"Based on ten years' research, this is the story of how a charismatic, dangerous boy became a student priest, romantic poet, gangster mastermind, prolific lover, murderous revolutionary, and the merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image: How Stalin became Stalin."--BOOK JACKET.

A soldier returns from the frontline of battle to report that Inspector Pekkala's charred body has been found at the site of an ambush. But Stalin refuses to believe that the indomitable Pekkala is dead. On Stalin's orders, Pekkala's assistant Kirov travels deep into the forests of Western Russia, following a trail of clues to a wilderness where partisans wage a brutal campaign against the Nazi invaders. Unknown to Kirov, he is being led into a trap...

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin's true motives-and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire-during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader. Even astute observers like George...

John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. Although the Eastern Front was the biggest and most important theater in World War II, it is not well known in the United States, as no American troops participated in the fighting. Yet historians agree that this is where the decisive battles of the war were fought. The conventional wisdom about the Eastern Front is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR because...

This ambitious book tells the story of the great social and political catastrophe that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945--a period of almost continuous upheaval, with two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the Third Reich. Historian Gellately argues that these tragedies are inextricably linked and that to consider them as discrete events is to misunderstand their genesis and character. Central to the catastrophe, of course,...

Reconstructs the month-by-month process through which the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiralled into the 'Great terror' in which 1.5 people lost their lives in a single year and Stalin's regime aimed to construct a new society.