Ocean State Libraries

In 1929, Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive "revolution from above," a decade-long effort to amass military-industrial power for a new war. He forced twenty-five million peasant families into state-run collectives and transformed the Communist Party into a servile instrument. In 1939, he concluded the pact with Hitler that enabled him to grasp at Eastern Europe while Hitler made war in the West. This book forms the second volume of Robert...

Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University. His books include Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe and The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949. The chilling story of Stalin's crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed....

It is 1937, and Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself on an airplane bound for Odessa after the suspicious suicide of a loyal young party member who supposedly had an illicit relationship with the party director. His instructions are to determine if her suicide was actually a cover-up for murder, and if so, to find her killer. Korolev finds help from several quarters, but none of them can make up for the one important fact of his case which he cannot...