Russia Books - Page 4

Jewels of the Tsars: The Romanovs and Imperial Russia

Prince Michael of Greece

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Royal Mess 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

While the subject of the Imperial Crown Jewels has not yet been exhausted, and this book assembles for the first time a large portion of the former collections, Prince Michael of Greece is not an Historian, gemologist, or specialist in decorative arts.

While this book, like his others, has a romantic and lyric chronology enhanced by the ruthless dropping in of uncorroborated family lore, these personal titbits are less interesting that the pieces themselves who have been done a disservice by inadequate research and fact-checking.

Page after page of this book are riddled with errors, inconsistencies and projections. Aigrettes are called brooches, diadems called chokers, the immense value of colored diamonds emphasized, which the actual stones shown are foiled to impart color. Members of the family are misidentified, the structure of the Diamond Fund misstated, and recreations misrepresented.

Do buy this books for the marvelous photographs, many taken orginially for inclusion in the "Jewels of the Romanovs" Show catalogue at the Corcoran Gallery, but which was never published in full.

Editorial Review:

The world’s fascination with the Russian imperial family endures, and with this stunning book a new spotlight is added. Jewels of the Tsars, the first book to examine the family’s unparalleled collection, is illustrated with extraordinary photographs taken under special conditions at the Kremlin’s Diamond Fund, and accompanied by 18th- and 19th-century portraits and photographs of the Tsars, their families, and their court. Prince Michael of Greece, a Romanoff descendant, writes with an insider’s knowledge of his family’s passion for rare and beautiful jewels, and their place in the troubled history of Imperial Russia.

Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra

Peter Kurth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Spectacular! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for a good book about Tsar Nicholas II, look no further. This was an absolutely amazing book. I have Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie, and it alone comes close to this one in telling the Romanov's story. It is very well written, does not bog the reader down with more information than is needed to tell the story. And the photographs are astonishing! Most of them apparently had not been published before this book. Peter Kurth is an excellent writer (I have his other book "The Riddle of Anna Anderson" and he captures the reader's interest right from the first paragraph. This is an excellent book about this tragic family.

Editorial Review:

75 years after the execution of the last Tsar and his family, interest in them is still strong. The recent DNA identifications of their bones made worldwide headlines, as did the fact that the remains of two of the children, Alexeia and either Anastasia or Maria, are missing. From formerly secret archives in Russia have come a host of documents that are changing history - Rasputin's diaries, Lenin's orders of execution and the Imperial family's diaries. Now the full story of the last Romanovs is told in this illustrated history. From the private life of the Imperial family to such events as the murder of Rasputin, the abdication of Nicholas II and the tragic last night in Ekaterinburg, the vanished world of pre-revolutionary Russia is evoked on every spread with hundreds of archival photographs.

Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives

Alan Bullock

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This dual biography is excellent. Bullock is an excellent writer with an uncluttered style and the content of this book reflects Bullock's considered judgements based on a careful reading of a large volume of scholarship. The balance between the narratives of Hitler's and Stalin's lives, explanations of the relevant contemporary history, and efforts at psychological insight is excellent. While a very thick book, it is a gripping read.
Bullock shows very well the distinct courses of Hitler's and Stalin's lives, a function both of their very different circumstances and personalities. Hitler rose to power in a partially democratized society, his success based on charismatic leadership, demagogic mass politics, and shrewd exploitation of the political weaknesses of his opponents. Once in power, he delegated power to trusted subordinates and presided over an anarchic state composed of competing power centers jockeying for his approval. Stalin, on the other hand, was a consummate bureaucrat and backroom politician. A tireless worker and master political infighter, he largely constructed the state apparatus that was the instrument of his power. His serial purges had the effect of elimnating any potential rival seats of power.
The major question, of course, is why produce a combined biography instead of 2 separate books? It is true that Hitler's and Stalin's lives intersected in very important ways but these issues could easily have been handled in separate books. The advantage of Bullock's approach is that it demonstrates, both implicitly and explicitly, the convergence of the Nazi and Stalinist states. Both were based on personal rule, crude but powerful ideological constructs that held the loyalty of the leaders and numerous followers, ruthless repression, and both states produced results that garned significant popular support. Both were constructed by monsters with considerable insight into human nature but no real sympathy for their fellow men. Both leaders were incredible egoists. Bullock uses the term narcissism in its clinical sense to describe both Hitler and Stalin, who saw the states they led as extensions of themselves. Not surprisingly then, in the depth and organization of repression and many other features, the Nazi and Stalinist states had major similarities. These basic patterns can be seen in many tyrannical states throughout human history and are independent of ideology.

Editorial Review:

A dual biography told in the context of Berlin-Moscow relations tells how the two similar men temporarily took total command of the historical forces swirling around them. 50,000 first printing. 50,000 ad/promo. History Bk Club Main.

The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, Second Edition

Geoffrey Hosking

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The First Socialist Society is the compelling and often tragic history of what Soviet citizens have lived through from 1917 to the present, told with great sympathy and perception. It ranges over the changing lives of peasants, urban workers, and professionals; the interaction of Soviet autocrats with the people; the character and role of religion, law, education, and literature within Soviet society; and the significance and fate of various national groups. As the story unfolds, we come to understand how the ideas of Marxism have been changed, taking on almost unrecognizable forms by unique political and economic circumstances.

Hosking's analysis of this vast and complex country begins by asking how it was that the first socialist revolution took place in backward, autocratic Russia. Why were the Bolsheviks able to seize power and hold on to it? The core of the book lies in the years of Stalin's rule: how did he exercise such unlimited power, and how did the various strata of society survive and come to terms with his tyranny?

The later chapters recount Khrushchev's efforts to reform the worst features of Stalinism, and the unpredictable effects of his attempts within the East European satellite countries, bringing out elements of socialism that had been obscured or overlaid in the Soviet Union itself. And in the aftermath of the long Brezhnev years of stagnation and corruption, the question is posed: can Soviet society find a way to modify the rigidities inherited from the Stalinist past?

Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine

Anna Reid, Alliston K Reid

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia’s wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918–1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe.In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine’s tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin’s famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine’s struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.

The Soviet Experiment: Russia, The USSR, and the Successor States

Ronald Grigor Suny

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The West has always had difficulty understanding the Soviet Union. For decades, analyses of America's Cold War foe were clouded by ideological passions and a shear dearth of information. Then came the flood of dramatic revelations under glasnost, followed by the sudden, shocking collapse of the Communist empire. Today, with the stunning secrets of newly opened archives and the excitement of political revolution still fresh in our minds, and we can look back at this remarkable nation and see it whole, see Soviet history as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In The Soviet Experiment, Ronald Grigor Suny does just that, in a landmark work that gives us the fullest account yet of the most remarkable story of our century.

With a clear-eyed mastery of the historical issues and literature, Suny combines gripping detail with insightful analysis in a narrative that propels the reader from the last tsar of the Russian empire to the first president of the Russian republic. He focuses in particular on four revolutions, each identified with a single individual: the tumultuous year of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik takeover of the tsarist empire; the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin refashioned the economy, the society, and the state; Mikhail Gorbachev's ambitious, and catastrophic, attempt at sweeping reform and revitalization; and the breakup of the Soviet Union led by Boris Yeltsin. Never have we had a more complete, nuanced, and crystal-clear examination of the complex themes running through Soviet history. Suny confidently moves from party debates and personal rivalries, to centuries-old ethnic tensions, to vast economic and social developments. He unravels tangled issues with ease, explaining "deeply contradictory" policies toward the various Soviet nationalities; Moscow's ambivalence over its own New Economic Policy of the 1920s; and the attempts at reform that followed Stalin's death. Suny's treatment of the Soviet break-up warrants particular attention, as he details precisely how Gorbachev's program unleashed forces that had built up during the previous decades--particularly the nationalism that had been shaped, ironically, by the Soviet structure of ethnically defined republics. Along the way, he offers a fresh telling of familiar as well as little-known events--capturing, for example, the movement of the crowds on the streets of St. Petersburg in the February revolution; Stalin's collapse into a near-catatonic state after Hitler's much-predicted invasion; or Yeltsin's political maneuvering and public grandstanding as he pushed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and then faced down his rivals.

The Soviet Experiment provides a rich, multilayered, seamlessly woven account of one of the great forces of modern history. With dispassionate insight and human detail, Suny has constructed a masterful work.

Stalin: Breaker of Nations

Robert Conquest

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A comprehensive introduction to Stalin and Stalinism 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 17 people found this review helpful.

There have been many biographies written about Josef Stalin. Many recent biographies of Stalin such as "Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar" by Montefiore and "Stalin and his Hangmen: The Tyrant and those who killed for him" by Rayfield focus only on the sexual depravity and crimes of Stalin's followers respectively. A person should only read those biographies only after they have read an introductory biography of Stalin and have therefore come away with an understanding of Stalin as whole. Robert Conquest's "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" provides such a biography with the vital information for one to build a basic stable foundation of the life of this twentieth century tyrant. In the introduction Conquest modestly says, "This book is not a dissection of Stalin's character, but a sketch". It is important to keep this quote in mind as one reads Conquest's book. Many reviewers unfortunately are hasty in criticizing "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" for its lack of length (a mere 330 pages or so). Nonetheless, Conquest's "sketch" proves to be more thorough than many of the "dissections" of Stalin available. Indeed Robert Conquest's work on Stalin has been so extensive that he was chosen to be the main history consultant for the 1992 movie "Stalin", starring Robert Duvall.

Robert Conquest writes his book for the common reader who only has a minimal knowledge of Stalin and Stalinism. The book is nonetheless engaging enough for the serious Russian history buff. Anyone who reads "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" will at least come away with the conclusion that Stalin was the most prolific mass murderer in history (yes even more than Hitler). The purpose of the book is ultimately to stimulate enough interest for the reader to do some further research and reading. If one wants further information on Stalin's crimes, one can pick up Robert Conquest's book entitled "The Great Terror: A Reassessment".

I strongly recommend "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" to anyone who wishes to have a firm grasp on the essentials of the early Soviet era. I especially wish to highlight Chapter 12 (entitled " War") of the book, which points how the Allies (Roosevelt in particular) were incompetent when it came to standing up to Stalin.

If you want some further readings on Russian History, just remember that the best Russian historians start with the letter "R" (Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Richard Overy, Robert Leckie, and Robert Payne).

Editorial Review:

A leading scholar-historian of the U.S.S.R. offers a penetrating look at one of the most enigmatic and terrifying figures of modern times. Distilling a lifetime's study, Conquest provides a powerful, living portrait of Josef Stalin as child and student, revolutionary and Communist theoretician, political animal and paranoid leader. "A brisk, informative synthesis."--The Wall Street Journal.

The Last Tsar

Edvard Radzinsky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Our Bitter, Bitter Revolution 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

A man is sitting at a book-covered table in the Central State Archive of the October (1917) Revolution in Moscow. The surviving diaries of the last imperial family of Russia are there, unclassified at last. Reading them, his thoughts carrying him back and forth in time, the man is moved when he finds pressed flowers in the journals of the tsar's daughters: "Souvenirs of a destroyed life".

Edvard Radzinsky is that haunted man, sitting at a table strewn with memories of a broken dynasty. "The Last Tsar" is the product of his research and his sadness. A playwright, Raszinsky is well-qualified to explore the human depths of the lives of Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and the others who were part of their doomed world.

The book gained a great deal of publicity when it was first released here for its sensational assertion that two of the family may have escaped execution on that terrible night in 1918. And this work of popular history merits the attention. This book is likely to become the definitive work on the last years of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

Rarely is a work of history so beautifully written, so thoroughly researched, and so permeated with emotion and insight. A great debt is owed to the translator for her lyrical and poetic voice while retaining a sense of historical authority.

Radzinsky's attitudes and feelings are juxtaposed with those of the two main characters of the story-- Tsar Nicholas and his queen, Alexandra. The inclusion of the author's feelings is unorthodox in a historical work however, in this case, it's a success and it offers a perspective that is both personal and realistic.

The tone of the book is conversational rather than scholarly. It is not difficult to imagine Radzinsky weeping as he sits at the table covered with diaries, though he does not say he did. Certainly, the depth and honesty of his feelings are so evident that we find it difficult to hold back tears ourselves as the tragedy of the Romanov family unfolds.

Radzinsky has a deep respect for the dead Tsar and his wife, but he clearly loves those children. They are the classic innocence, doomed by the destruction of their grand and insulated world.

In the early 90s, exhumation of what is assumed to be the family's grave revealed only nine skeletons. Although the accepted number of victims has always been put at eleven. Even more recently, two bodies were found nearby to the execution site and burial site that some experts believe to be the missing bodies.

The book and the forensic examination raise again the persistant belief that not only the Princess Anastasia, but also the Tsar Evitch Alexi, heir to the Russian throne may have survived the execution. However, these most recent exhumations near the main burial pit appear to show that neither Alexi nor Anastasia survived.

One of the participants in the execution later wrote that Alexi and his four sisters remained alive after the shooting had stopped.

"This had amazed the Commandant", he wrote, "since we had aimed straight for the heart. It was also surprising that the bullets from the revolvers bounced off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping around the room like hail."

That night, the children were wearing clothing into which the family diamonds had been sewn. Seeing that the bullets had not done its jobs, the killers decided to finish off the children with bayonets. A strong, although essentially circumstantial case, is presented that Alexi and Anastasia may, in fact, have survived.

This conclusion appears to have been recently overturned by the finding of the two bodies near the main burial site.

"The Last Tsar" was written as the Soviet Union, the author's homeland itself, was collapsing. The two Russian Revolutions, those of 1917 and 1989, are often intertwined in the book. In the lonely archives and libraries of a dying country, Radzinsky fell into a no-man's land of historical whirlwinds where huge and incomprehensible became understandable. He offers insights into the character of Russian history where, ". . . great and terrible events. . . are usually due to someone's stupidity or laziness," and to the apparently cyclical nature of history.

"Oh, our bitter, bitter revolution," he writes.

This is a book about processes. The tragedy of a family, the drama of a world turned upside down and the mechanics of research and writing are among the subjects.

Radzinsky's superb use of diaries and letters, his simple straightforward arguments and his penetrating thought-provoking style combined to make a very entertaining and convincing book.

The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II

Greg King

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Editorial Review:

Praise for The Court of the Last Tsar



"Any book by Greg King is a book to be kept and savored. He has not only given us a fresh, clear-eyed, and often startling new look at the life of the last Romanovs, but also lived up to the promise of his title. He has shown us how the whole enterprise worked, from Tsar Nicholas to his lowest cook and chambermaid. This book is a great work of scholarship--and a wonderful read."
--Peter Kurth, author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra and Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson

"A mammoth, monumental achievement. No other book captures the essence and the entire scope of life at the court of Nicholas II. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and encyclopedic masterpiece that will be a major source for historians and biographers for years to come."
--Marlene A. Eilers, author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and publisher of Royal Book News

"Greg King has truly written a tour de force. The book is extremely well researched, has over 100 illustrations and is, quite simply, marvelous."
--Coryne Hall, author of Little Mother of Russia, Once a Grand Duchess, and Imperial Dancer

"Greg King is emerging as one of the leading authorities in today's liveliest field of Russian studies, and this is a major contribution to the study of late Imperial Russia."
--Joseph T. Fuhrmann, author of Rasputin and the editor of The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra

The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War

Asne Seierstad

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the early hours of New Year’s 1994, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, plunging the country into a prolonged and bloody conflict that continues to this day. A foreign correspondent in Moscow at the time, Åsne Seierstad traveled regularly to Chechnya to report on the war, describing its affects on those trying to live their daily lives amidst violence.

In the following decade, Seierstad became an internationally renowned reporter and author, traveling to the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn regions. But she never lost sight of this conflict that had initially inspired her career. Over the course of a decade, she watched as Russia ruthlessly suppressed an Islamic rebellion in two bloody wars and as Chechnya evolved into one of the flashpoints in a world now focused on the threat of international terrorism.

In 2006, Seierstad finally returned to Chechnya, traveling in secret and under the constant threat of danger. In a broken and devastated society she lived with orphans, the wounded, the lost. And she lived with the children of Grozny, those who will shape the country’s future. She asks the question: What happens to a child who grows up surrounded by war and accustomed to violence?

A compelling, intimate, and often heartbreaking portrait of Chechnya today, The Angel of Grozny is a vivid account of a land’s violent history and its ongoing battle for freedom.