Based on the novel by Mikhail Bulghakov, "Master and Margaret" is not only a story of devils visiting soviet and antireligious Moscow, of true and victorious love, of Jesus meeting Pontius Pilate. Above all it is existing proof of a great and praiseworthy belief that the world after all, is not so bad, and the people, if only given a chance are simply good.

In this magnificent new biography of Stalin, Kotkin rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin's psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin's near paranoia was fundamentally political, and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution's structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin demonstrates the impossibility of understanding Stalin's...

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world It has the quality of myth: A poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian Empire, reinvents himself as a revolutionary and finds a leadership role within a small group of marginal zealots. When the old world is unexpectedly brought down in a total war, the band seizes control of the country, and the new regime it founds as...

A study of the political and social upheavals in Europe between 1914 and 1945 focuses on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and on the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, revealing the similarities and differences among the three.

"An exploration of prewar and postwar power relations in Russia'sSmolensk amid Stalinism and Nazism in Russia's Smolensk. The book investigates how lived experiences shaped people's fateful choices and how ordinary people sustained the twentieth century's two most murderous regimes"-- Provided by publisher.

"Drawing on new research, including the diaries, memoirs, and personal letters of both Lenin and his friends, Victor Sebestyen's biography--the first in English in nearly two decades--is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century, but a portrait of Lenin the man."-- Provided by publisher. "Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin--the first major biography in English...

"Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as co-leader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the twentieth century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come...