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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Screenplay'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Darkness at Noon'
Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, Darkness At Noon asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It isas the Times Literary Supplement has declared"A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama..." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Days That Shook The World'
This was followed by the dispersal of the Soviet at Kaluga. The Bolsheviki, having secured a majority in the Soviet, set free some political prisoners. With the sanction of the Government Commissar the Municipal Duma called in troops from Minsk, and bombarded the Soviet headquarters with artillery. The Bolsheviki yielded, but as they left the building Cossacks attacked them. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times Soviet Russia in the 1930s'
Most popular books about the Stalin era feature the big names and a firm narrative shape: Robert Conquest's The Great Terror; Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin. Some books yield their revelations at a glance, like the stunning The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia.
But scholar Sheila Fitzpatrick is famous for letting the common people and the facts speak for themselves, in all their complexity. Her new book on Soviet life in the 1930s--based on research in newly opened archives--does for urbanites what her Heldt Prizewinning Stalin's Peasants did for rural victims. The many witnesses in this fascinating horror story cast doubt on Stalin's notorious 1935 slogan "Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful."
A comment made by a victim of Ivan the Terrible would be more apt: "We Russians don't need to eat; we eat one another and this satisfies us." Famine, caused by bad weather and worse policies, plagued the decade, and life became a chronic struggle to wrest crumbs from an incompetent bureaucracy. Stalin's sly methods of deflecting blame from the state onto allegedly disloyal citizens provoked orgies of denunciation (which could backfire on denouncers). A mad starch factory director forbade comrades to get shaves or haircuts at home--it would have been disloyal to the factory's hairdresser. One kid, Pavlik Morozov, reported his father for grain hoarding in 1937, was murdered by relatives, and became a national hero to kids. Andrei Sakharov's future spouse Elena Bonner was shocked at her 9-year-old brother's response to his father's arrest: "Look what these enemies of the people are like--some of them even pretend to be fathers." The celebrated Moscow Children's Theater put on The Squealer, a drama strikingly like Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront.
Fitzpatrick gives a sense of what it really was like to live under the satanic circus master Stalin: it was beyond Kafka, and it was bloody hard work. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The First Circle'
A major literary event 50 years in the making:In the First Circle is the first complete English translation of Nobel Prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns best novel (Washington Post). With an introduction by Edward Erickson, this work by the author of The Gulag Archipelago is the story of a brilliant mathematician who finds himself locked in a Moscow prison filled with the countrys brightest minds and must decide whether to aid Stalins repressive state. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag: A History'
Gulag: A History, by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, is a cogent, meticulously researched exposé of the Soviet system of institutionalized terror, repression, and punishment that, over the course of the 20th century, turned the world's largest nation into a vast concentration camp and mass grave. Applebaum investigates the gulag from its origins just after the Russian Revolution through its expansion under Stalin's reign to its collapse during the period of glasnost and the fall of communism. She draws on original research, as well as recently released archival material and memoirs by both "ordinary" survivors and those who would become literary giants, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Polish novelist Gustav Herling-Grudzinski, who wrote A World Apart based on his experiences in the camps. She describes the categories of prisoner--an estimated 18 million between 1929 and 1953, the year Stalin died--who from "the very earliest days of the new Soviet state&were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were": old Bolsheviks, deportees from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II, repatriated Soviet POWs, foreign communists, dissidents, the man, woman or child on the street--political prisoners mixed with common criminals. Anyone who could be perceived as a threat or traitor or simply a needed body was arrested, tortured, and used as slave labor to extract natural resources from remote corners of Siberia, work on absurdly ambitious transportation and energy projects, and build the Soviet economy. The reasons for incarceration; the journeys to the outposts; the strategies for survival of prisoners subjected to cold, starvation, rape; the types of heavy labor; the conditions for women and children; the political structure within the camp--these are just some of the broad themes that Applebaum tackles.
Deftly melding generality with specificity, Applebaum allows the individual to speak for the many and, in the process, paints a horrifying portrait of a nation forged from paranoia and the terror invoked by the arbitrary exercise of power that tore apart families and enslaved, brutalized, and murdered millions. By giving voice to the millions who disappeared into unmarked graves in an eight-decade-long episode in human history that rivaled the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, Applebaum makes an invaluable contribution to a growing body of re-evaluative literature that will, hopefully, inspire a thoughtful consideration of our collective past, and a more critical awareness our present. --Diana Kuprel [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag / Gulag: Historia de los Campos de Concentracion Sovieticos / History of the Soviet Concentration Camps'
More editions of Gulag / Gulag: Historia de los Campos de Concentracion Sovieticos / History of the Soviet Concentration Camps:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag Archipelago'
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation. [via]
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[This is the MP3CD audiobook format of VOLUME 2 in vinyl case.]
**Time Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the 20th Century**
In this masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony, and sheer comedy, it combines history, autobiography, documentary, and political analysis as it examines in its totality the Soviet apparatus of repression from its inception following the October Revolution of 1917.
This second volume in Solzhenitsyn's narrative chronicles the appalling inhumanity of the Soviets' ''destructive-labor camps'' and the fate of prisoners in them--felling timber, building canals and railroads, and mining gold without equipment or adequate food and clothing, and subject always to the caprices of the camp authorities. Most tragic of all is the life of the women prisoners and the luckless children they bear.
Once again, this chronicle of appalling inhumanity is made endurable by the vitality and emotional range of the writing. In one truly remarkable chapter, a parody of an anthropological treatise, Solzhenitsyn achieves new heights of sardonic wit. In the final section the music changes, and he provides a magnificent coda on the possibilities of redemption and purification through suffering. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 an Experiment in Liter'
More editions of Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 an Experiment in Liter:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Parts I-VII'
[This is the MP3CD audiobook format of VOLUME 2 in vinyl case.]
**Time Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the 20th Century**
In this masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony, and sheer comedy, it combines history, autobiography, documentary, and political analysis as it examines in its totality the Soviet apparatus of repression from its inception following the October Revolution of 1917.
This second volume in Solzhenitsyn's narrative chronicles the appalling inhumanity of the Soviets' ''destructive-labor camps'' and the fate of prisoners in them--felling timber, building canals and railroads, and mining gold without equipment or adequate food and clothing, and subject always to the caprices of the camp authorities. Most tragic of all is the life of the women prisoners and the luckless children they bear.
Once again, this chronicle of appalling inhumanity is made endurable by the vitality and emotional range of the writing. In one truly remarkable chapter, a parody of an anthropological treatise, Solzhenitsyn achieves new heights of sardonic wit. In the final section the music changes, and he provides a magnificent coda on the possibilities of redemption and purification through suffering. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II'
[This is the MP3CD audiobook format of VOLUME 2 in vinyl case.]
**Time Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the 20th Century**
In this masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony, and sheer comedy, it combines history, autobiography, documentary, and political analysis as it examines in its totality the Soviet apparatus of repression from its inception following the October Revolution of 1917.
This second volume in Solzhenitsyn's narrative chronicles the appalling inhumanity of the Soviets' ''destructive-labor camps'' and the fate of prisoners in them--felling timber, building canals and railroads, and mining gold without equipment or adequate food and clothing, and subject always to the caprices of the camp authorities. Most tragic of all is the life of the women prisoners and the luckless children they bear.
Once again, this chronicle of appalling inhumanity is made endurable by the vitality and emotional range of the writing. In one truly remarkable chapter, a parody of an anthropological treatise, Solzhenitsyn achieves new heights of sardonic wit. In the final section the music changes, and he provides a magnificent coda on the possibilities of redemption and purification through suffering. [via]
More editions of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gulag Archipelago, Part 1 & 2, Book 1'
The Soviet Union had the largest secret political prison system of its time, scattered into the most remote corners of Eastern Europe and Asia. When Solzhenitsyn came out, he told the stories of shattered lives in a shattered nation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hunt For Red October'
Somewhere under the Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision: the Red October is heading west. The Americans want her. The Russians want her back. And the most incredible chase in history is on....
The Hunt for Red October is the runaway bestseller that launched Tom Clancy's phenomenal career. A military thriller so accurate and convincing that the author was rumored to have been debriefed by the White House. Its theme: the greatest espionage coup in history. Its story: the chase for a runaway top secret Russian missile sub. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire'
David Remnick was Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post between 1988 and 1991 and later a staffer at the New Yorker. While with The Post he covered events the emergence of perestroika, the taking of power by democrats, the failed Communist counter-coup of August 1991 and beyond. His gripping personal account of that historic period is filled with vivid sketches of people. He writes with passion of the twofold nature of the crimes of Stalinist communism--"murder and the unending assault against memory." His powerful literary style is suggested in the title, the mausoleum holding Lenin's body being a central image in his book for the construction and maintenance of the dead culture of communism. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Master And Margarita'
A mysterious stranger and his retinue have astonished the locals of Stalins Moscow with the magic show to end all magic shows and have quite literally set the town alight. But whats the real purpose behind their visit?
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› Find signed collectible books: 'MASTER AND MARGARITA'
Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.
Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"
Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary Park [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Master and Margarita'
Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.
Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"
Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary Park [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Master I Margarita'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Mbi (We)'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Okhota Za"Krasnym Oktiabrem"'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich'
Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 1962. It is painfully apparent that Solzhenitsyn himself spent time in the gulags--he was imprisoned for nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich'
The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich'
A graphic picture of life in a Stalinist work camp. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Readings on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Russians'
Hedrick Smith has done what we all wish we could do: he has gone to Russia and spoken to the people. Over steaming samovars, in cramped flats, and on dirt-floors, he has spoken to peasants and bureaucrats, artists and officials. He has studied their customs and their governments and shares his fascinating insights and fresh perspectives with us. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar'
Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimesas many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulaghas given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalins reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundationhuman, psychological and physicalthat supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.
In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalins court from the time of his acclamation as leader in 1929, five years after Lenins death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of personalityStalins as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among themthe author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalins favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenins dictum, A revolution without firing squads is meaningless). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalins inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine.
With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalins court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalins rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalins meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalins dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive and unforgiving. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalingrad'
Hitler made two fundamental and crippling mistakes during the Second World War. The first was his whimsical belief that the United Kingdom would eventually become his ally, which delayed his decision to launch a major invasion of Britain, whose army was unprepared for the force of blitzkrieg warfare. The second was the ill-conceived Operation Barbarossa--an invasion of Russia that was supposed to take the German army to the gates of Moscow. Antony Beevor's thoughtfully researched compendium recalls this epic struggle for Stalingrad. No-one, least of all the Germans, could foretell the deep well of Soviet resolve that would become the foundation of the Red Army; Russia, the Germans believed, would fall as swiftly as France and Poland. The ill-prepared Nazi forces were trapped in a bloody war of attrition against the Russian behemoth, which held them in the pit of Stalingrad for nearly two years. Beevor points out that the Russians were by no means ready for the war either, making their stand even more remarkable; Soviet intelligence spent as much time spying on its own forces--in fear of desertion, treachery and incompetence--as they did on the Nazis. Due attention is also given to the points of view of the soldiers and generals of both forces, from the sickening battles to life in the gulags.
Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defences were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that "[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years". This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves. --Jeremy Storey [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sword and the Shield'
In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to "speak to someone in authority." As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, "Hundreds of people! That just doesn't happen! Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents--but not hundreds!"
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB's systematic silencing of dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices--stay silent, resign, or undermine the system from within--Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
In 1995, Mitrokhin, by then a British citizen, contacted Christopher Andrew (For the President's Eyes Only), head of the faculty of history at Cambridge University and one of the world's foremost historians of international intelligence. Andrew was allowed to examine the archive Mitrokhin created "to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it." The Sword and the Shield is the earthshaking result. The book details the KGB's foreign-intelligence operations, most notably those aimed at Great Britain and the "Main Adversary"--the United States. In the 700-page book, Andrew reveals operations aimed at discrediting high-profile Americans, from Martin Luther King to Ronald Reagan; secret arms caches still hidden--and boobytrapped--throughout the West; disinformation efforts, including forging a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to implicate the CIA in the assassination of JFK; attempts to stir up racial tensions in the U.S. by sending hate mail and even bombs; and the existence of deep-cover agents in North America and Europe--some of whom were effectively "outed" when the book was published.
Mitrokhin's detailed notes are well served by Andrew, who writes forcefully and clearly. The Sword and the Shield represents a remarkable intelligence coup--one that will have serious repercussions for years to come. As Andrew notes, "No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure." --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB'
In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to "speak to someone in authority." As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, "Hundreds of people! That just doesn't happen! Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents--but not hundreds!"
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB's systematic silencing of dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices--stay silent, resign, or undermine the system from within--Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
In 1995, Mitrokhin, by then a British citizen, contacted Christopher Andrew (For the President's Eyes Only), head of the faculty of history at Cambridge University and one of the world's foremost historians of international intelligence. Andrew was allowed to examine the archive Mitrokhin created "to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it." The Sword and the Shield is the earthshaking result. The book details the KGB's foreign-intelligence operations, most notably those aimed at Great Britain and the "Main Adversary"--the United States. In the 700-page book, Andrew reveals operations aimed at discrediting high-profile Americans, from Martin Luther King to Ronald Reagan; secret arms caches still hidden--and boobytrapped--throughout the West; disinformation efforts, including forging a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to implicate the CIA in the assassination of JFK; attempts to stir up racial tensions in the U.S. by sending hate mail and even bombs; and the existence of deep-cover agents in North America and Europe--some of whom were effectively "outed" when the book was published.
Mitrokhin's detailed notes are well served by Andrew, who writes forcefully and clearly. The Sword and the Shield represents a remarkable intelligence coup--one that will have serious repercussions for years to come. As Andrew notes, "No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure." --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ten Days That Shook the World'
The situation in St. Petersburg was growing more and more tense. The People's Revolution had begun by overthrowing the corrupt Tsarist regime in March 1917, but the workers and the peasants felt the revolution had much farther to go. Tired of fighting a war that meant little to them, the soldiers also grew restless: "When the land belongs to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!"
Lenin pressed the Bolsheviks to seize power. On the night of October 24, an organized mass of workers, soldiers, peasants, and sailors stormed the Winter Palace. On the following day, at the opening of the second Congress of Soviets, Trotsky announced the overthrow of the provisional government. Counterrevolutionary forces marched on the capital, but the Revolutionary Army triumphed. After all, "[t]his was their battle, for their world; the officers in command were elected by them. For the moment that incoherent multiple will was one will."
In Ten Days That Shook the World John Reed tells the story of Red October and the Russian revolution from a unique, firsthand perspective. Reed, an American journalist, was on assignment in Russia for The Masses--then the principal radical journal in the United States--and spent his days walking the streets, reading and collecting handbills, newspapers, and posters, and talking to people. As a result, Ten Days crackles with energetic immediacy. At its best moments it reads like a novel: Reed recounts conversations and arguments, details political machinations, and speculates on personal motives. Though this is no mere piece of propaganda, Reed's enthusiasm for the revolution infuses the text (some readers may be put off by Reed's florid prose), casting each counterrevolutionary act in a negative light. Helpful notes flesh out the background for those less familiar with the preceding events and render this a solid work of history. Ten Days That Shook the World is a stirring account of a stirring event. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We'
First published in the West in 1924, We is an adventurous story of the future nameless "numbers," the two-tenths of the world's population that survived the Great Two Hundred Years War. Their food is derived from petroleum, and they believe that their totally restricted existence under the watchful eye of the Benefactor is the ideal. They do not mourn the passing of the creative human spirit; indeed, they are hardly aware it ever existed. More than half a century later, We remains a strange and telling tragicomedy of love and death. The author, an acknowledged satirist in his own right, set the stage for Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We'
Translated by Natasha Randall
Foreword by Bruce Sterling
Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and soberingand now available in a powerful new translationWe is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Workplay: Playing to Learn and Learning to Play'
WorkPlay offers you some of the most enjoyable and educational games and exercises you'll find anywhere. More than "just another" collection of structured activities, this reproducible volume includes a provocative discussion of the serious impact of fun and games on the adult learner.
WorkPlay provides training in: Leadership, team building, change, problem solving, creativity, decision making, goal setting, trust, risk taking, and more!
WorkPlay is designed to provide program designers, workshop presenters, facilitators, and consultants with creative, structured learning experiences and detailed guidance on how to use them for effective training, conferences, and workshops. It is a practical handbook containing 27 varied and versatile activities that cover a comprehensive range of learning themes. Although these activities are particularly well-suited to team building, group problem solving, and leadership training, they can be used for communication, decision making, creativity, resource management, and a multitude of other learning purposes. Each activity can serve a range of training needs and agendas. Each activity has applicability to a variety of learning themes, some of which can be explored in depth using the activity alone or in conjunction with suggested companion exercises. They can be implemented either at different times for different purposes or used singularly to accomplish a variety of related learning objectives.
WorkPlay includes:
27 reproducible activities in a convenient 3-ring binder.
Exercises include icebreakers, energizers and closing activities, scenario-based activities, and general activities for multiple objectives.
Observer/judge sheets for participants to learn by observing
Guidelines for ensuring that physically challenged participants can safely and enjoyably take part in the activities
Requirements for set-up, time, group size, materials, constraints, and safety considerations.
Development
Experiential activities can transform learning into adventure for adults in conference, academic, and work training settings. Learning is an emotional, physical and cognitive experience. Movement and feelings affect learning. Play can engage the mind and body and provoke a positive, emotional response during exercises that are designed to enhance skills and elucidate concepts and theories. Almost any topic can be explored through gaming. Learning that involves skill building and behavioral change, such as group dynamics, communication, leadership, problem solving, teamwork, and decision making are particularly well-suited to gaming.
Playing games for the serious purpose of learning creates a paradoxical situation in which participants are simultaneously involved in serious play and playful seriousness. The object of gaming is knowledge, not fun. However, the process is enjoyable and thus conducive to learning. This type of play entails the lighthearted yet earnest pursuit of educational aims within a fun-and-games context. The paradoxical nature of gaming to learn allows players freedom to experiment with new approaches, change old approaches, and even fail with impunity. After all, learning is a risky business. Safety is ensured in the imaginative realm of play.
Conducting the Activities
Each activity provides all the information necessary to conduct the experience, including directions and other handouts that can be easily copied for the participants. Some of the games do not require these handouts for participants or may have handouts to be used by the facilitator as a guide. These handouts contain all the pertinent information necessary for the group considerations. They also ensure that the group cannot project responsibility for its performance on faulty facilitator instructions, insulating the facilitator from being unwittingly drawn into authority issues that properly belong in the group.
Many of the activities are designed to accommodat [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Archipiélago Gulag : 1918-1956: Ensayo de Investigación Literaria'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Caza Del Submarino Ruso/the Hunt for Red October'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulag / Gulag: Historia de los Campos de Concentracion Sovieticos / History of the Soviet Concentration Camps'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalingrado'
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