In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

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.

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."

An impassioned firsthand account of the Russian Revolution An American journalist and revolutionary writer, John Reed became a close friend of Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 revolution in Russia. Ten Days That Shook the World is Reeds extraordinary record of that event. 'It flashed upon me suddenly: they were going to shoot me!' This electrifying eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, written by an American journalist in St Petersburg as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, is an unsurpassed record of history in the making. John Reed (1887-1920) American journalist and poet-adventurer whose colorful life as a revolutionary writer ended in Russia but made him the hero of a generation of radical intellectuals. Reed became a close friend of V.I. Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 October revolution. He recorded this historical event in his best-known book TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1920). Reed is buried with other Bolshevik heroes beside the Kremlin wall.

The Spanish Civil War served as an ideological and physical battleground for visionary Americans wishing to combat the spread of fascism. Harry Fisher was one such idealist who became a solider in the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American contingent of international volunteers dedicated to defeating Franco's forces. ø Fisher was one of the earliest American volunteers and one of the few to participate in all the major battles. Under a barrage of shells, bombs, and bullets for eighteen months, he lost his illusions about war's efficacy in solving political issues. To this day a despondence often overwhelms him when he recalls a family photograph he found jutting from the pocket of a slain fascist soldier. His involvement taught him that up close, the dead, whether fascist soldiers or his own fallen comrades, looked alike. ø This is a war story, simply told. Yet it is also a complex story about a young man testing his ideology in the harsh realities of battle.

Cabral is among the great figures of our time — these texts provide the evidence.

Comrades is a new history of the mentalities of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, based on recently discovered intelligence records from the American interrogation camp Fort Hunt near Washington, where German prisoners of war were interned and secretly listened in on during the Second World War. US Military Intelligence captured tens of thousands of open conversations between Wehrmacht soldiers and recorded them in verbatim transcripts. The resulting collection offers new insights into the thinking and worldviews of ordinary members of Hitler's armed forces - their attitudes towards National Socialism and the 'Führer', their views of the war and their experiences during the fighting, and their knowledge of and participation in war crimes and the Holocaust. The accompanying biographical information reveals how their mindsets were connected to their individual paths through the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht, and the war. The book offers a nuanced and realistic account of life in the Wehrmacht, based on unique source material, which allows us to see the Second World War through the eyes of the protagonists.

Tukhachevsky - Trotsky Collaboration

A Girl's Echoing Voice in the Zimbabwe Chimurenga Guerrilla Girl is a historical novel, set amidst the backdrop of the struggle for liberation of Zimbabwe. Whilst the names of the characters are fictitious, the majority of events and places are true. The main protagonist in this novel is also the narrator; a woman fully involved as a trained fighter in most of the events. The story depicts an account of how the women were fully involved in the liberation struggle. The other element to the story is how the women of Zimbabwe had to fight the battle on two fronts, against two kinds of enemy: the struggle against the common enemy, the colonialist, and the struggle against male chauvinism. Most of the African men in Zimbabwe found it hard to accept their women as fighters, let alone armed guerrillas. So women had a hard time trying to assert themselves as capable and trusted liberators. Women were always in extreme danger of being put down by their male counterparts. About the author Helen is a retired college principal lecturer. She grew up in Colonial Zimbabwe, Southern Rhodesia. Initially she trained as a nurse but later worked as a tailor in a garment factory. Helen then joined the African Trade Union Congress and became involved in trade unionism which eventually led to involvement with national political groups. Through her political activities, she met her future husband. Because of their political views they ended up in exile. During this period, they lived in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), USA, UK and Kenya. Helen and her husband remained involved in party politics during their time in exile. They returned to Zimbabwe at independence in 1980. As a black woman, Helen has known extreme poverty and discrimination. She has a passion for the emancipation and advancement of women.