Russia World War

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. Fallout dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didn't share their knowledge with the Americans, who in turn deceived the British about the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated their plans for the bomb.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany.

"We are provincials no longer," said Woodrow Wilson on March 5, 1917, at his second inaugural. He spoke on the eve of America's entrance into World War I, as Russia teetered between autocracy and democracy. Just 10 days after Wilson's declaration, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, ending a three-centuries-long dynasty and ushering in the false dawn of a democratic Russia. Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany a few short weeks later.

The Unconventional Lens: Revisiting the 1941-1945 Russo-German War The years 1941 to 1945 witnessed one of the most devastating conflicts in human history, a war that would reshape the destiny of the European theater during World War II. Imagine, if you will, the clock turning back to June 1941. In one corner, stood the most technologically advanced nation in Europe, while in the other, lay the largest but economically struggling nation on the continent. Adolf Hitler, the formidable dictator of Germany, expected an easy victory, envisioning swift conquest of the Soviet Union within mere ...

A collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv - an unmatched record of a brilliant, distinguished writer reporting from throughout his war-ravaged country. Andrey Kurkov - "Ukraine's greatest novelist," in the words of Giles Harvey in the New York Times - "is fighting for his country."

Partly out of dire circumstances and partly from a cultural worldview, it was the Soviet Union who first pressed female pilots into direct combat when Hitler invaded Russia. Ahead of Stalingrad, Stalin publicly declared that “women should be given the right to fly and fight for their country.” As a result, more than 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during the war years.

In 1979, alarmed Soviet leaders watched the growing civil war in Afghanistan with trepidation. Russia’s neighbor had been a close ally for many years, acting as a buffer between Russia and British India, proving vital in the “Great Game” between the two empires. Various coups had, by this point, led to a Moscow-friendly government in Kabul, but things were not playing out as the Soviets had hoped.

During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane thirty-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin’s newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. In the back streets of Petrograd and Moscow, in nightclubs, in cells beneath Lubianka prison, the conspirators engaged in a deadly game of wits for the highest possible stakes.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

In 1944, there was still no united Yugoslavia, the Axis controlled most of Europe, and D-Day was only in the planning stages. In the Balkans, Tito was a beacon of hope against the advancing Nazis. He led a force of resistance fighters that bedeviled the occupying German army throughout Slavic regions and empowered people's committees to act as local government in all liberated areas. For observers on the political left, Tito seemed uniquely poised to unite the East and West against fascism - once and for all.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, some one million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile. Motivated by opposition to the war, by guilt for their country’s deeds, by personal hatred for the Czar-like Putin, and by a vision of a better Russia, shorn of autocracy, the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin’s rule. Paul Starobin travels to meet with exiles and has conversations with prominent figures throughout Europe and America, as he takes measure of this rebellion—and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich, read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman. What did it mean to grow up in the Soviet Union during the Second World War? In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich started interviewing people who had experienced war as children, the generation that survived and had to live with the trauma that would forever change the course of the Russian nation.

The Arctic convoys run to the ports of Northern Russia from 1941 to 1945 combined the man-made and maritime horrors of the Battle of the Atlantic with the unforgiving ferocity of one of the most inhospitable of the world's climates. Maintaining that lifeline through the waters of the Arctic circle was essential to the development and maintenance of the Anglo-American alliance with the Soviet Union. With the massive campaign on Germany's Eastern front hanging in the balance in 1941 to 1942, the German Armed Forces deployed significant numbers of submarines, bomber and torpedo aircraft, ...

The sacrifices that enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 are sacrosanct. The foundation of their eventual victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. For Germany, the catastrophic defeat was the beginning of their eventual demise that would see the Red Army two years later flying their flag of victory above the Reichstag. Stalingrad is seen as the pivotal battle of the Second World War.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest sieges in history and it inflicted some of the worst civilian casualties of World War Two. When Hitler declared his intention to obliterate the key city of Leningrad on 22 September 1941, he could not have foreseen the grim determination of its citizens. Over the course of 900 days, the city resisted the Germans pounding at its gates.

1941: almost four million Nazi troops marched on Moscow, with a brutal scorched-earth tactic that saw millions of Soviet citizens massacred. A level of brutality only paralleled after the Soviet's triumphed at Stalingrad and took mindless revenge as they marched back into Berlin. Beginning with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, to the appalling circumstances of the Fall of Berlin in April 1945 and told from the perspective of the people of Russia and Eastern Europe, Barbarossa is a heartrending story of tragedy, suffering and heroism.

In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Despite Stalin's obvious reservations about the presence of foreign troops in Russia, he was persuaded, and in early 1944 and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated as B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region in today's Ukraine.

From learning about Lenin and the Red Army to discovering how and why Stalin rose to power and his eventual leadership during World War II and beyond, this book provides an essential look at one of the most important periods in Russian history. Listeners will be enthralled by this fascinating tale that delves into every aspect of Russia's struggles and successes.

In Fire and Lamentations, Janvier T. Chando offers readers succinct accounts of the lives, ideals, and untimely deaths of the towering political figures whose assassinations shocked American society, triggered domestic political transformations, and fundamentally altered America foreign policy, so that the United States of America lost its innocence forever. Spanning a century, the shooting deaths of four United States Presidents — Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, James A. Garfield, and John F. Kennedy — and the country’s soul and the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. brought...

Take Me to Your President is another brilliant political satire by the author of The Mouse That Roared. After chasing his dog (who was chasing a rabbit), a simple farmer from a small village in England finds himself inexplicably on board a top-secret intergalactic missile. Before he can sort it out, the farmer finds himself touching down in the United States of America where he is mistaken for a Martian. And now it’s up to him to bring world peace. “Once again Leonard Wibberley—author of The Mouse That Roared—has conjured a unique sort of comedy from a blend of fantasy, blandly ...