Historical Biographies Russia

The Sinner and the Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story - and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of those closest to him, and literary banishment.

В "Записках" имеются ценные сведения о времени царствования Петра III, о воцарении Екатерины II и роли Дашковой в перевороте, о полной интриг придворной жизни, подробности десятилетнего скитания княгини по Европе, зарисовки московского быта середины XVIII в., характеристики известных русских и европейских деятелей, с которыми автора мемуаров сталкивала судьба.

A century after his death, Grigory Rasputin remains fascinating: the Russian peasant with hypnotic eyes who befriended Tsar Nicholas II and helped destroy the Russian Empire, but the truth about his strange life has never fully been told. Written by the world's leading authority on Rasputin, this new biography draws on previously closed Soviet archives to offer new information on Rasputin's relationship with Empress Alexandra, sensational revelations about his sexual conquests, a re-examination of his murder, and more.

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent. Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs, or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear.

Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland.

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg, and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.

Guy Burgess is the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - the group of British men recruited to pass intelligence to the Soviets during World War Two and the Cold War. Burgess' story takes us from his student days in 1930s Cambridge, where he was first approached by Soviet scouts, through his daring infiltration of the BBC and the British government to his final escape to Russia and lonely, tragic-comic exile there.

At last a book about the so-called "Mad Monk" of Imperial Russia that lays to rest the myths and reveals the truth about one of the most controversial characters in human history while exploring the impact his murder had on a dynasty, a people, and a country.

История Петра I — незавершенный исторический труд гениального российского поэта, "солнца русской поэзии", драматурга и прозаика А. С. Пушкина (1799–1837). В нем представлена хронология событий времени правления Петра Великого. Пушкин планировал на ее основании написать Историю Петра I максимум через год. Параллельно он трудился над "Историей Пугачева" и "Капитанской дочкой". Работу прервала дуэль… Николай I запретил печатать рукопись. Причина — автор с большой для того времени смелостью позволил себе рассказать не только о положительных, но и отрицательных качествах императора.

From the court of Imperial Russia to Foxley Manor in Herefordshire, the story begins with the First World War. Part One takes the listener through the Russian Revolution to the formation of the Second Polish Republic and the Polish-Bolshevik war. Part Two begins at the outset to World War Two with the German invasion on September 1st, 1939, and the subsequent invasion by the Soviet Union on the 17th of the same month. The listener is taken through the early months of soviet occupation and then on to the first wave of Polish deportations to Siberia.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as coleader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the 20th century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York.

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic single event of the Cold War and a major turning point in history. Though it ended unsuccessfully, the spontaneous uprising of Hungarians against their country's Communist party and the Soviet occupation forces in the wake of Stalin's death demonstrated to the world at large the failure of Communism.

He was Grand Duke Michael, handsome brother of Tsar Nicholas II. She was the beautiful twice-divorced daughter of a Moscow lawyer. Their scandalous love affair and their runaway marriage to Vienna in 1912, trailed by the Tsar's secret police, caused uproar in Russia and was the talk of all Europe.

It was history's most successful political partnership - as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin - wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented - was the love of her life and her co-ruler. Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, defining the Russian empire to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine her young male favourites.

The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.

Quando il giovane Teodor finisce la scuola media, suo padre gli fa un regalo che lui desiderava tanto. Era una radiolina a transistor che porterà con sé dappertutto. Un giorno, mentre era con le loro mucche al pascolo, scopre il suono di una bellissima lingua: l’italiano. Da quel momento la sua vita comincia a cambiare. Mentre studia l’italiano all’Università di Bucarest, incontra la donna dei suoi sogni, Ariella, che lo salverà dal comunismo.

What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands? With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents, this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies.

Dopo il successo di Putin e Ucraina, Nicolai Lilin ci racconta l'enigma Rasputin, una delle figure più affascinanti, controverse e misteriose della storia russa. Rasputin è stato tante cose: un mistico rozzo ma con grande seguito, un guaritore, un seduttore, un visionario dai tratti profetici, un manipolatore di anime morte, per dirla con Gogol, un abile e furbo stratega. Un "impostore" dalla vita piena di contraddizioni, un arrampicatore sociale, un genio che sapeva parlare al cuore delle persone semplici e non solo. Aveva ai suoi piedi la dinastia dei Romanov.

Книга Натальи Громовой Смерти не было и нет: Ольга Берггольц — опыт прочтения судьбы поэта, ставшего символом блокадного Ленинграда. Ольга Берггольц (1910–1975) — поэт, журналист, драматург; лауреат Сталинской премии; "блокадная Мадонна", автор "Февральского дневника", "Ленинградской поэмы" и автобиографической книги "Дневные звёзды". Берггольц была искренне предана советской власти, но не могла не видеть страшную действительность.