- Iosif Stalin was a past master of deception, disinformation, and camouflage, through which he gained supremacy in China and defeated imperialism on Chinese soil. -The editor is a leading scholar of the subject with a long track record of publications. - The volume is based on extensive archival research.

- Iosif Stalin was a past master of deception, disinformation, and camouflage, through which he gained supremacy in China and defeated imperialism on Chinese soil. -The editor is a leading scholar of the subject with a long track record of publications. - The volume is based on extensive archival research.

This profile looks at how Stalin, despite being regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world, achievieving divine-like status as a dictator. Through recently uncovered research material and Stalin's archives in Moscow, Kuromiya analyzes how and why Stalin was a rare, even unique, politician who literally lived by politics alone. He analyses how Stalin understood psychology campaigns well and how he used this understanding in his political reign and terror. Kuromiya provides a convincing, concise and up-to-date analysis of Stalin's political life.

This book discusses both the freedom of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland of the Donbas and the terror it has suffered because of that freedom. In a detailed panorama the book presents the tumultuous history of this steppe frontier land from its foundation as a modern coal and steel industrial centre to the post-Soviet present. Wild and unmanageable, this haven for fugitives posed a constant political challenge to Moscow and Kiev. In the light of new information gained from years of work in previously closed Soviet archives (including the former KGB archives in the Donbas), the book presents, from a regional perspective, new interpretations of critical events in modern Ukrainian and Russian history: the Russian Revolution, the famine of 1932-3, the Great Terror, World War II, collaboration, the Holocaust, and de-Stalinization.

This is the first detailed political and social history in English of Stalin's industrial revolution during the first Five-Year Plan. The diversion of vast resources into industrialization severely squeezed national consumption, imposing a heavy burden and sacrifice on the entire nation.

The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022. It began eight years earlier in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. In his new book, Jakob Hauter investigates the escalation of violence in the spring and summer of 2014. He demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the pre-2022 conflict was not a civil war. Ukraine has been fighting a Russian invasion since the armed conflict's very beginning. Hauter arrives at this conclusion based on a thorough review of the digital open source information (DOSI) available on the Internet. He argues that social science research needs theoretical and methodological innovation to operate in the abundant but murky information environment surrounding the Donbas War and other conflicts of the social media age. To address this challenge, he develops an escalation sequence model which divides the formative phase of the Donbas War into six critical junctures. He then combines the social science methodology of process tracing with DOSI analysis to investigate the causes of these critical junctures. For each juncture, Hauter assesses the available evidence of domestic causes and Russian interference, reaching the conclusion that, in most cases, there is convincing evidence that Russian involvement was the primary cause of armed escalation.

A mostrous tyrant, Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union was one of the bloodiest episodes in modern history. This profile looks at how, regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, Stalin managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world and achieve divine-like status as a dictator.

• The author has worked on Stalin's rule for nearly 30 years.
• This title complements the other titles in the Profiles in Power series.
• The complementary title in the Seminar Studies series Stalin and Stalinism sold over 5000 copies worldwide.
• There are over 300 Russian studies courses in the UK.
• Takes an unusual angle-fuses his politics with psychology.

Anne Konrad's Red Quarter Moon is the gripping account of her search for family members lost and disappeared within the Soviet Union. Konrad's ancestors, Mennonites, had settled the Ukrainian steppes in the late 1790s. An ethno-religious minority, they became special objects of Soviet persecution. Though her parents fled in 1929, many relatives remained in the USSR. Konrad's search for these missing extended family members took place over twenty years and five continents - on muddy roads, lonesome steppes, and in old letters, documents, or secret police archives. Her story emerges as both haunting and inspiring, filled with dramatically different accounts from survivors now scattered across the world. She aligns the voices of her subjects chronologically against the backdrop of Soviet policy, intertwining the historical context of the Terror Years with her own personal quest. Red Quarter Moon is an enthralling journey into the past that offers a unique look at the lives of ordinary families and individuals in the USSR.

Even the best books on international history are ignorant of the secret war against the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union waged jointly by the Caucasian peoples and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores and exposes previously unknown passages in Eurasian international history. Although the secret war ultimately failed in liberating the Caucasian peoples, the lessons of this Eurasian collaboration were not lost on the United States, which after World War II confronted the Soviet Union just as Japan had earlier. Washington copied the strategy of its former enemy and developed it further. The Eurasian triangle of Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan is a forgotten history of cardinal importance that, stretching from the Russo-Japanese War to World War II, influenced Western Cold War strategies. This book is also the story of a friendship rare in international politics between two unlikely partners unspoiled by political vicissitudes.

The voices of dozens of innocent victims, silenced during Stalin's Terror and since forgotten, can yet be heard in secret police archives Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev. Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested, executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests, beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners, homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into the enigma of Stalinist terror.

This book discusses both the freedom of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland of the Donbas and the terror it has suffered because of that freedom. In a detailed panorama the book presents the tumultuous history of this steppe frontier land from its foundation as a modern coal and steel industrial centre to the post-Soviet present. Wild and unmanageable, this haven for fugitives posed a constant political challenge to Moscow and Kiev. In the light of new information gained from years of work in previously closed Soviet archives (including the former KGB archives in the Donbas), the book presents, from a regional perspective, new interpretations of critical events in modern Ukrainian and Russian history: the Russian Revolution, the famine of 1932-3, the Great Terror, World War II, collaboration, the Holocaust, and de-Stalinization.

Conscience on Trial reveals the startling story, kept secret for sixty years, of ordinary citizens caught up in the elaborate machinery of political terror in Stalinist Ukraine. In 1952, fourteen poor, barely literate Seventh-Day Adventists living on the margins of Soviet society were clandestinely tried for allegedly advocating pacifism and adhering to the Saturday Sabbath. The only written records of this trial were sealed in the KGB archives in Kiev, and this harrowing episode has until now been unknown even within the Ukraine.

Hiroaki Kuromiya has carefully analyzed these newly discovered documents, and in doing so, reveals a fascinating picture of private life and religious belief under the atheist Stalinist regime. Kuromiya convincingly elucidates the mechanism of the Soviet secret police and explores the minds of non-conformist believers -precursors to the revival of dissidence after Stalin's death in 1953.