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
The Soviet Union 1956: after Stalin's death, a violent regime is beginning to fracture. Stalin's successor Khrushchev pledges reform. But there are forces at work that are unable to forgive or forget
In the 1950s the world is shivering from the Cold War. Not just from the increasingly frigid relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, but from the threat of nuclear destruction. The b
When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989 he had transformed Soviet Communism. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, h
The Russian T-72 Ural tank is the most widely-deployed main battle tank of the current generation. Used by the armies of the former Warsaw pact and Soviet Union, it has also been exported in large num
This lucid account of Russian and Soviet history presents major trends and events from ancient Kievan Rus’ to Vladimir Putin’s renewed presidency of the twenty-first century. Russia and the Soviet Uni
In this book an international group of scholars examines China's acceptance and ultimate rejection of Soviet models and practices in economic, cultural, social, and other realms.
