More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as illegals. During the Second World War, illegals were dispatched behind enemy lines to assassinate high-ranking Nazis. Later, in the Cold War, they were sent to assimilate and lie low as sleepers in the West. The greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB's most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB's espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large.

From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling account that reads almost like the script for a movie (The Wall Street Journal)--a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history's worst nuclear disasters.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a riveting, deeply reported reconstruction (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

The most complete and compelling history yet (The Christian Science Monitor), Higginbotham's superb, enthralling, and necessarily terrifying...extraordinary (The New York Times) book is an indelible portrait of the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will--lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.

BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20^TH CENTURY. --Time

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times. --George F. Kennan

It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. --David Remnick, The New Yorker

Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today. --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

[A] masterly analysis.--Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal

In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century.

Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances--and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile--and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents--from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia--and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20^TH CENTURY. --Time

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times. --George F. Kennan

It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. --David Remnick, The New Yorker

Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today. --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller that explores the gripping Dyatlov Pass incident that took the lives of nine young Russian hikers in 1959.

What happened that night on Dead Mountain?

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the mountain climbing incident--unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes--have led to decades of speculation over the true stories and what really happened.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident delves into the untold story through unprecedented access to the hikers' own journals and photographs, rarely seen government records, dozens of interviews, and author Donnie Eichar's retracing of the hikers' fateful journey in the Russian winter.

An instant historical nonfiction bestseller upon its release, this is the dramatic real story of what happened on Dead Mountain.

GRIPPING AND BIZARRE: This is a fascinating portrait of young adventurers in the Soviet era, and a skillful interweaving of the hikers' narrative, the investigators' efforts, and the author's investigations. Library Journal hailed the drama and poignancy of Eichar's solid depiction of this truly eerie and enduring mystery.

FOR FANS OF UNSOLVED MYSTERIES: Unsolved true crimes and historical mysteries never cease to capture our imaginations. The Dyatlov Pass incident was little known outside of Russia until film producer and director Donnie Eichar brought the decades-old mystery to light in a book that reads like a mystery.

FASCINATING VISUALS: This well-researched volume includes black-and-white photographs from the cameras that belonged to the hikers, which were recovered after their deaths, along with explanatory graphics breaking down some of the theories surrounding the mysterious incident.

Perfect for:

• Fans of nonfiction history books and true crime
• Anyone who enjoys real-life mountaineering and survival stories such as Into Thin Air, Buried in the Sky, The Moth and the Mountain, and Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
• Readers seeking Cold War narratives and true stories from the Soviet era

I have not read anything else with such detailed and intimate knowledge of what took place. This manuscript is the most important contribution I have read.
-Phillip Bonosky, author of Afghanistan-Washington's Secret War

A well-researched work containing a great deal of useful historical information. Everyone will benefit greatly from the mass of historical data and the thought-provoking arguments contained in the book.
-Bahman Azad, author of Heroic Struggle Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR

A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be. -The New York Times

The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20^TH CENTURY. --Time

Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times. --George F. Kennan

It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. --David Remnick, New Yorker

Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today. --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

The official, one-volume edition, authorized by Solzhenitsyn

BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20^TH CENTURY --Time

The Nobel Prize winner's towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. --David Remnick, The New Yorker

Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims-this man, that woman, that child-we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the welcome that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. And Solzhenitsyn's genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.

The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times. --George F. Kennan

Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. ... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today. --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

Washington hunted Bout for more than a decade, before finally trapping him and jailing him for 25 years. Then, in December 2022, the story took an unlikely turn: President Biden pardoned Bout and sent him home to Moscow, in a prisoner exchange to rescue basketball superstar Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia on drugs charges. Soon enough, Bout cozied up with doomed Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and the Russian governors Putin had installed in occupied Ukraine.

Has America's extraordinary decision to swap Bout undermined Western interests? Has Putin put him back to work in his old business? Through candid interviews with US investigators and Viktor Bout himself, this book reveals the true story of the 'Merchant of Death'.

The Romanovs ruled a sixth of the world's surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality intoc the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?

This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence, and wild extravagance.

Drawing on new archival research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and tragedy, love and murder, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of empire that helps define Russia today.

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of late socialism (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.

The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world's first workers' state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?

In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilization that still resonates loudly today.

It is history on an epic yet human scale. Vast in scope, exhaustive in original research, written with passion, narrative skill, and human sympathy, A People's Tragedy is a profound account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation. Many consider the Russian Revolution to be the most significant event of the twentieth century. Distinguished scholar Orlando Figes presents a panorama of Russian society on the eve of that revolution, and then narrates the story of how these social forces were violently erased. Within the broad stokes of war and revolution are miniature histories of individuals, in which Figes follows the main players' fortunes as they saw their hopes die and their world crash into ruins. Unlike previous accounts that trace the origins of the revolution to overreaching political forces and ideals, Figes argues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and that what had started as a people's revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship. A People's Tragedy is a masterful and original synthesis by a mature scholar, presented in a compelling and accessibly human narrative.

A vivid history of how Cold War politics helped solve one of the twentieth century's biggest refugee crises

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These displaced persons, or DPs--Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939--refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls, Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.

American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined--from victims of war and Nazism to victims of Communism--in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this theft of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West's welcome of them, became an important theme in America's Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union.

A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

2021 Hardcover Reprint of 1932 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. State and Revolution (1917) describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution. It describes the inherent nature of the State as a tool for class oppression, a creation born of one social class's desire to control all other social classes. Whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the State remains in the control of the ruling class. Even in a democratic capitalist republic, the ruling class will never willingly relinquish political power, maintaining it via various strategies. Hence, according to this view, communist revolution is the sole remedy for the abolition of the state.