George Bernard Shaw wrote that on the last day of Creation, God desired to crown His work, and so fashioned the Croatian coastline out of tears, stars, and breath. Anyone who has glimpsed that long, mountainous, island-studded coast would surely agree that its beauty is little short of divine. Croatia, quite simply, is blessed with some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet and in recent years has become a favorite tourist destination. A Traveller's History of Croatia offers tourists and travellers an inside look at the complex roots of Croatian history and the many influences they will see on its towns, ports and islands. The country has been a melting-pot of Mediterranean, Central European and Italian cultures. After a look at how its geography and geology have shaped the nation, a fascinating story unfolds explaining its past: why there are so many Greek and Roman archaeological remains, the coming of Christianity, the sad tale of how the early blooming of the Croatian state in the 9th century was thwarted by its subsequent partition and absorption into the Venetian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and the tortuous struggle for sovereignty in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century brought new solutions in the founding of Yugoslavia, problems with Croatian nationalism and the horrors of invasion in World War II. Under Tito a new stability came to the region until the battles of the 1990s, which were finally resolved with the international recognition of an independent state in 1992. One definite conclusion can be drawn about Croatia in the early twenty-first century: this is the best time in all of Croatian history. The country is after all independent, democratic, with a stable economy, and it has established itself as one of the world's most coveted tourist destinations.

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century.

Americans call the Second World War the Good War. But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.
 
Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

After a hall of records was discovered beneath the Romanian Sphinx in 2003, an ancient parchment surfaced in the highest mountains of Tibet. This book tells the story of the detailed political intrigues behind these remarkable finds and also how these matters have been subject to intervention by superior spiritual forces. While the parchment presents five invaluable techniques for spiritual advancement, its very presence in the world has ignited a series of quantum events, one of which is a mysterious antenna-like structure that reveals itself as a result of melting ice near a secret American base in Antarctica. Acting as some sort of cosmic buoy, it has an energy signature connecting both to Jupiter's moon, Europa, and an area of Transylvania where the remains of an ancient civilization were uncovered in 1990 amidst vast tunnels of solid gold. This gold is revealed to facilitate super-consciousness as well as lead to the nexus of the Inner Earth where all the worlds unite.

In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism--illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history

Eastern Europe has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond.

A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family's past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today.

'History, stories, recipes and beautiful illustrations' - OLINA HERCULES

'Christmas brings the indestructibility of hope in times of the greatest hopelessness. As long as we celebrate this holiday, we can neither be defeated nor destroyed. This is the message that Ukraine is trying to convey to the world. And this is what our book is about.'

From Christmas music to gifts and food, as well as a look back through the country's rich and troubled history through the perspective of the festive season, this beautifully illustrated and powerful book introduces readers to Ukraine's unique Christmas traditions. In a country where East and West meet, this is a fascinating and unmissable guide to capturing the spirit of one of the most important times of year and a powerful reminder of the strength of holding on to your culture and beliefs, even as others try to take everything from you.

'Sings of the independence of Ukraine yet ensures you feel the connecting hand of warmth, understanding, and friendship ... So profoundly meaningful and powerful, A Ukrainian Christmas ensures that you never lose sight of the true meaning of these festivities and how important they are in the lives of so many people' - LOVEREADING

'Richly illustrated ... from Christmas music to gifts and food, it introduces readers to festive traditions followed in Ukraine' - Caroline Sanderson, THE BOOKSELLER

The Publisher is making a donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal on publication of this book.

A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential

Shore brilliantly captures the contingency, uncertainty, and chaos that was transmuted into the remarkable, seemingly transcendent solidarity of the Maidan's unified resistance to a corrupt and cruel régime.--Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy, McGill University

What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013-14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. The Maidan was an illumination of the human capacity for natality, the ability to act, to begin anew at this moment. It was the turning point without which Ukrainian resistance to the full-scale Russian invasion cannot be understood.

In this lyrical and piercing book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian revolution. Grounded in interviews with activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore's book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian's reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it--and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

A history of the largely forgotten peasant revolution that swept central and eastern Europe after World War I--and how it changed the course of interwar politics and World War II

As the First World War ended, villages across central and eastern Europe rose in revolt. Led in many places by a shadowy movement of army deserters, peasants attacked those whom they blamed for wartime abuses and long years of exploitation--large estate owners, officials, and merchants, who were often Jewish. At the same time, peasants tried to realize their rural visions of a reborn society, establishing local self-government or attempting to influence the new states that were being built atop the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. In The Last Peasant War, Jakub Benes presents the first comprehensive history of this dramatic and largely forgotten revolution and traces its impact on interwar politics and the course of the Second World War.

Sweeping large portions of the countryside between the Alps and the Urals from 1917 to 1921, this peasant revolution had momentous aftereffects, especially among Slavic peoples in the former lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It enabled an unprecedented expansion of agrarian politics in the interwar period and provided a script for rural resistance that was later revived to resist Nazi occupation and to challenge Communist rule in east central Europe.

By shifting historical focus from well-studied cities to the often-neglected countryside, The Last Peasant War reveals how the movements and ambitions of peasant villagers profoundly shaped Europe's most calamitous decades.

Rebecca West's magnum opus . . . one of the great books of our time. --The New Yorker

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

This new edition of the Balkan Ghosts includes six opinion pieces written by Robert Kaplan about the Balkans between 1996 and 2000 beginning just after the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and ending after the conclusion of the Kosovo war, with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power.

How much Eastern European history do you know?

The story of Eastern Europe is one of successes and failures, competing interests, and the rise and fall of states and empires. The ancient Greek and Roman empires knew the importance of Eastern Europe for trade and settlement. Later, during the Migration Period, also known as the Barbarian Invasions, Eastern Europe became the stomping grounds for many people groups. The Visigoths, Huns, Slavs, and central Asian Turkic tribes like the Avars and Khazars all made their way into Eastern Europe.

With so many people moving in, the first states started to rise. Some of them would break apart as soon as they started, while others would form full-fledged empires. The medieval period would see some of the greatest empires of European history, like Kievan Rus, the Bulgarian Empire, Serbia, and the German Crusader states. By the early modern period, these great states would be replaced by Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire.

In the coming centuries, the rise of Russia, Austria, and Prussia would spell doom for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottomans would keep pressing into Eastern Europe. The 19th century would lay the foundations for the outbreak of World War I, which would itself lead to World War II. In the aftermath, Eastern Europe became part of the Eastern Bloc, which was dominated by the USSR until the fall of communism nearly five decades later. This book extends past contemporary histories of Eastern Europe, which usually end at the fall of the Berlin Wall, to cover more recent events, including the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo and the 2014 Crimean crisis.

In this book, you will learn about:

• The Greek and Roman influence in Eastern Europe
• The Migration Period, aka the Barbarian Invasions
• Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
• The Mongol invasions
• Christian Europe vs. the Ottoman Empire
• The fall of Constantinople
• The rise of Russia and its famous rulers, like Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great
• The path to World War I and World War II
• The Jewish experience in Eastern Europe
• The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc
• The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism
• The conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo
• The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea

To learn more about Eastern Europe than you ever thought possible, add The History of Eastern Europe to your cart today!

This Element is a historical tour of Ukraine from the medieval Kyivan prince Volodymyr the Great through to Ukraine's twenty-first-century rock star president Volodymyr Zelensky. It presents Ukraine as an actor, not a pawn, in international history. And it focuses on people. In the past, historians wrote about Ukraine from a colonial perspective that portrayed it as a region, not its own entity. This shaped the way people thought about Ukraine and created mental maps where it was just part of something else. Put in contemporary terms, Ukraine was subjected to a historical disinformation war. This Element joins voices that are decolonizing that way of thinking by drawing a different mental map, one where Ukraine exists as itself. It explains how the people living on its lands have their own distinct history, how they shaped it, were shaped by it, and had an impact on both European and global history.

As Adam Zamoyski set out to update The Polish Way, his bestselling first history of Poland, he realized the task required not so much re-writing as re-thinking the known facts well as the assumptions of the past. The events of the last twenty years and the growth of the independent Polish state allowed him to look at Poland's past with a fresh eye. Tracing Poland's complex development from the Middle Ages to present day, Zamoyski examines the country's political, economic, and military struggles, as well as its culture, art, and richly varied society through the ages, bringing the major events and characters in Poland's history to life.

In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel combines the same powerful eloquence, moral passion, and abiding wisdom that informed his writing as a dissident and playwright, with a candor unprecedented from one with the broad perspective and infinite responsibility of governing a country.

Havel, now president of the Czech Republic, addresses the legacy of Communism as the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution gives way to a more problematic reality. Yet even as he grapples with the challenges of political change, he affirms his belief in a politics motivated by moral responsibility; in an economy tempered by compassion; and in the central roles of art and culture in the transformation of society. Summer Meditations is not only a timely and necessary testament of events in Eastern Europe but a profound reflection upon the nature and practice of politics and a stirring call for morality, civility, and openness in public life throughout the world.

Polish Saber - The use of the Polish Saber on foot in the 17th century covers the history, anecdotes and use of Poland's iconic weapon. In matters of honor and personal safety the saber was the Polish nobleman's choice of arms. The concept of the duel, the form and function of the weapon, as well as source material from Poland, Italy and Germany are blended together in an interpretation presented in full-color. The work is suitable for history enthusiasts, Historical European Martial Artists and re-creationists who wish to explore Poland's Commonwealth and the weapon that symbolized its nobility.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

From one of Russia's smartest and best-sourced young journalists (The New York Times)--the first work by a Russian author to reveal his country's history of oppressing Ukraine, providing an unprecedented overview of the war for Ukrainian independence that affects us all.

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.

In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever.

Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, this is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it.

In 1987, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector ever from the Eastern bloc, published RED HORIZONS, his expose of the unchecked power and corruption of Nicolae Ceausecu, then the Romanian President and Romanian Communist Party General Secretary, and his wife, Elena. Pacepa's intention was to bring down the Ceausescu regime and liberate his daughter, whom he had to leave behind in Romania.

When Ceausescu was told of Pacepa's defection, he suffered a nervous breakdown and ordered Pacepa killed. Ceausescu's murder squads never succeeded in tracking down Pacepa, who remained in hiding in the U.S.

Not long after the publication of RED HORIZONS, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty began their campaigns to broadcast the book into Romania.

On Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed by military forces who had joined the Romanian people in a spontaneous revolt against one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, bringing an abrupt end to 24 years of Communist tyranny.

On December 26, 1989, Truth, the Romanian daily newspaper which had declared itself free, began printing excerpts from RED HORIZONS. The editors' preface to these excerpts said:

What can be read in the pages of this book appears to be the fruit of a sick fantasy and yet, every word is true. The publication of this book played an uncontested role in revealing in all its hideousness the true face of a dictatorship, which with diabolical cunningness had managed to outfox a part of the world.

National Book Award Finalist
TIME Magazine's #1 Nonfiction Book of 2012
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2012
Best Nonfiction of 2012: The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer

In the much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. Iron Curtain describes how, spurred by Stalin and his secret police, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. Drawing on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time, Applebaum portrays in chilling detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. As a result the Soviet Bloc became a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in these electrifying pages.

In the immediate aftermath of its successful revolution, Cuba was heralded by socialist nations as the vanguard of communism in Latin America in the early 1960s. But by the late 1980s, Cuba's inability to adopt the modes of socialist planning and Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had deeply soured the relationship between Havana and the Soviet-led socialist bloc. While secondary literature often highlights Cuba's political and economic relations with Washington and Moscow, Havana's ideological, political, and economic relations with the Eastern European states have received considerably less attention. This book aims to fill this gap by offering a detailed chronological account of how Cuba's post-revolutionary development was influenced by Eastern European diplomats.

Outside of their roles as representatives of their respective states, Eastern European diplomats were entrusted with the task of educating local Cuban leadership in the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, steering Cuba's governors onto the correct path of development, helping them eradicate erroneous ideas of economic development, and showing them the validity of socialist morals and ideology. By considering these developments and analyzing firsthand accounts of Eastern European diplomats' experiences in Havana, historian Radoslav Yordanov reconstructs the thinking of Eastern European diplomats and specialists in their dealings with Cuba from the 1959 Cuban revolutionary victory to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, shedding new light on Cuba's role in the global Cold War.

Since its beginnings, Poland has been a moving target, geographically as well as demographically, and the very definition of who is a Pole has been in flux. In the late medieval and early modern periods, the country grew to be the largest in continental Europe, only to be later wiped off the map for more than a century. The Polish phoenix that rose out of the ashes of World War I was obliterated by the joint Nazi-Soviet occupation that began with World War II. The postwar entity known as Poland was shaped and controlled by the Soviet Union. Yet even under these constraints, Poles persisted in their desire to wrest from their oppressors a modicum of national dignity and, ultimately, managed to achieve much more than that.

Poland is a sweeping account designed to amplify major figures, moments, milestones, and turning points in Polish history. These include important battles and illustrious individuals, alliances forged by marriages and choices of religious denomination, and meditations on the likes of the Polish battle slogan for our freedom and yours that resounded during the Polish fight for independence in the long 19th century and echoed in the Solidarity period of the late 20th century.

The experience of oppression helped Poles to endure and surmount various challenges in the 20th century, and Poland's demonstration of strength was a model for other peoples seeking to extract themselves from foreign yoke. Patrice Dabrowski's work situates Poland and the Poles within a broader European framework that locates this multiethnic and multidenominational region squarely between East and West. This illuminating chronicle will appeal to general readers, and will be of special interest to those of Polish descent who will appreciate Poland's longstanding republican experiment.

The most comprehensive survey of Polish history available in English, God's Playground demonstrates Poland's importance in European history from medieval times to the present. Abandoning the traditional nationalist approach to Polish history, Norman Davies instead stresses the country's rich multinational heritage and places the development of the Jewish German, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian communities firmly within the Polish context.

Davies emphasizes the cultural history of Poland through a presentation of extensive poetical, literary, and documentary texts in English translation. In each volume, chronological chapters of political narrative are interspersed with essays on religious, social, economic, constitutional, philosophical, and diplomatic themes.

This new edition has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end of the twentieth century.