The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries
Author: Gabriel Gorodetsky
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 633
Release: 2015-09-24
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300217331

The terror and purges of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain’s drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, Churchill’s rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.

The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries
Author: Ivan Mikhaĭlovich Maĭskiĭ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 633
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300180675

Highlights of the extraordinary wartime diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Churchill's rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.

The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries
Author: Ivan Maisky
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300221701

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Churchill's rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front.

The Complete Maisky Diaries

The Complete Maisky Diaries
Author: Ivan Mikhaĭlovich Maĭskiĭ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 1669
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Ambassadors
ISBN: 0300117825

The complete diaries that Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London, kept between 1932 and 1943 Confiscated by Soviet authorities in the 1950s, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the USSR's ambassador to Great Britain from 1932 to 1943, have been unearthed, annotated, and edited for publication in a three-volume set that Niall Ferguson predicts "will stand as one of the great achievements of twenty-first century historical scholarship." Maisky's revelations illuminate Soviet foreign policy in the years prior to and during World War II, providing fascinating perspectives on London's political life and climate, key figures and events, and the Kremlin rivalries that influenced Soviet policy. Volume 1: The Rise of Hitler and the Gathering Clouds of War, 1932-1938 Volume 2: The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Battle of Britain, 1939-1940 Volume 3: The German Invasion of Russia and the Forging of the Grand Alliance, 1941-19

Yalta

Yalta
Author: S. M. Plokhy
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2010-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101189924

A major new history of the eight days in February 1945 when FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided the fate of the world Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace. The ink wasn't dry when the recriminations began. The conservatives who hated Roosevelt's New Deal accused him of selling out. Was he too sick? Did he give too much in exchange for Stalin's promise to join the war against Japan? Could he have done better in Eastern Europe? Both Left and Right would blame Yalta for beginning the Cold War. Plokhy's conclusions, based on unprecedented archival research, are surprising. He goes against conventional wisdom-cemented during the Cold War- and argues that an ailing Roosevelt did better than we think. Much has been made of FDR's handling of the Depression; here we see him as wartime chief. Yalta is authoritative, original, vividly- written narrative history, and is sure to appeal to fans of Margaret MacMillan's bestseller Paris 1919.

The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949

The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949
Author: Georgi Dimitrov
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300133855

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian and Soviet official, one of the most prominent leaders of the international Communist movement and a trusted member of Stalin’s inner circle. Accused by the Nazis of setting the Reichstag fire in 1933, he successfully defended himself at the Leipzig Trial and thereby became an international symbol of resistance to Nazism. Stalin appointed him head of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935, and he held this position until the Comintern’s dissolution in 1943. After the end of the Second World War, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria and became its first Communist premier. During the years between 1933 and his death in 1949, Dimitrov kept a diary that described his tumultuous career and revealed much about the inner working of the international Communist organizations, the opinions and actions of the Soviet leadership, and the Soviet Union’s role in shaping the postwar Eastern Europe. This important document, edited and introduced by renowned historian Ivo Banac, is now available for the first time in English. It is an essential source for information about international Communism, Stalin and Soviet policy, and the origins of the Cold War.

Salvaged Pages

Salvaged Pages
Author: Alexandra Zapruder
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2015-08-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300210833

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth “Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”—Publishers Weekly “These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights.”—Elie Wiesel This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.

The Kremlin Letters

The Kremlin Letters
Author: David Reynolds
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300241046

A penetrating account of the dynamics of World War II’s Grand Alliance through the messages exchanged by the "Big Three" Stalin exchanged more than six hundred messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume—the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration—the messages are published and also analyzed within their historical context. Ranging from intimate personal greetings to weighty salvos about diplomacy and strategy, this book offers fascinating new revelations of the political machinations and human stories behind the Allied triumvirate. Edited and narrated by two of the world’s leading scholars on World War II diplomacy and based on a decade of research in British, American, and newly available Russian archives, this crucial addition to wartime scholarship illuminates an alliance that really worked while exposing its fractious limits and the issues and egos that set the stage for the Cold War that followed.

Churchill's Trial

Churchill's Trial
Author: Larry P. Arnn
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595555315

No statesman shaped the twentieth century more than Winston Churchill. To know the full Churchill is to understand the combination of boldness and caution, of assertiveness and humility, that defines statesmanship at its best. With fresh perspective and insights based on decades of studying and teaching Churchill, Larry P. Arnn explores the greatest challenges faced by Churchill over the course of his extraordinary career, both in war and peace—and always in the context of Churchill’s abiding dedication to constitutionalism. Churchill’s Trial is organized around the three great challenges to liberty that Churchill faced: Nazism, Soviet communism, and his own nation’s slide toward socialism. Churchill knew that stable free government, long enduring, is rare, and hangs upon the balance of many factors ever at risk. Combining meticulous scholarship with an engrossing narrative arc, this book holds timely lessons for today. Arnn says, “Churchill’s trial is also our trial. We have a better chance to meet it because we had in him a true statesman.” In a scholarly, timely, and highly erudite way, Larry Arnn puts the case for Winston Churchill continuing to be seen as statesman from whom the modern world can learn important lessons. In an age when social and political morality seems all too often to be in a state of flux, Churchill’s Trial reminds us of the enduring power of the concepts of courage, duty, and honor. --Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Napoleon: A Life and The Storm of War Larry Arnn has spent a lifetime studying the life and accomplishments of Winston Churchill. In his lively Churchill’s Trial, Arnn artfully reminds us that Churchill was not just the greatest statesman and war leader of the twentieth century, but also a pragmatic and circumspect thinker whose wisdom resonates on every issue of our times. --Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University In absorbing, gracefully written historical and biographical narration, Larry Arnn shows that Churchill, often perceived as inconsistent and opportunistic, was in fact philosophically rigorous and consistent at levels of organization higher and deeper than his detractors are capable of imagining. In Churchill’s Trial Arnn has rendered great service not only to an incomparable statesman but to us, for the magnificent currents that carried Churchill through his trials are as admirable, useful, and powerful in our times as they were in his. --Mark Helprin, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and In Sunlight and in Shadow Churchill’s Trial, a masterpiece of political philosophy and practical statesmanship, is the one book on Winston Churchill that every undergraduate, every graduate student, every professional historian, and every member of the literate general public should read on this greatest statesman of the twentieth century. The book is beautifully written, divided into three parts–war, empire, peace–and thus covers the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill and the topics which define the era of his statesmanship. --Lewis E. Lehrman, cofounder of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and distinguished director of the Abraham Lincoln Association