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In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. Before she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin's brutality. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice...

Set against the explosive, war-torn backdrop of 1930s Ukraine, this action-filled epic follows a young artist as he battles famine, imprisonment, and torture to save his childhood love and free his country.

"Drawing on ambitious new research in European and U.S. archives, Stalin's War revolutionizes our understanding of World War II by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, was the Pacific war of 1941-1945 the direct result of Stalin's maneuverings, which he orchestrated to unleash...

Butler explores for the first time the complex partnership during World War II between FDR and Stalin, reassessing in-depth how the two men became partners, how they shared the same outlook for the postwar world, and how they formed an uneasy but deep friendship, shaping the world's political stage from the war to the decades leading up to and into the new century.

"On March 1, 1953, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- Joseph Stalin -- had a severe stroke. A doctor could not be called until the Central Committee had convened, voted, and agreed on which doctor to use, a task made more complex by the fact that Stalin had just ordered the deaths of many of the Soviet Union's leading physicians. And so began the bureaucratic merry-go-round that became the...

November 1943: World War II teetered in the balance. The Nazis controlled nearly all of the European continent. Japan dominated the Pacific. Allied successes at Sicily and Guadalcanal had gained modest ground but at an extraordinary cost. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets had already lost millions of lives. That same month in Tehran, with the fate of the world in question, the 'Big Three,' Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin,...

This book transports the reader to a turbulent era in which fascism and Communism are on the rise and America retreats from the world. Noel Field joined the secret underground of the international Communist movement during a time of national collapse, when Communism promised the righting of all social and political wrongs. Many in Field's generation were seduced by its siren song, but none paid a higher price for his betrayal of his country and his...

"In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world's largest peasant economy into "socialist modernity," otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over...