Using recently uncovered archival materials, personal interviews, and a broad familiarity with Russian history and culture, two young Russian historians have written a major interpretation of the Cold War as seen from the Soviet shore. Covering the volatile period from 1945 to 1962, Zubok and Pleshakov explore the personalities and motivations of the key people who directed Soviet political life and shaped Soviet foreign policy. They begin with the fearsome figure of Joseph Stalin, who was driven by the dual dream of a Communist revolution and a global empire. They reveal the scope and limits of Stalin's ambitions by taking us into the world of his closest subordinates, the ruthless and unimaginative foreign minister Molotov and the Party's chief propagandist, Zhdanov, a man brimming with hubris and missionary zeal. The authors expose the machinations of the much-feared secret police chief Beria and the party cadre manager Malenkov, who tried but failed to set Soviet policies on a different course after Stalin's death. Finally, they document the motives and actions of the self-made and self-confident Nikita Khrushchev, full of Russian pride and party dogma, who overturned many of Stalin's policies with bold strategizing on a global scale. The authors show how, despite such attempts to change Soviet diplomacy, Stalin's legacy continued to divide Germany and Europe, and led the Soviets to the split with Maoist China and to the Cuban missile crisis. Zubok and Pleshakov's groundbreaking work reveals how Soviet statesmen conceived and conducted their rivalry with the West within the context of their own domestic and global concerns and aspirations. The authors persuasively demonstrate thatthe Soviet leaders did not seek a conflict with the United States, yet failed to prevent it or bring it to conclusion. They also document why and how Kremlin policy-makers, cautious and scheming as they were, triggered the gravest crises of the Cold War in Korea, Berlin, and Cuba.

Thirty-three articles translated from Russian newspapers and magazines published in 1987 and 1988; twenty articles translated by the editor.

This is the gripping history of the Nazi-sponsored attempt to infiltrate the 1943 wartime Allied conference in Tehran and assassinate the "Big Three" leaders: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. It shows how close the plot came to success, and how the removal of any one or more of the Allied chiefs might have significantly altered the future course of the Second World War. Intended to be led by the SS lieutenant colonel Otto Skorzeny, Operation Long Jump was ultimately detected by Soviet agents, and it remains one of the most tantalizing "what-if" questions of the 20th century.

Did Nazi salutes and Nazi behavior come from the USA's Pledge of Allegiance to the flag? Did the swastika represent crossed "S" letters for "socialism" under Adolf Hitler's socialism (Nazism)? The historian Dr. Rex Curry's discoveries are explained in this book by the author Micky Barnetti. The book "World History ⅛" also introduces readers to Anarchaeology, Misanthropology, and the Socialist Crusades, the Latest Socialist Dark Age, and the Modern Socialist Inquisitions, which resulted in socialist genocide, a.k.a. the Wholecaust (of which the Holocaust was a part). Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and other socialists are exposed along with the influence of socialists in the United States upon those dictators.