Over 500,000 Jews fought under the Soviet banner in World War Two, of which an approximate 40 percent gave their lives - the highest percentage of all the nations of the Soviet Union and among all the other nations that fought in the Second World War. Dr. Arad now sets the record straight on the immense contribution of Soviet Jewry in the battle against Nazi Germany, a part of history long concealed by the Soviet government. After outlining the military progress of the war, the book documents the contributions of Soviet Jewry on the battlefronts and in the weapons development industry, in the ghetto undergrounds and in partisan warfare. In addition, the book records the Soviet government's deliberate attempts to downplay the Jewish effort and the anti-Semitism that Jewish soldiers and partisan groups suffered at the hands of the Soviet establishment, even while giving their lives for their country. Replete with the stories of individual heroes of all ranks, the book pays a debt of gratitude to those who paid the ultimate price to achieve our victory.

The majority of European Yiddish speaking Jews was murdered by Hitler's National Socialists, their cultural realm was destroyed. After the war, the Communist regimes suppressed Jewish culture, but despite emigration of Jewish survivors, small Jewish communities continued to exist and made efforts to revive their culture in most of the Communist countries. Jewish organizations, clubs, cultural societies and theatres were founded, and a great number of Yiddish books, newspapers and periodicals were printed, despite political pressure, hostility and persecution. The cultural activity which developed "under the red banner" cannot of course be compared to the immense impact the Yiddish culture experienced before the Second World War but it was an important phenomenon in Jewish history which remained uninvestigated for a long time and has not been described in a proper way until today. This volume of seventeen essays is a collection of papers delivered by scholars from the USA, Sweden, Israel, Germany and Poland at the conference on Yiddish Culture in the Communists Countries in the Postwar Era which was organized at the Jagiellonian University Cracow in cooperation with the University of Potsdam in November 2006.

This fascinating documentary history is the first English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

This concise look at the life of Trotsky begins with his first meeting with Lenin in exile, in 1902, and ends with Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, in 1940. Ideological and practical conflicts with the other major personalities of the Russian revolution are detailed, and a brief descriptive bibliography of Trotsky's key writings is included.

Supported by evidence released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book follows the career of the Red Army from its birth in 1918 as the vanguard of world revolution to its affiliation in 1941 with 'the citadel of capitalism', the USA.

A Good Morning America Buzz Pick The dazzling historical novel about a legendary Chinese pirate queen, her fight to save her fleet from the forces allied against them, and the dangerous price of power. As Recommended By The TODAY Show * Washington Post * Goodreads * LitHub * Real Simple * Time * Popsugar * HuffPost * Los Angeles Times * Ms. Magazine * Book Riot * Elle.com * The Rumpus * Tor.com * Polygon * Debutiful * Electric Lit * Shondaland * When Shek Yeung sees a Portuguese sailor slay her husband, a feared pirate, she knows she must act swiftly or die. Instead of mourning, Shek Yeung launches a new plan: immediately marrying her husband's second-in-command, and agreeing to bear him a son and heir, in order to retain power over her half of the fleet. But as Shek Yeung vies for control over the army she knows she was born to lead, larger threats loom. The Chinese Emperor has charged a brutal, crafty nobleman with ridding the South China Seas of pirates, and the Europeans-tired of losing ships, men, and money to Shek Yeung's alliance-have new plans for the area. Even worse, Shek Yeung's cutthroat retributions create problems all their own. As Shek Yeung navigates new motherhood and the crises of leadership, she must decide how long she is willing to fight, and at what price, or risk losing her fleet, her new family, and even her life. A book of salt and grit, blood and sweat, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea is an unmissable portrait of a woman who leads with the courage and ruthlessness of our darkest and most beloved heroes.

This Red Banner Reader follows Lyndon Larouche from his origins in the Socialist Worker's Party to his interlude with the National Caucus of Labor committees, and on to the flood of organizations, fronts, committees, parties, caucuses and whatever that Larouche has generated since his prison release in 1994. It notes Larouche's psychotic collapse and wildly cultist behavior of the 1970's, and traces the links, not without consequence, between cult politics and "real" politics in the worlds of Reagan and Bush.

This book is acknowledged as the only work dealing exclusively with the identification and description of international gallantry awards, past and present. The multitude of illustrations allows the reader to readily identify those awards most likely to be encountered. The work embraces forty-three countries and describes 270 decorations together with their various classes. A ten page ribbon chart shows 216 different world gallantry ribbons all in full colour.

R. Craig Nation provides the first post-Cold War history of the Soviets' seventy-five-year struggle to maintain an effective national security policy in a hostile world without altogether abandoning the commitment to their original internationalist ideals.