The first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s leading deputies, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the life of a man of key importance to the shaping of the Stalinist state. With its insight into the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, as well as its examination of this aspiring politician’s policy-making role during the Stalinist regime, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the previously undocumented life of Lazar Kaganovich, the last surviving member of the Stalin government and one-time heir apparent to the Soviet Union.

The first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s leading deputies, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the life of a man of key importance to the shaping of the Stalinist state. With its insight into the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, as well as its examination of this aspiring politician’s policy-making role during the Stalinist regime, ‘Iron Lazar’ investigates the previously undocumented life of Lazar Kaganovich, the last surviving member of the Stalin government and one-time heir apparent to the Soviet Union.

In this alternative history, Joe Steele takes the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt to become the U.S. President leading the country out of the Great Depression. The reforms he puts in place get citizens back to work, but Steele's critics end up in work camps if they complain too much about the policies.

Explanatory Note -- Glossary -- The Team Emerges -- The Great Break -- In Power -- The Team on View -- The Great Purges -- Into War -- Postwar Hopes -- Aging Leader -- Without Stalin -- End of the Road -- Biographies

An edited volume which brings together the work of the leading historians on the subject of Stalin's Terror in the 1930s, underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives in the field.

The “gripping story” of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city’s morale (The New York Times Book Review). For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike. Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled “Leningrad” in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra’s hundred members had survived. With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony “brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment” (Booklist, starred review), in “a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan’s descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting.” —The Washington Post

Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has been characterised by pluralism. To explain why and how Ukraine's and Russia's paths diverged, this monograph investigates the century-long and Soviet origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which the author argues are at the foundation of the modern Ukrainian institutional system. Drawing on unused archival material, the book re-examines the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994 to demonstrate how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of both the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions, and how this institutional framework affected in turn the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership, and the regions. The result - weak central authority and pronounced regionalism - was Ukraine's Soviet legacy, and the established power of regional clans made (post-Soviet) Ukrainian politics resistant to Russian?style authoritarianism, even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed. This innovative and wide-ranging approach to the history of economic management highlights the importance of considering long-term historical trends for understanding both the complicated nature of Soviet institutions and their varied and contested legacies across post-Soviet space.