The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking "bulldozer," wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev's authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin. But it took four months of intrigue and double-dealing before the Soviet Union collapsed and the day arrived when Yeltsin could hustle Gorbachev out of the Kremlin, and move in as ruler of Russia.
Conor O'Clery has written a unique and truly suspenseful thriller of the day the Soviet Union died. The internal power plays, the shifting alliances, the betrayals, the mysterious three colonels carrying the briefcase with the nuclear codes, and the jockeying to exploit the future are worthy of John Le Carre or Alan Furst. The Cold War's last act was a magnificent dark drama played out in the shadows of the Kremlin.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Abraham Ascher offers a skillful blend of engaging narrative and fresh analysis in this concise introduction to Russian history.
Newly updated on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, it covers the grow...
The definitive, single-volume history of the Russian Revolution, from an award-winning scholarIn The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the events which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced...
“Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingart...
Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeOne of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb c...
Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth...
The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia When the Swedish Academy awarded...
After two and a half years as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, David Greene travels across the country-a 6,000 mile journey by rail, from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok-to speak with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the p...
A New York Times Bestseller for 12 weeks! "Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses." —People magazine"The public spoke of the sisters in a gentile, superficial manner, but Rappaport captures sections of lette...
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world’s surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? &...
Narrator: Simon Russell Beale Published: 05/03/2016
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