Entries in 02) Soviet Union (9)
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin
Author Information: Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Former Chair of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Honorary Air Commodore of 7006 Squadron (Intelligence) in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra. Professor Andrew is also co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history. He is currently a govenor of Norwich School.
In recent years he has collaborated with two KGB defectors, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, producing detailed histories of the KGB and its operations using material and documents provided by the two. In addition to The Sword and the Shield, he has also collaborated with Mitrokhin on The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005). (bios: Wikipedia)
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He collected notes over the course of 30 years that form the majority of revelatory information in the book collaborations he had with Andrew.
Book Description: Vasili Mitrokhin, a veteran K.G.B. officer, becomes progressively disenchanted with the Soviet system. In 1972, he is made responsible for checking and sealing some 300,000 K.G.B. files in a move from the Lubyanka headquarters to a new building. He uses this privileged access to take longhand notes of the most sensitive files that pass through his hands. Over the next 12 years he hides thousands of pages of these notes at his dacha. In 1992, Mitrokhin defects to Britain, bringing his cache with him. He makes the smuggled archive available to British intelligence and teams up with Christopher Andrew, a leading writer on Soviet intelligence, to produce this volume. (From this excellent NYT review)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter IIU.
Book Links
Dan McMinn
in 01) History, 02) Soviet Union
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The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine after World War II
by Yaroslav Bilinsky, published in 1964
Author Information: Professor emeritus of political science and international relations, University of Delaware. He has published several articles and chapters on Ukraine and the Soviet Union, as well as the books Endgame in NATO's Enlargement: The Baltic States and Ukraine and The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine After World War II. Bilinsky also served as president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States and was editor and major contributor to volume 14 of its Annals.
A graduate of Harvard College, Bilinsky was a special student in Soviet affairs at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received his doctorate from Princeton University. (from UD faculty listings)
Book Description: This book contains a lot of information on topics such as language use and identity, as well as accounts of what happened in the areas taken over by the USSR from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945 and the supression of the Greek Catholic church. This is an excellent book, may be hard to find. Somewhat dated, obviously, but Ukrainophiles will not care! Bilinsky is sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism. (Orange Ukraine reader WRY's review)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent reader and commenter WRY.
Book Links
Bilinsky reviews four other Soviet history books
Bilinsky's great article detailing why Holodomor should be considered genocide
TomFolio's Copy
Questia's e-book
Education of a True Believer
Released in 1954, in 1956 he was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of Communism, during the Khrushchev Thaw he restored his CPSU membership. In 1957-1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. After 1966, Kopelev actively participated in the human rights and dissident movement. In 1968 he was fired from his job and excluded from the CPSU and the Writers' Union for signing protest letters against the persecution of dissidents, publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and actively denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also protested Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers' Union. For his political activism and contacts with the West, he was deprived of the right to teach or be published in 1977. Kopelev died in 1997 in Cologne, Germany.
Dan McMinn
in 02) Soviet Union, 05) Biography
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Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
Author Information: The author, Miron Dolot (a pseudonym), is a language teacher in California, who as a 15-year-old boy, lived through Stalin's forced collectivization and the genocidal famine known as Holodomor. (From the Institute for Historical Review)
Book Description: The first book-length account of this mass murder to be written by one who lived through these terrible events. The author, Miron Dolot (a pseudonym), is a language teacher in California, who as a 15-year-old boy, lived through the winter of 1932-33 in a Ukrainian village that became "a ghost town" that looked "as if the Black Death had passed through."
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter WRY: "Account of the terror-famine. Gripping and horrific; an inexpensive paperback on Amazon.com."
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Dan McMinn
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Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
by
Author Information: Mykhailo Hrushevsky Research Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. Some of his other publications include: Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, New York 1988; The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk, New York 1981.
Book Description: Chronicles the final two decades in the history of the Soviet Union and presents a story that is often lost in the standard interpretations of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The key to understanding what was unimaginable in November 1989 yet became a reality in December 1991, Szporluk says, lies in understanding the relationship of Ukraine and Russia. (full description at the Hoover Institution)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by Leopolis: "Not exactly light reading, but a classic nonetheless".
Book Links
Review in the Ukrainian Weekly
Bio at the Harvard Davis Center
Some Recent Article at Eurozine
Amazon
Dan McMinn
in 01) History, 02) Soviet Union
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The Harvest of Sorrow
by Robert Conquest
Author Information: Robert Conquest is Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the East European Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of over twenty books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs.
Book Description: The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.
Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history. (source)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by Orange Ukraine reader Rowan: "The Harvest of Sorrow, by Robert Conquest, covers the terror-famine/Голодомор that occurred under Stalin in the 1930s; it's considered to be a companion to The Great Terror. Conquest doesn't pull any punches in his criticism of the Soviet regime."
Book Links
Guarded Recommendation by Peter Wilson at NY Review of Books
Conquest and Wiles cheeky tit-for-tat
Much Friendlier National Review review
Full Conquest Bio at Hoover Institute
Amazon
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The Ukrainians - Unexpected Nation
Second Edition
by Andrew Wilson
Author Information: Andrew Wilson is senior lecturer in Russian and Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London. He is also the author of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World.
Book Description: As in many postcommunist states, politics in Ukraine revolves around the issue of national identity. Ukrainian nationalists see themselves as one of the world’s oldest and most civilized peoples, as “older brothers” to the younger Russian culture.Yet Ukraine became independent only in 1991, and Ukrainians often feel like a minority in their own country, where Russian is still the main language heard on the streets of the capital, Kiev. This book is a comprehensive guide to modern Ukraine and to the versions of its past propagated by both Russians and Ukrainians. Andrew Wilson provides the most acute, informed, and up-to-date account available of the Ukrainians and their country.
Concentrating on the complex relation between Ukraine and Russia, the book begins with the myth of common origin in the early medieval era, then looks closely at the Ukrainian experience under the tsars and Soviets, the experience of minorities in the country, and the path to independence in 1991. Wilson also considers the history of Ukraine since 1991 and the continuing disputes over identity, culture, and religion. He examines the economic collapse under the first president, Leonid Kravchuk, and the attempts at recovery under his successor, Leonid Kuchma. Wilson explores the conflicts in Ukrainian society between the country’s Eurasian roots and its Western aspirations, as well as the significance of the presidential election of November 1999. (source)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by LEvko of Foreign Notes, along with Wilson's book on the Orange Revolution.
Book Links
University of Alberta Review
Yale Press Credits
Article List on FindArticles.com
Amazon
Dan McMinn
in 07) Politics, 01) History, 02) Soviet Union, 09) Culture and Society
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The Ukrainian Resurgence
by Bohdan Nahaylo et al
Author Information: Former director of Radio Liberty's Ukrainian Service, before which he worked at Amnesty International's headquarters in London from 1978 to 1982, where he served as the organization's chief researcher and spokesman on human rights violations in the Soviet Union. In 1984 he was hired by RL, first as a program specialist for the Ukrainian Service, then as a foreign policy analyst. Nahaylo was later named director of the Ukrainian Service.
In addition to his work at RL, Nahaylo is an established writer on Soviet and Ukrainian issues, contributing articles to the London Spectator, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many other publications. (source)
Book Description: Focused on the events in the latter period of the Soviet Union leading up to independence. Some discussion of the early postwar period as well.
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by LEvko of Foreign Notes.
Book Links
Dan McMinn
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Gulag: A History
by Anne Applebaum
Author Information: Columnist and member of the board at the Washington Post, frequent editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. Has contributed at many other publications.
Book Recognition: winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Book Description (from Powell's, linked below): "The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century."
Dan's Comments: I love almost everything this woman has to say about Eastern Europe and politics in the region.
Book Links
Information on the Book From Her Site
Review - Powell's Books
Review from NY Times
Purchase from Amazon
Dan McMinn
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