In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

Traces the power struggle between the Bolsheviks and the West at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, offering insight into the roles of diplomats, reporters, dissidents and others who impacted foreign policy throughout subsequent decades.

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."

Cabral is among the great figures of our time — these texts provide the evidence.

Comrades is a new history of the mentalities of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, based on recently discovered intelligence records from the American interrogation camp Fort Hunt near Washington, where German prisoners of war were interned and secretly listened in on during the Second World War. US Military Intelligence captured tens of thousands of open conversations between Wehrmacht soldiers and recorded them in verbatim transcripts. The resulting collection offers new insights into the thinking and worldviews of ordinary members of Hitler's armed forces - their attitudes towards National Socialism and the 'Führer', their views of the war and their experiences during the fighting, and their knowledge of and participation in war crimes and the Holocaust. The accompanying biographical information reveals how their mindsets were connected to their individual paths through the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht, and the war. The book offers a nuanced and realistic account of life in the Wehrmacht, based on unique source material, which allows us to see the Second World War through the eyes of the protagonists.

Tukhachevsky - Trotsky Collaboration