Featuring specially commissioned artwork, this study breaks new ground in covering all the uniformed Soviet security organizations from the Russian Revolution through to World War II. While the average person reacts to the term 'SS' with justified horror, most do not realize that, like Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union had its own instrument of terror, the NKVD. The precursor to the NKVD, the Cheka, was central to the Bolsheviks' elimination of political dissent during the Russian Civil War (1918-21). After 1922 the Soviet state-security organs became the GPU and then the OGPU (1923-34) before coalescing into the NKVD. After it played a central role in the Great Terror (1936-38), which saw the widespread repression of many different groups and the imprisonment and execution of prominent figures, the NKVD had its heyday during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). During the conflict the organization deployed full military divisions, frontier troop units and internal security forces and
“Broue enables us to feel that we are actually living through these epoch-making events…. [D]o not miss this magnificent work.”—Robert Brenner, UCLAA magisterial, definitive account of the upheavals i
Russia's geographical position as both a European and an Asian power and her twin aims of promoting world revolution and establishing normal relations with capitalist governments led to server stresse
Russia's geographical position as both a European and an Asian power and her twin aims of promoting world revolution and establishing normal relations with capitalist governments led to server stresse
Broue (history, Institut d'etudes politiques, Grenoble) understands the proper socialist revolution to mirror that of the Bolsheviks. In the case of Germany, which experienced five years of struggle a
This book provides a great deal of detail on working-class militancy between 1917 and 1923. It stresses the large scale and considerable impact of mass action and labor activism, challenging tradition
When Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik party led the first successful workers revolution in history, they were under no illusions that their work was finished with the overthrow of capitalism in Russia
The Politics of Self-Determination examines the territorial restructuring of Europe between 1917 and 1923, when a radically new and highly fragile peace order was established. It opens with an explora
Here is the history of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and the emergence, on its ruins, of a multinational Communist state. In this revealing account, Richard Pipes tells how the Communists
