Russia Books

A book where every name ,situation,person is based in facts and books.
A book where author knows his sources and have a clear view of achivments and drawbacks of Soviet space programm
An author who can read Ruusian and have of net contact of the sources
I found the style of language difficult but fluid.

Asif Siddiqi covers the first laps of the space race from the Soviet side. This tome goes deeper than just the hardware by covering some of the personalities involved on the Soviet side of the space industry. If you are interested in the history of early space exploration, this book fills in many of the holes that most Western histories leave unexplored.

St Petersburg is, generally, better covered than any other Northern European city in terms of travel writing: spectacular canals and buildings, relatively compact size, obvious highlights (including out-of-town estates) all make it a dream for any guidebook writer.

Cadogan made a better job than most. The first thing you notice that the sheer quality of writing. You feel you a reading A BOOK, not an anonymous travel guide. In this sense, I felt that Cadogan beat the spectacularly good DK Eyewitness Guide (my other obvious recommendation for the city): where Eyewitness can be predictable and kind of flat, this book feels more in tune with subtle northern charms of St Petersburg.

In fact, peculiarly romantic cities, where so much of the charm is difficult to capture and perceive logically, such as Venice or St Petersburg or Krakow, always present a challenge for any well-oiled travel publishing house. You cannot "crack" such a city using your standard procedures, you have to have a skilled writer and then - only then - build practicalities around the core understanding and feeling of the place. That is why there are so many guides to Venice and so few good ones.

I think Cadogan managed to deal with this task in St Petersburg - hats off to Rose Baring who researched the subject well and gained a good insight into this least Russian of all Russian cities. The guide avoids generalizations and cheap jokes at the expense of the locals, at the same time it is honest and detailed and relevant.

If you need more info on practicalities (although frankly I thought Cadogan was sufficient for that too), try Rough Guide (no inspired writing there I am afraid), who put all their effort into practical research.

Besides plenty of practical information (hotels, restaurants, etc), this book contains seven suggested walks in St. Petersburg. They range throughout the center of the city, Vasilievsky Island, the Smolny area and the outlying palaces (and full attention is given to five of them rather than just Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo as in most guidebooks). It also includes a walk in the Hermitage. These walks include good maps. Additionally, this book has excellent sections on the history of the city, customs and various subjects (the "mafia", icons, vodka, etc.) that provide context for your visit. The author is an excellent writer who, although she obviously loves the subject, presents a thorough picture.

I was born and lived in St.Petersburg for 23 years. I am and will always be in love with this strikingly beautiful, cultural capital of Russia. Arthur George's book is the best book about St.Petersburg I have ever read. The author shows a thorough knowledge of the Russian history, literature and politics, the history of the city and the most famous St.Petersburgers: writers and poets, musicians and artists, politicians.

Thank you, Arthur and Elena George. Vivat, St.Petersburg!!

I lived in St. Petersburg for seven years, and of all the books I have read about the City and Russia, this is the most fascinating and thorough. Arthur George is very smart; well educated in many areas: culture, history, law, politics, and philosophy; and has an excellent research colleague in Elena George. Because I lived there, I especially appreciate his historical descriptions of the city, often followed by subsequent and current names of places. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has visited the city, either once or frequently; and it would be a brilliant introduction to anyone planning to go to St. Petersburg for any reason. I definitely appreciate his placing of St. Petersburg into the history of Russia, and his hope that the current Russian Federation administration under Vladimir V. Putin--coming as it does largely from St. Petersburg--will lead Russia away from the two horrible eras dominated by Moscow. My only disappointment is that the book finally ended, although for anyone who has ever visited St. Petersburg there is hope that they will return and be part of its history again.

D. Rayfield's book gives us sharp portraits of Stalin himself as well as his hangmen Dzier¿yñky, Vychinski, Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria. Together those men are responsible for the death of millions of innocent citizens, organizing the longest and most terrible bloodbath in the history of mankind (one other contender is Mao Zedong, see Jung Chang).

The author correctly states that Stalin was not a Marxist: `Marxists declare man to be naturally good, all evil stems from social injustice. Stalin knew all human beings to be sinners in need of punishment and expiation.'
Not Marx, but Machiavelli was his tutor: `he saw the retention of power by all means as the sole task for a ruler. He not only killed political rivals, but also wiped out any class from which future opposition might spring.'
There is also an essential difference between Stalin and Hitler: Hitler did not turn his aggression on his own kind.

The result of Stalin's policies was a Hobbesian world: `Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, when society loses the complex play of forces - judiciary, army, executive, public opinion, religion, culture - that keep each other in check, and both anarchy and tyranny at bay.'

But why did the Russian population not react? `They had incentives to collaborate with its oppressors. If you did not run with the hounds, you were a hare to be torn apart by them, and those who disappeared left behind vacant jobs, rooms to live in, clothes, food and drink. The urban terror pitched the young, the dispossessed and unskilled against the middle-aged who had riches and skills.'

Even the foreign observers and intellectuals didn't (want to) see the disaster around them.
This book contains excellent analyses of the murder of Kirov, the show trials and the policies of Beria after Stalin's death (he wanted a reunification of Germany).

And Russia today? `Any genuinely democratic politician or journalist has not much more life expectancy today than under the Bolsheviks ... School history textbooks pass over in silence the record of Stalinism.'

The reader needs a strong stomach to digest this relentless stream of slaughtering in a mere gigantic power struggle.

This book with excellent graphic material is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind.

Whose heart the accustom'd sight of death makes hard,
Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck
But first begs pardon: will you sterner be
Than he that dies and lives by bloody drops?
Shakespeare As You Like It.

Baudelaire once wrote: "I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel - The victim and the executioner!" In many respects that sums up the lives of Stalin's (and Lenin's) henchmen that ran the USSR's security apparatus from the Russian (October) Revolution through the death of Stalin. Donald Rayfield's "Stalin and His Hangmen" provides an excruciatingly morbid examination of the men and the organization that facilitated Stalin's rise to total power and the means they used to achieve that end.

Rayfield, a professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London, has provided a scholarly, yet compelling history of the men who built and maintained the Soviet security regime. As stated in his preface, Rayfield's purpose in writing this book was not to add yet another biography of Stalin but, rather, to examine the means by which Stalin gradually assumed total power in the USSR. He does so by focusing on the men who facilitated that rise to power by creating a brutally efficient killing machine exceeded in the 20th century only (perhaps) by Hitler's Holocaust.

Rayfield focuses on the lives and bloody career of five leaders of those security organs (commonly known by a succession of acronyms or initials, the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB, and KGB): F. Dzerzhinsky, V. Menshinksy, G. Iagoda, N. Ezhov, and L. Beria. Along the way we see the machinations that caused the ousting of Trotsky from power and his eventual murder. Rayfield explores the role the security organs played in Stalin's cat-and-mouse games with Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev and his suppression, imprisonment, and/or murder of the Russian Orthodox Church, ethnic nationalities, kulaks, and millions of enemies, real or imagined None of this is particularly new ground for anyone with an interest in the subject matter. However, Rayfield, by examining these events with an eye towards the symbiotic relationship between Stalin and his hangmen, manages to cast a fresh eye on old horrors.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase banality of evil. Although it has a certain ring of truth to it Rayfield's look into the lives of these leading `Chekists' shows that some, if not all of them, were far from banal. Some considered themselves poets and tried to develop relations with the Soviet intelligentsia (before sending them to the Gulag). They each managed to kill hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, including many lives taken by their own hands. They each, with the possible exception of the rather puritanical Dzerzhinsky, were perverse (their sexual depravity was legion and is well chronicled here) and brutal psychopaths. Yet some, particularly Beria had exceptional managerial skills and a broad range of intellectual interests. Ultimately, they all knew that the fires of death they fueled would ultimately consume them yet, like moths to the flame they stayed on until the bitter end of their own lives, as Baudelaire put it, both victims and executioners.

Rayfield does not attempt to explain why these Chekists played out their horrible roles with such gusto. I'm not sure an explanation is possible and I think it was a wise choice to avoid exploring the myriad motivations behind such collective complicity in horrible acts. I think it sufficient simply to set out the lives of these men and their separate and collective relationships with Stalin and let the facts speak for themselves.

Although a scholarly work, Rayfield's prose is accessible to anyone with an interest in Soviet history. Highly recommended.

This is the first book about social history of the Red Army. The russian historian.

Reese does maginficent job at describing the poor state of the Red Army before the Second World War. According to Reese the main reason for the defeats that the Red Army suffered during the opening phases of the Second World War was due to the lack of training prior to the German attack. Soldiers spent more time working in factories or collective farms rather than training for war. To make matters worse the huge expansion of the army according to Reese left a huge shortage of junior officers and NCOs to train the new recruits. Stalin only excerbated the situation by abolishing the national guard in order to spend money on the new recruits, this only led to a lack of any reserve units in case of a emergency. Due to the above mentioned factors, Reese concludes that the Red Army suffered massives defeats during the opening phases of the Second World War. I would highly reccomend this book for anyone who wants to understand why the Russian army performed so poorly at the outset of World War II.

Mr. Rubenstein has done an outstanding job as a researcher and writer in giving us this gripping record of Stalin's purge in 1950-52 of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The JAC had been active during WWII in organizing international aid to the besieged Soviets. Despite their vigorous efforts in the struggle against the Nazis, some of the most respected Russian Jewish poets, writers, and cultural figures associated with the JAC were eventually imprisoned on blatantly fabricated charges of espionage, then executed in 1952. Using recently-opened soviet files, he and Mr. Vladimir Naumov have carefully and authoritatively documented this sordid chapter in recent Soviet history.

This book documents just one of the horrors of the Soviet regime. While Stalin murdered millions of innocent people who were unlucky enough to have been citizens under his rule, this book tells of the way this evil regime turned on fifteen people whose crime was being Jewish and wanting to examine the Nazi atrocities in the portions of the USSR they occupied.

It is a particularly poignant telling because the authors provide us with excerpts from the transcripts of the trial so you hear the victims and their accusers in their own words. These people were destroyed by the system they tried to serve and help largely because Stalin decided to use the Jews and the fear of paranoid Zionist conspiracies as the Nazis had done.

This is a very valuable book and I am glad it is in print. As part of the Annals of Communism series it provides important and permanent testimony of the criminality of the USSR that had been lied about and hidden for too long.

Thanks to the authors.

I adore this book.It made me understand what our teachers try to explain to us in such unclear and tortous way.
If you're involved in theater and/or acting I've one advice for you: READ THIS.

Before I read his novel, I had my doubts about Stanislavski. I had tried active memory with some disastrous results. However, Gordon clarifies these misconceptions and others in his novel.

He begins each section by explaining the lives of Stanislavski and his disciples (Chekov and Vakhtangov). Hence, the reader gets an understanding of the motivations for each section or interpretation of the System. Furthermore, Gordon gives exercises designed by each man that are useful for actors. Perhaps the greatest thing I gained from this novel is an understanding of what disciple of the System I follow. Chekov and I have similar views on acting. If I had not read this novel, I may never have discovered this. My advice to any young actor who is persuing the Stanislavski's System as a method for acting to read this insightful book

Somin clearly points out how easy it would have been for the West to overthrow the Bolsheviks by forcefully intervening themselves or providing sufficient support to the White armies to crush the Bolsheviks. Western leaders like Lloyd George and President Wilson didn't overthrow the Bolsheviks because they didn't want to. Winston Churchill was the only Western leader who understood the situation. In a letter to Lloyd George in March 1920 he wrote, "Since the armistice my policy would have been `Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik Tyranny.' Willingly or unavoidably, you have followed something very near the reverse." The cost of the Bolshevik victory was horrific but avoidable. Somin does an excellent job of showing why.

This book is an unparalleled effort to bring the visceral experience of the oppressed Russian citizens to the lay person. Somin is a quick study, finding his true voice, and the voice of those he writes about throughout this work. I only wish the book was longer. How long will I have to wait for Somin's next book?

Schneider's excellent "Structure of Strategic Revolution" is perhaps the best one-book lesson on modern military theory I have yet found. He starts with a concise and excellent deconstruction of historical military theory, much in the manner of Svechin himself. Perhaps as like Svechin, Schneider is a teacher of military theory and has applied his classes to his own theoretical work. So for those of you unable to attend the US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies and become, as they call it "a Jedi Knight", then read on.

But the beginning is just to lay a framework for an overview of the Red Army group of military theorists of the 20s and 30s whose story of tragic endings, subsequent rebirth as the basis of American land warfare doctrine (not to mention many others) is only matched by the brilliant insight of their theory. But this book isn't a personal history it is all about military art.

While critiqued above as "dense" I've found Schneider's style relatively easy to read compared to other military theorists. But more importantly than style is the basis of the work and that is a study of the most comprehensive, accurate and effective form of military doctrine yet developed. While in the Soviet experience this lead to the creation of the total warfare state and its subsequent collapse this theory has many utilities for richer and less vulnerable states like America and Australia.

Schneider's conclusion is to examine the effect of the application of best practice military theory to an entire state. In this case Stalin and the Soviet Union. The book isn't really about Stalin the great monster and examines the actual sensible reasons that the Soviet Union felt the necessity to do so. While Schneider explores the ultimate conclusion of this historical chapter with the collapse of the Soviet Union one has to wonder how these ideas (the Red Army group's) are being interpreted in that one remaining total warfare state: North Korea.

Schneider's excellent "Structure of Strategic Revolution" is perhaps the best one-book lesson on military theory I have yet found. He starts with a concise and excellent deconstruction of historical military theory, much in the manner of Svechin himself. Perhaps as like Svechin, Schneider is a teacher of military theory and has applied his classes to his own theoretical work. So for those of you unable to attend the US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies and become, as they call it "a Jedi Knight", then read on.

But the beginning is just to lay a framework for an overview of the Red Army group of military theorists of the 20s and 30s whose story of tragic endings, subsequent rebirth as the basis of American land warfare doctrine (not to mention many others) is only matched by the brilliant insight of their theory. But this book isn't a personal history it is all about military art.

While critiqued above as "dense" I've found Schneider's style relatively easy to read compared to other military theorists. But more importantly than style is the basis of the work and that is a study of the most comprehensive, accurate and effective form of military doctrine yet developed. While in the Soviet experience this lead to the creation of the total warfare state and its subsequent collapse this theory has many utilities for richer and less vulnerable states like America and Australia.

Schneider's conclusion is to examine the effect of the application of best practice military theory to an entire state. In this case Stalin and the Soviet Union. The book isn't really about Stalin the great monster and examines the actual sensible reasons that the Soviet Union felt the necessity to do so. While Schneider explores the ultimate conclusion of this historical chapter with the collapse of the Soviet Union one has to wonder how these ideas (the Red Army groups') are being interpreted in that one remaining total warfare state: North Korea.

Any one who's seen the F-15 fly knows that is a tough jet to beat, but with the Su-27, you've got a jet that likes to make sure everyone in the sky knows it is around!
The Su-27 is jet that was designed by builders who know what a pilot need in jet, from avionics to track & shoot down any thing that flies, to engines & aerodynamics that has no bounds to fly circles againts any & all who come up against it!
With new models of the flanker coming off the production line, it pays to know what the fellow across the street is flying!

In this book, Volume 42 in the Warbird Tech Series, their full treatment is given to the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker. This is one of the most advanced fighter aircraft in use today. The basic design was begun in 1971, and really began volume production in about 1986, giving some idea of the time it takes to create a state-of-the-art aircraft design today. The Su-27 was designed in response to the United States development of the F-14 and F-15 fighters. It is large and fast, with exceptional range, heavy armament, and very high agility. Although little used in actual combat, the impressive air combat maneuvring capacity should make it an excellent dogfighter.

This aircraft has become a staple of Russia's sales on the international market with sales to the expected countries that were in the old Soviet Union, but also to other countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, India and China. Even the United States has purchased two aircraft, probably for military training.

Now that we are friends with Russia, it is great to see books such as this which not too many years ago would have been considered top secret.