DIVOn the hunt for long-lost gold, a historian attracts murderous attention /divDIVTwenty-five million people died during the Russian Civil War. It was a clash between Tsarist loyalists and the new Soviet order, and when the imperialist forces saw defeat in sight, their thoughts turned to their future. Under the command of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, they loaded the entire Tsarist treasury onto a train, packing millions of worthless banknotes alongside platinum, jewels, and over five hundred tons of gold bullion. As Kolchak retreated, the train disappeared, and the fortune vanished./divDIV /divDIVAmerica’s foremost historian of Russia, Harry Bristow, is researching a new biography of Kolchak when an ancient veteran of the Russian Civil War gives him a clue to the gold’s whereabouts. Bristow would like to find the treasure for the sake of historical research, but where gold goes, greed follows—and death is not far behind./div

At its peak before the first world war, the fortune of the Romanovs of Russia has been calculated at over 45 billion dollars. It included fabulous state jewels, exquisite Faberge eggs, the palaces in and around St. Petersburg and the Crimea, the royal yachts and trains, and millions in Tsarist bank accounts in London, New York, and elsewhere. Since the secret murders of Nicholas and Alexandra and their family in 1918, and the subsequent, and controversial, discovery of their remains, the mystery persists: What happened to all that wealth? Questions surrounding the lost fortune are inevitably tied up with the issue of just who was killed that terrible summer's night in 1918 at Ekaterinburg. William Clarke goes to the heart of the Romanov story, to the Central State Archives in Russia, which for three-quarters of a century had been filed away in secrecy, and is only now open to investigation. The result of over twenty years of research, Clarke's quest reveals the truth behind claims to the Tsarist fortune made by the likes of Anna Anderson and Michel Goleniewski, and sheds new light on this most intriguing of historical mysteries.

This book details the frenzied rise and fall of a handful of Cossack junior officers led by Captain Grigori Semionov, who established themselves as warlords in Siberia during Russia's violent revolutionary upheaval of 1918-1921.

In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime’s sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational, investors had legitimate reasons to hope for repayment. Soviet debt recognition, a change in government, a bailout by the French government, or French banks, or a seceding country would have guaranteed at least a partial reimbursement. As Greece and other European countries raise the possibility of sovereign default, Oosterlinck’s superbly researched study is more urgent than ever.

The eighth book in the Grafton Everest series sees the hapless ex-President of the Republic of Australia, Dr Professor Grafton Everest, caught up in a web of international espionage and intrigue that he is hopelessly ill-equipped to handle. Abandoned to his own inadequate devices when his wife Janet departs on a world tour, with his home invaded by his now broke daughter and son-in-law, Grafton accepts an assignment with the United Nations to investigate electoral fraud in Russia. The reason is not only to get out of the house; an old letter from his mother, addressed to someone in the Soviet Union fifty years ago, suggests that Grafton may not be the only child that he always thought he was. Grafton’s mission to Moscow and his search for this mysterious sibling take him far from the Russian capital, deep into the icy wastes of Siberia and even deeper in a tangled conspiracy whose roots extend back to the Cold War and even as far back as the Russian Revolution.

In the book stories, journalism, verses, stories are collected. Two of them comic. In one work the author exposes the myth about collapse of the USSR, No stagnation existed...

From an award-winning scholar comes this definitive, single-volume history that illuminates the tensions and transformations of the Russian Revolution. ​ In The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the events which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced Communism to the world. Between 1917 and 1922, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation. Taking advantage of the collapse of the Tsarist regime in the middle of World War I, the Bolsheviks staged a hostile takeover of the Russian Imperial Army, promoting mutinies and mass desertions of men in order to fulfill Lenin's program of turning the "imperialist war" into civil war. By the time the Bolsheviks had snuffed out the last resistance five years later, over 20 million people had died, and the Russian economy had collapsed so completely that Communism had to be temporarily abandoned. Still, Bolshevik rule was secure, owing to the new regime's monopoly on force, enabled by illicit arms deals signed with capitalist neighbors such as Germany and Sweden who sought to benefit-politically and economically-from the revolutionary chaos in Russia. Drawing on scores of previously untapped files from Russian archives and a range of other repositories in Europe, Turkey, and the United States, McMeekin delivers exciting, groundbreaking research about this turbulent era. The first comprehensive history of these momentous events in two decades, The Russian Revolution combines cutting-edge scholarship and a fast-paced narrative to shed new light on one of the most significant turning points of the twentieth century.