San Antonio College Library

A biographical account of the Soviet Union's infamous dictator from his childhood in Georgia to his seminary studies and domination of the Soviet people.

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting...

"In the first full comparative history of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, Overy clearly conveys the workings of these two bloody regimes. His portraits of Hitler and Stalin take in their private and public selves, their ascents to power, and their consolidation of absolute rule. He shows us the use of terror in each system; the ways in which the party dominated politics, culture, and the economy in each; and how each waged total war. He details...

The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. It was "hailed as the only scrupulous, nonpartisan, and adequate book on the subject". And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the Soviet Union, where it is now considered the authority on the period, and has been serialized in Neva, one of their leading periodicals. Of course, when the author wrote the...

Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether...