.