"Russian" is really not an accurate description of the warping of the human soul by Communism.
590022
It is hard to write what to say about one's feelings upon reading this book. However, "feelings" are exactly what the book makes you feel. The characters act upon your feelings in layers. The overall feeling of this book is that it is heavy, dark, morose, depressing, and an incredibly interesting peek into the everyday worker's life in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. I came to completely deplore the central character as a completely self-absorbed narcissistic personality that completely lacked empathy for others. A type of person I try to stay away from in life. And yet, unlike the acts of such people, this one actually has some redeeming qualities in the end. I seriously considered setting this book aside. But for some reason I didn't. When the end came to this novel I was surprised to find that although it is hard to read, this is a truly interesting study of very difficult people living in horrible circumstances.
All I can suggest, in the final analysis, is that you read it and judge for yourself how you feel.
2307324
I checked this book out from the library, and I must say that this book's portrayal about Vladimir Putin and his family life is outrageous and not true.  There's not a lick of truth to anything this author has to say about how Vladimir relates to his family.  I suspect that Vladimir's enemies wrote this book.

See my review for Vladimir's memoir First Person for more on this.  As I read the book I felt I read a carefully calculated presentation with an agenda, and that agenda is not to tell the truth, but to defame the character of Vladimir Putin.

I did not feel I was reading a biography, but a piece of propaganda.  The book insulted my intelligence.
2467220
The author presents a moving and compassionate picture of life under the last years of Tsar Nicholas II from the point of view of an adolescent girl who grew up in priviledged society. The author's intention has obviously been to present a piece of history to children in a way they can identify with and instead of the "rags to riches" story this is one from "riches to rags." The characters in the Imperial family,including Rasputin,are painted true to life and poor Nicholas was simply not up to the job he was confronted with. The book also shows very clearly in the character of Misha how youthful enthusiasm can turn to bitter disappointment when the fruits of revolution are presented.
The book can be highly recommended especially for Middle and High School libraries or as a gift for teenage children.
In our era, where the study of history as being "all about dead white males" is discouraged, Angel on the Square shows that history is people and, unfortunately, September 11 2001 has literally brought home to us in a most terrible manner.
2625808
I think the effort is good but explaining Russia's history the way the author did is just his opinion, not Truth and Induces the Reader to think like him.... Good try
1744406
While this book is the first comprehensive accounting of not only human losses during WWII, but during the entire period that the Soviet Union existed, this book has been very controversial not so much outside of Russia, but among Russian historians and scholars. Throughout the Cold War it was always an article of faith that the Soviets suffered by far the greatest human losses of all the countries that fought in that war. The battles on the Eastern Front with Germany were colossal in a scale not seen before or since and the destruction of Russian infrastructure resulted in collateral deaths from disease, famine and exposure to the harsh weather.

Joseph Stalin claimed in 1946 that Soviet deaths totaled 7 million and that was the number quoted for almost a decade until in 1960 when Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky made a statement that the true number will always be a state secret, but even if the true cost was 16 million lives, it did not matter. But within a year Nikita Khrushchev stated in a speech that over 20 million Russians died during WWII.  This was later confirmed by President Leonid Brezhnev in 1965. However, during the Glasnost period Soviet scholars questioned these numbers as underestimates, asserting that there were as many as 27 million casualties as a direct result of the war to include 8.6 million military and 20 million civilian dead. Today, even those numbers are in dispute as scholars claim there are over 14 million servicemen listed as dead and missing in the Russian data bases from WWII.

Though this book provides a comprehensive accounting of casualties beginning with the Civil Wars of the 1920s to the occupation of Afghanistan that ended in 1989, it is the WWII period that makes up the vast majority of the book. It provides a front-by-front and theatre level casualty count. Russia's human cost is so high it is almost incomprehensible. But to illustrate the scale, the Soviet Army lost more soldiers killed in Poland in 1944 than the US Army lost in all of WWII. The Soviet Army lost more lieutenants during the war than the US Army lost of all ranks in all of WWII. That is the scale of Russia's military losses in WWII!

As an aside, the book offers comparisons in casualties with the Axis Armies that participated in the invasion of Russia. Along with this is an accounting of total numbers of German, Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian POWs captured during the war. The most revealing chapters are those that account for casualties in the conflicts after WWII to include military losses during the Korean War that is the first admission of pilot casualties from fighting the US Air Force in the skies over North Korea. There is also an accounting of losses in the proxy wars in Africa and the Vietnam War. And of course, there is the first comprehensive accounting ever published for military casualties during the War in Afghanistan.  Though Soviet casualties in 10 years of war in Afghanistan were only 25% of what America lost in in 8 years of war in Vietnam, those casualties had a worse effect on the Soviet public that at the beginning was not kept informed about the war. But once informed, the war became hugely unpopular with the public.

This book will not settle the answer on the Soviet Union's WWII casualties. There is a newer edition published in Russia that now includes the casualties for post Soviet Union conflicts that include the two wars for Chechnya and the fighting in the other republics after the breakup of the Soviet Union. That work has not been translated into English, but is no doubt is just as controversial as this edition.  However, I highly recommend this book for historians and scholars of Soviet military history.
2338188
But it's interesting how the author's attempt at objectivity has been twisted into a drawn-out polemic rationalizating pogroms in post-war Poland.  This was surely not his intent. A more incisive look at post-war Polish anti-Semitism, in my opinion, is to be found in Professor Jan Gross's "Fear."

Stalin lost not a wink of sleep over Jews killed in Poland before or after the war. By the "logic" of "they deserved it" alluded in some reviews - similar to traditional attitudes toward rape victims - one can as easily say Poland deserved 40 years of Communism for reveling in communal bigotry and violence in the name of anti-Communism.  But as the case of Kielce shows, violence was instigated not in the name of fighting Communism, but over the ancient accusation of child ritual murder, a traditional canard long pushed by the Church and having nothing to do with wartime ethnic politics in Poland.

In spite of the distorted interpretations given this book by some, "After the Holocaust" does not say "they had it coming."
797372
Strangely, contrary to direction one might expect, military histories of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, rather than becoming more "disciplined" from an American standpoint--insofar as they follow the expectations, rules, and requirements of profesional academia, particularly in the area of citation and presentation of evidence--seem to becoming less structured, less clearly cited, and more haphazard. Maybe I'm reading the wrong materials, or maybe I'm just overly pessimistic. In any case, Gorodetsky's work here, at least, is a much needed deviation from this unfortunate trend, based less on emotional appeals, attractive, even romantic notions and popular culture that seems more than a little pervasive in Second World War histories, particularly in the Eastern Front, and more on an extremely indepth, analytical view based on access to very numerous archives in, from what I've seen, multiple states.

I don't expect 'Grand Delusion' to serve as a rallying cry for any of the political "sides" concerning the Eastern Front--it's too rational, too deliberately methodical and expositional to do that, especially compared to its competition, it's language reserved and tempered by comparison. That could be a strike against Gorodetsky, but I personally don't think it detracts from it in its intended purpose. It does historical personalities little in the way of favors, but greatly interests the interested reader.

On a side note, I had a chance to speak with Dr. Gorodetsky about his book, very briefly--he mentioned the unfortunate fact that the designer for the book's cover cut off part of the photograph, removing part of the sign that would have otherwise indicated the German's proximity to Moscow (if memory serves correctly). Another case of a cover messed-up for aesthetics, I guess.
2885609
Professor Kuromiya has produced a work on a topic much covered in historical literature: Stalin's reign of terror. What Kuromiya adds is
a record of the original sources of documentation kept by the Soviet
secret police. These notes offer "bureaucratically efficient" records of
each prisoner's dialogue with captors, interrogators and torturers.
The language is bland, like a record from the motor vehicles bureau. But the context of these notes, the hidden torments, truths and lies they reveal, is chilling. Kuromiya's familiarity with the archival records allows him to infer pieces of "truth" amidst the vast conspiracy of offical lies. The records themselves are dry, even mundane, but the story thy tell, and that Kuromiya retells, is one of life, truth and, ultimately, of injustice and death.
3927301
Starting with Koehler's _Stasi_, and continuing on with Funder's _Stasiland_, East Germany, and by extension socialist Eastern Europe in general, has been stereotyped as an 1984-ish nightmare by English language texts. Without denying the harsh treatment that dissidents received, one cannot understand Ostalgie and analogous movements in other former socialist nations without realizing that secret police and political prisons were not part of the experience of the vast majority of citizens. The back cover of "The Lost World of Communism" suggests that it isn't just another triumphal denigration of the socialist block but one that considers both the good and the bad. Instead, upon reading the book, one finds horror stories basically recycled from Koehler's and Funder's texts, and the reader is left no wiser in understanding why many look back on the socialist era with less than completely negative feelings.
2067137
A lot of [people] have referred to this book as being against the backdrop of the Cold War, but the sad thing is that since the end of the Cold War, the warnings of this book have become MORE and not less pertinent, as the hard left have used the ruse that Communism has collapsed to inject their values into all of us, like a bacillus, through the back door.
I see the brainwashing of the children described in this book as being what university students in the so-called humanities go through, in nearly every university in the world.
The media and universities are trying to do to all of us what the teacher did to the children in the book!
And slowly as youth are filtered through the universities they will permeate the rest of society with corrupt neo-Marxist views, including elementary schools.
How many people throughout the world marched in support of Saddam Hussein earlier this year , without a thought about the morality of the positions they where taking?
Yes, the nightmare we read about in `The Children's Story' is happening across the world. Too many of us have lost the distinction between right and wrong.
Can the voices of freedom fight back?
3524681
This novel is a portrait of two "individuals."  The first protagonist is Soviet intelligence agent Leo Demidov, a rather unintelligent hunk whose unquestioning loyalty to Communism makes him perfectly suited to his work.  The novel centers around his search for a serial killer whose brutal crimes are systematically covered up by Soviet society, crimes that reveal fault lines in Stalin's supposedly harmonious utopia of perfectly reeducated citizens.  The second protagonist is the Soviet Union during the 1930s, when collectivization policies led to massive starvation, suffering, and even cannibalism in the Ukraine, and in the early 1950s, at the height of Comrade Stalin's bloody reign.  This is one of the bleakest worlds that I have ever visited in a novel.  The state sees all independent thought and initiative as a mortal threat to its absolute rule, and so brutally suppresses it; the crimes of Andrei (the serial killer) represent on a small-scale this systematic annihilation of Russia's children.  "Barbarity, certainly," Leo says of the Soviet way, "but barbarity for a reason, barbarity for the greater good: 'Greater Good the Greater Good.'  It was necessary to repeat it, to carve it into every thought, so that it ran like ticker tape across the bottom of your mind."  There might be hope for Leo-- whose investigation leads him to slowly, painfully develop a conscience-- but we are left with little hope for the like redemption of Soviet society and its people as a whole.

The big plot twist detracted from an otherwise tightly-wound, well-plotted novel, for me-- it felt too facile and false.
4044481
Ann Applebaum explains in detail ,why the communists failed in eastern europe. It was not liberation ,but military occupation. The author describes in detail country by country the oppresion on the Russians
437265
Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's focus on Paczkowski's chapter on Poland (pp. 363-393), and related matters. His chapter spans the 1917-1939 oppression of Soviet Poles, the WWII Gulags, the postwar imposition of the Soviet puppet state, and Communist rule until its 1989 nominal end.

Consider the situation facing Soviet Poles in 1931-1938: "The Poles account for some 10 percent of the victims of the Great Purge, and for around 40 percent of the victims of purges against national minorities. These figures are, if anything, understated, since thousands of Poles were deported from Ukraine and Belorussia for reasons unconnected with the `Polish Operation'." (p. 367).

Ironic to complaints about this book citing hyper-inflated numbers of victims, Paczkowski's quoted archival Communist sources do the exact opposite. The 1939-1941 Polish deportees, at 340,000 (up to about 500,000; p. 372), are dwarfed by other estimates (1 million or more: p. 209). The Poles killed during the early-postwar imposition of Communism (1945-1948), at 8,700 (p. 376), constitute a tenfold smaller death toll than others estimate. Paczkowski doesn't explain this. Does he tacitly suppose that archival data is the most reliable? (I talked with a historian having firsthand experience with Communist archives. He told me that the completeness of archival data cannot be assumed without cross-checks against other information. Internal Communist archives are rife with falsifications at all levels. The common argument that there was no reason for falsifying data unintended for public consumption is a fallacious one).

The imposition of the Soviet puppet state on Poland shouldn't be called a civil war, as most of the 1944-1947 antagonists were Soviet troops and NKVD. (p. 376). Were Communists just targeting their opponents? Far from it! "From 1945 through 1947, thousands of people who had never taken any part in opposition activity fell victim to pacification campaigns and preventive measures..." (p. 380). One would think that, with the crushing of appreciable pro-independence Polish guerilla activity by 1947, Communist repression would've slackened. To the contrary: "After 1948, the Security Service used terror to subjugate the whole of society...The [Extraordinary Commission's] rulings became more and more repressive. In 1945-1948, it sent 10,900 people to forced-labor camps; in 1949-1952 the figure reached 46,700. The total for the years up to 1954 was 84,200. These verdicts were not for political crimes...This was a period when everyone seemed to be going to prison..." (p. 380, 382).

Even in later years, Communist murders never ceased. Based on the fact that the UB was strictly regulated by orders, Paczkowski rejects the contention that the murderers of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, in 1984, had acted alone. (p. 390).

Finally, let's clarify Feliks Dzierzhinsky and the Polish constituents of the Cheka. Although its original membership of about 100 (in December 1917) was indeed disproportionately of Polish and Baltic origin (p. 62), this situation was very temporary. In fact, within a short six months (June 1918), the Cheka's membership had exploded to 12,000, followed by further growth to 40,000 members (by late 1918), and to over 280,000 (in early 1921). (p. 62, 68).
3338731
To my eternal shame I believed in communism in my 20's. All that changed after I read the Gulag Archepeligo by Solzhenitsyn and Colymer Tales by Varlaam Shalamov. Leftism is liike a cult that brainwashes its victims into blind acceptance. To manage to break free you still have to have within you a degree of open mindedness to read alternative views about an ideology that has killed and enslaved over 100 million people.  Since reading Solzhenitsyn I've ready many books on the subject but non of them convey, in such a succinct and visual way, the true nature of this evil ideology. I would go so far as to say that if this book was compulsory reading for all students' communist ideology would never raise its ugly head again after a generation.
46832
Petrograd, the city of trouble...
By merial Buchanan

This book begins as a lively account of a vital part of history, but it degenerates into a vicious, scurrilous attack on the Bolshevik Revolution and on the Russian people. This account is the source for much of the recent book called "Caught in the Revolution" by Helen Rappaport. So the vilifying of the Russian Revolution continues unabated from generation to generation.

This is an interesting account of the tense, eventful months leading to the Revolution. The author was the young daughter of the British ambassador, an official whose chief duty was to keep Russia in a war that the Tzar never wanted and which he entered only to please England and America.

As the war became a disaster for Russia, the author witnessed many of the harrowing scenes in St. Petersburg, often viewing them from the windows of the Embassy facing the river and bridges where so many of the most important events were  played out.

It is almost amusing to see her change of attitude as events unfolded. The Russian soldiers, the wounded in the hospital, the crowds on the street where public speakers held forth -- to her, all were upstanding and sympathetic depending on their attitude toward Bolshevism. If they favored Bolshevism, she calls them surly and disreputable.

The author speaks of the Russian masses in the same way that foreigners always have. In her eyes, they were almost simple-minded -- admirable when they were subservient, docile, and humble, but savage when they wanted freedom from the iron grip of tyranny and capitalism.

When they fought the Germans, she acknowledges that they fought bravely even though they lacked every essential for fighting, but when they were thrown back by the enemy and flooded into St. Petersburg, in her eyes they became slovenly, lazy, dirty.

The author cannot find vitriol enough to satisfy her hatred of the revolution and its people. I think I have never read such venomous language used about any other revolution, about any other people seeking to be free.

Following the French Revolution, everybody grew to love the French. But a century after the Russian Revolution, one dare not voice a favorable word about its heroes.  Of course, France became a capitalist paradise, so all's well with the world.

This book is well worth reading. It demonstrates how diplomats managed, though with difficulty and with the help of many servants, to keep up a privileged existence in a city in the grip of dire circumstances, a city torn apart by events of world-shaking consequence.

It also reveals how the moneyed classes regard the strata below them, the people that have no savings, no estates, no superior education, no foreign tours, no wealthy connections.

In short, it demonstrates first-hand, though inadvertently, why the Russian Revolution was an historic necessity.

This book requires patience because there are so many typographical errors, many more than I have ever found before. Because of this, I could only give it four stars. But  otherwise, the writing flows easily and interestingly.
3796125
let's get something straight

UKRAINIANS and their cossack ancestors are not RUSSIANS - they are RUSYNS, not to be confused with their so-called similiar northern kin and centuries old enemeies, the MUSCOVITE RUSSIANS. The latter would want you to believe that the Ukrainians are Russian so that they can keep the land that is wealthy of natural resources for themselves, for they usurped the title of KIYIV-RUS and called themselves RUSSIANS and tried many brutal campaigns of assimilation to destroy Ukrainian identity. Also, you do not place "THE" in front of UKRAINE - it's a country, not a region of Muscovy Russia. You do not say "THE BELOROSIA", "THE POLAND", "THE CROATIA", "THE ITALY", "THE ISRAEL", get the idea now?

Going back to the movie, it depicts Ukrainian cossack warriors in the 16th century, not the 18th century and is supposed to be parallel to the life and times of the famous Ukrainian Hetman BOHDAN KHMELNITSKIY.

It's a pretty decent depiction with a whole lot of drama and romance that also kind of blurred the historical narration of things.
2314367
This horribly descriptive movie showcases the true suffering  of the Russian People as they struggle to persevere during the  war crimes waged at the hands of the Nazis. Their willingness to bleed and die for their unfeeling dictator gave them the ability to outlast their German Tormentors.