Search results

This essential book offers a compelling and original interpretation of the rise of military aviation. Jeremy Black, one of the world's finest scholars of military history, provides a lucid analysis of the use of airpower over land and sea both during the two world wars and the more limited wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Considering both the theory and praxis of air power, the author begins with hot air balloons, and then highlights the use of zeppelins, piston engine fighters...

A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as "Letters from Prison". Beginning where that volume ended, "Letters from Freedom" finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the 'cold civil war' between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays,...

The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is captured in this account, which conceptualizes the field clearly, offering a synthesis of the secondary literature in the area, and also providing the author's own evaluation of the key issues. This edition takes into account the new opportunities afforded to historians - both Russian and Western - by the collapse of communism and the greater availability to researchers of archival sources. It acknowledges the various problems and perspectives...

This revised edition includes and examination of the recent presidential and parliamentary elections and their effects on Putin's leadership and Russia. Praise for the previous edition: "Out of her blunt, often acerbic, account come shrewd insights into Putin's transformation from an implausible, contrived successor into a dominator unchallenged by oligarchs, legislators, or regional bosses, let alone a democratic opposition." -Foreign Affairs "Shevtsova is one of the most astute and independ...

The Dictatorship of Sex explores the attempts to define and control sexual behavior in the years following the Russian Revolution. It is the first book to examine Soviet "sexual enlightenment," a program of popular health and lifestyle advice intended to establish a model of sexual conduct for the men and women who would build socialism. Leftist social theorists and political activists had long envisioned an egalitarian utopia, and after 1917, the medical profession took the leading role in solv...

God, Tsar, and People brings together in one volume essays written over a period of fifty years, using a wide variety of evidence—texts, icons, architecture, and ritual—to reveal how early modern Russians (1450–1700) imagined their rapidly changing political world. This volume presents a more nuanced picture of Russian political thought during the two centuries before Peter the Great came to power than is typically available. The state was expanding at a dizzying rate, and atop Russia's traditi...

For 872 days during World War II, the city of Leningrad endured a crushing blockade at the hands of German forces. Close to one million civilians died, most from starvation. Amid the devastation, Olga Berggolts broadcast her poems on the one remaining radio station, urging listeners not to lose hope. When the siege had begun, the country had already endured decades of revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and Stalin's purges. Berggolts herself survived the deaths of two husbands and both of...

Perestroika -- Economic and Political Reform -- Is What The World Associated with Mikhail Gorbachev when he led the USSR. There were, however, some political scientists in the West who saw Gorbachevism as a time of conservatism and not radical change.Dennis Soltys confirms these assertions in this study of educational policy and institutions in the former Soviet Union. Focusing on vocational and technical schooling, Soltys reveals very strong continuity from Khrushchev to Brezhnev to Gorbachev....

Vivid account of courage in air-to-air combat over Europe Amazing and dramatic true story of a prince in battle Driven by intense hatred for the Soviet Union - the Bolsheviks murdered his uncle in 1917 and the secret police later executed his father - Prince Leonidas Maximciuc, nephew of the Russian tsar, joined up with Romanian and Free Russian forces in 1942 at the age of sixteen. Already a budding fighter pilot, the young prince began a career in which he scored fifty-two aerial victories, de...

The unexpected arrival of Soviet troops at the end of January 1945 at the ancient fortress and garrison town of Kustrin came as a tremendous shock to the German High Command - the Soviets were now only 50 miles from Berlin itself. The Red Army needed the vital road and rail bridges passing through Kustrin for their forthcoming assault on the capital, but flooding and their own high command's strategic blunders resulted in a sixty-day siege by two Soviet armies which totally destroyed the town. T...

Primary source material This book, from the series Primary Sources: Historical Books of the World (Asia and Far East Collection), represents an important historical artifact on Asian history and culture. Its contents come from the legions of academic literature and research on the subject produced over the last several hundred years. Covered within is a discussion drawn from many areas of study and research on the subject. From analyses of the varied geography that encompasses the Asian contine...

This classic study by the late John Doyle Klier is considered a seminal text in modern Jewish history by one of the foremost scholars in the field. In this, his first book, Klier offers an important analysis of Russia's early acquisition of, attitudes toward, and administration of its Jewish population. He argues that the Russian response to the Jewish Question was based less on a tradition or religious antipathy than on the failure to develop a consistent, well-articulated policy in the face of...

Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when...