Burlington Public Library

In this revelatory book, Timothy Snyder offers a groundbreaking investigation of Europe's killing fields and a sustained explanation of the motives and methods of both Hitler and Stalin. He anchors the history of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Terror in their time and place and provides a fresh account of the relationship between the two regime.

When the tyrannical ruler Stalin dies, his hapless inner circle scrambles to come up with the next evolution of the revolution, but it's clear everyone is really out for themselves. Proof that comedy, like politics, is all in the execution.

"Drawing on ambitious new research in European and U.S. archives, Stalin's War revolutionizes our understanding of World War II by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, was the Pacific war of 1941-1945 the direct result of Stalin's maneuverings, which he orchestrated to unleash...

"Hiroaki Kuromiya argues that the key to understanding Stalin lies in the fact that he lived solely for the purpose of shaping the body politic through the pursuit and exercise of power. Whatever private emotions Stalin had - whether affection, lust, hatred, or vindictiveness - he channelled to political ends and subsumed in his quest for power. Even ordering the deaths of people close to him evoked no special emotion because he deemed it necessary...

"Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Robert Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years." "Service describes in unprecedented...

The German Army begins to shatter before the advancing Soviet forces in 1944. Two Russian soldiers burrow into the crypt of a German church, where, clutched in the hands of a priest's skeleton, they discover a priceless icon last seen in the grasp of Rasputin, the mad monk who mesmerized the Romanovs. When news of the discovery reaches Moscow, Stalin calls upon his most trusted investigator, Inspector Pekkala, to unravel the secret of the icon's past....

Stalin's obsession with the missing gold of Tsar Nicholas II has finally found meaning. Russia stands at the brink of war with the mighty German army. It is broke, barely able to feed its people, much less fight a war against an enemy bent on its destruction. Stalin must find that gold, and so when a rumor comes out of the Gulag, and it proves to have credible elements, Stalin leaps into action.

"One of the most successful dictators of the twentieth century, Stalin believed that fashioning a better tomorrow was worth sacrificing the lives of millions today. He built a modern Russia on the corpses of millions of its citizens." "Stalin and Stalinism has established itself as one of the most popular textbooks for those who want to understand the Stalin phenomenon. This third edition provides up to date analysis of the Stalin era; a chapter analysing...