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."

A shocking insight into the brutalities faced by ordinary soldiers and the atrocities committed in the name of survival. Dispassionately we stared at the bloody scene. It had become an everyday sight. The 27th Penal Regiment care nothing for Hitler's war. They fight only to stay alive. But then they uncover the Soviet Army's biggest secret. A Russian commissar has hidden 30 million dollars of gold somewhere behind enemy lines. In a madcap scheme, Porta brokers a deal with the commissar: free passage for the Russians in return for a share of the gold. To find it, Sven and his comrades must be prepared to lie, steal and go behind the lines of the deadly Russian army...

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.

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?