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Author : William Taubman
Release : 2003
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 445/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Khrushchev by : William Taubman
Download or read book Khrushchev written by William Taubman. This book was released on 2003. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the life story of twentieth-century Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, featuring information from previously inaccessible Russian and Ukrainian archives.
Author : Prof. William Taubman
Release : 2017-10-05
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 041/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Khrushchev by : Prof. William Taubman
Download or read book Khrushchev written by Prof. William Taubman. This book was released on 2017-10-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Taubman delivers a political and biographical tour de force, something approaching a definitive work' Simon Sebag-Montefiore, The Financial Times 'Outstanding, superbly gripping and surely definitive' Daily Telegraph 'Taubman has produced an utterly convincing picture of the contradictory Khrushchev, from his peasant origins and meteoric rise, through purges, politburo plotting, brave de-Stalinisation and the erratic, blustering, bull-in-a-china-shop style that eventually alienated his colleagues and took the world to the brink of Armageddon over Cuba' SUNDAY TIMES 'Unlikely to be surpassed any time soon either in richness or complexity . . . [A] monumental biography' New York Times William Taubman's brilliant biography of one of the key figures of the Soviet Union is a study in contrasts -- how the boy from a peasant background rose to the heights of power; how a single-minded, ambitious political player survived twenty years under Stalin; how he opened up to the West after Stalin's death and yet brought the world close to oblivion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a man constantly torn between benevolence and malevolence -- a man who made himself cultured and yet who could never really escape his image as a bullying country bumpkin (most famously demonstrated by his interruption of Macmillan's speech to the UN in 1960 by banging his shoe on the table -- the urbane Macmillan responded, 'Mr President, perhaps we could have a translation, I could not quite follow'). William Taubman has previously edited collections of Nikita Khrushchev's speeches and reminiscences and is completely immersed in this subject -- his biography is likely to remain the standard work for years to come.
Author : Sergei N. Khrushchev
Release : 2000
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 706/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower by : Sergei N. Khrushchev
Download or read book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower written by Sergei N. Khrushchev. This book was released on 2000. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique account of Cold War history during the Khrushchev era by one who witnessed it firsthand at his father's side.
Author : William Taubman
Release : 2017-09-05
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 683/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Gorbachev: His Life and Times by : William Taubman
Download or read book Gorbachev: His Life and Times written by William Taubman. This book was released on 2017-09-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
Author : Marvin Kalb
Release : 2017-10-10
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 620/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Year I Was Peter the Great by : Marvin Kalb
Download or read book The Year I Was Peter the Great written by Marvin Kalb. This book was released on 2017-10-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia—and molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called “the year of the thaw”—a time when Stalin’s dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a “genius,” a wizard of communism—Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a “madman” whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year’s end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship. "
