Historians have long debated the factors most responsible for the fundamental transformation of Soviet social and political structures which occurred between the October Revolution and the emergence of the Stalinist police state. With this social and institutional history of the Red Army, Mark von Hagen provides a valuable new perspective on this critical first decade in the history of the Soviet Union.

Military coups have plagued many countries around the world, but Russia, despite its tumultuous history, has not experienced a successful military coup in over two centuries. In a series of detailed case studies, Brian Taylor explains the political role of the Russian military. Drawing on a wealth of new material, including archives and interviews, Taylor discusses every case of actual or potential military intervention in Russian politics from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. Taylor analyzes in particular detail the army's behavior during the political revolutions that marked the beginning and end of the twentieth century, two periods when the military was, uncharacteristically, heavily involved in domestic politics. He argues that a common thread unites the late-Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian army: an organizational culture that believes that intervention against the country's political leadership - whether tsar, general secretary, or president - is fundamentally illegitimate.

A powerful, groundbreaking narrative of the ordinary Russian soldier's experience of the worst war in history, based on newly revealed sources Of the thirty million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan -- as the ordinary Russian soldier was called -- remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Soviet Union Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure. A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

Born in 1879, Eugen Varga was an immensely prolific writer who would become the most prominent Marxist economist in the Soviet Union – ‘Stalin’s economist’. This volume contains a wide and representative selection of his works written over a period of almost 40 years.

Under Joseph Stalin's iron-fisted rule, the Soviet state tried to forge an army that would be both a shining example of proletarian power and an indomitable deterrent against fascist aggression. In reality, the author reveals, Stalin's grand military experiment failed miserably on both counts before it was finally rescued within the crucible of war. Instead, the author portrays an army at war with itself, focusing on the daily lives of soldiers, officers, and civilians.

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.

Overy gives readers an absorbing study of Hitler and Stalin, ranging from their private and public selves, their ascents to power and consolidation of absolute rule, to their waging of massive war and creation of far-flung empires of camps and prisons.