“An unforgettable story of love, survival and the power of imagination in the most tragic circumstances. Elegant and poetic.” —Isabel Allende, New York Times bestselling author of Zorro The ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . . “Extraordinary. . . . Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers . . . illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment.” —Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker “A poignant tale.” —Booklist, starred review “Dean writes with passion and compelling drama.” —People “Rare is the novel that creates that blissful forgot-you-were-reading experience . . . but that is precisely what Debra Dean has achieved with her image-rich book.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer “Poetic.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “[A] heartfelt debut.” —New York Times Book Review “Remarkable”— NPR, Nancy Pearl Book Review

Now available in PDF format. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: St Petersburg will lead you straight to the best attractions this city has to offer. This uniquely visual guidebook includes illustrated cutaways, floor plans, and reconstructions of the city's stunning architecture, plus 3-D aerial views of the key districts to explore on foot. Detailed listings highlight the best hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops for all budgets in this fully updated and expanded guide. Insider tips reveal on everything from where to find the best markets and nightspots to great attractions for children. A free pull-out city map is clearly marked with sights from the guidebook and includes an easy-to-use street index, as well as detailed street views of key areas. Transportation maps and information on how to get around the city make finding one's way easier than ever before, and there's even a chart showing the distances between major sights to help with itinerary planning. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: St Petersburg shows you what others only tell you.

The DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: St. Petersburg will lead you straight to the best attractions St. Petersburg has to offer. The guide includes unique cutaways, floor plans and reconstructions of the city's stunning architecture, plus 3D aerial views of the key districts to explore on foot. You'll find detailed listings of the best hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops for all budgets in this fully updated and expanded guide, plus insider tips on everything from where to find the best entertainment to the top guided walks. Founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703, St. Petersburg quickly became a magnificent city reflecting the majesty of the Russian Empire. The uniquely visual DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: St. Petersburg includes in-depth coverage of the wonderfully preserved heritage of Russia's cultural capital.

Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.

The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled. Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories to computerized data bases.