Deployed to the prison planet of Furia Penitens to quell a violent uprising, the 77th Vostroyan Firstborn regiment of the Imperial Guard find themselves in a precarious position. The rebels are in a fortified prison-hive, all but impenetrable. A disgrace suffered by their forebears haunts them. And they hate their new commissar. Can Commissar Flint bring them to victory and restore their reputation, or with the 77th fail again?

A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."

Forfatteren forklarer udviklingen af den sovjetrussiske dominans i Mellemøsten lige fra Ægyptens "tjekkiske våbenhandel" i 1955, som åbnede vejen for at Sovjet trådte i stedet for Storbritannien og USA som den toneangivende magt i området og til at russerne i 1972 beordredes til at forlade Ægypten.

This innovative study offers the first-ever comparison of the military roles played by commissars, political officers, and chaplains in military settings ranging from the armies of Cromwell, the Jacobins, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the United States. Despite the stark differences in the political systems of the countries of these disparate armed forces, Dale R. Herspring argues that there are certain critical functions that must be fulfilled in every military, regardless of its ideological orientation. Most vital are motivation, morale boosting, and political socialization. In addition, Herspring's comparative historical analysis decisively demonstrates that the roles of commissars, political officers, and chaplains alike have evolved in ways that are crucial yet rarely understood either by policymakers or scholars.

Traces the power struggle between the Bolsheviks and the West at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, offering insight into the roles of diplomats, reporters, dissidents and others who impacted foreign policy throughout subsequent decades.

After the 1917 revolution, Russia is teetering on the brink of civil war. When the Soviet head of state Lenin is shot by an assassin, CHEKA agent Anna Sokolova is tasked with hunting down British spy Sidney Reilly who set in motion an audacious plot to alter the course of Russian history. Meanwhile, in New York, an American WWI veteran William Arden sets sail on a mission to Russia that is not what it appears to be, and the true purpose of which even he may not yet fully comprehend. Their paths cross in Petrograd, and they become unlikely allies. As a bloody conflict ignites throughout Russia, Anna’s loyalties are tested. Can she save her country and not lose herself in the process? Based on historical events, Commissar is a gripping spy thriller about the little-known period of US and British intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918-22).

For six decade the Soviet system has been immune to military rebellion and takeover, which often characterizes modernizing countries. How can we explain the stability of Soviet military politics, asks Timothy Colton in his compelling interpretation of civil-military relations in the Soviet Union. Hitherto most western scholars have posited a basic dichotomy of interests between the Soviet army and the Communist party. They view the two institutions as conflictprone, with civilian supremacy depending primarily upon the party's control of officers through its organs within the military establishment. Colton challenges this thesis and argues that the military party organs have come to possess few of the attributes of an effective controlling device, and that the commissars and their heirs have operated as allies rather than adversaries of the military commanders. In explaining the extraordinary stability in army-party relations in terms of overlapping interests rather than controlling mechanisms, Colton offers a major case study and a new model to students of comparative military politics.

Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.