Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev is a biography of one of history's greatest dancers, who ended his own life in a snow-bound Russian dacha in 1977 at the age of thirty-six. The book is also a personal memoir by Lisa Whitaker, who befriended Soloviev when he toured Australia in 1969. And it is autobiography, too, describing Whitaker's travels to Russia after Perestroika to find his family and uncover the mystery of his fate. Soloviev was a government-decorated icon in the USSR, and an international star as well. On tour with the Kirov, he was idolized by audiences and critics. In words and more than one hundred photos, many never before published, his phenomenal talent lives again. The book is the culmination of decades of research, during which the authors interviewed Soloviev's family, friends, and colleagues to peel back layers of accrued myth and reduction. Soloviev's suicide was his response to both personal and institutional repression, a bombshell hurled at Soviet officialdom. Soloviev's psychology reflected the stringency of the Soviet system and the individual vagaries of a turbulent family. Red Star, White Nights is informed by Whitaker's experience in Russian research and Lobenthal's many accounts of Russian culture and ballet. The book weaves together Soloviev's story with multiple epochs of Soviet history: the 1917 revolution, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, the "thaw" of the 1950s and '60s, the stagnation of the '70s. Preserved on video, Soloviev's talent continues to astound, while his life and death continue to haunt. Red Star, White Nights illuminates the many facets of this most enigmatic of ballet stars.

As Russia plunges from World War I into revolution, the tragic events of Bloody Sunday leave their stain upon the nation--and the Fedorcenko family. After a devastating loss, the Fedorcenkos struggle with their grief and find their loyalties in the conflict divided. Will their bond be strong enough to endure the trials of civil war?

A rare memoir of underwater warfare in the treacherous Baltic. Red Star Under The Baltic is the gripping memoir of a Soviet submariner during his years at sea in the Baltic during the Second World War. Not only is this a superb record of the appalling conditions endured on these basic craft, but a very human account detailing the comradeship and tensions among the crew as they operated in the most life-threatening conditions. Viktor Korzh vividly describes the many actions that he and his comrades were involved in. Many of these were successful, and Korzh witnessed numerous engagements and sinkings of German shipping. However, it was by no means a one-sided contest, and there were some horrifyingly close calls. The comparatively shallow waters of the Baltic were less than ideal for submarine warfare. Perhaps the most dangerous and dramatic moment came when his submarine became entangled in netting. After frantic efforts, they just managed to extricate themselves before being depth-charged. Another constant threat was of mechanical malfunction. It is extremely rare to have a totally authentic Russian account like this one, which has been superbly translated into English. It is a thrilling memoir, filled with nonstop action and underwater danger. Previously published as Reserve of Strength

Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad. It's 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case. The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.

For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit. A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale… An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid… Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site… A teleporting experiment goes awry, leaving a subject to cope with a bizarre sensory swap… A boy discovers the explosive truth of his father’s “antiseptic” work, stamping out dissent on distant worlds… The last 100 years in Russia have seen an astonishing diversity and depth of literary works in the science fiction genre, by authors with a dizzying array of styles and subject matter. This volume brings together 18 such works, translated into English for the first time, spanning from path-breaking, pre-revolutionary works of the 1890s, through the difficult Stalinist era, to post-Soviet stories published in the 1980s and 1990s.