One piece of advice before you sit down with a Dovlatov book: make sure you have enough time to finish it before you do anything else. "Chemodan," also known as The Suitcase in English translation, is a charming novel, masked as a short story collection... As the protagonist goes through the old suitcase, brought to America from the "old country," each item brings forth a story. The book is full of wit, absurd situations.. in other words, just the right amount of insanity to make one tackle everyday life better.

Alex Saranin's story is a vivid description of the first lost generation of Soviet Russia, millions of children lost their parents into the civil war, collectivization and other soviet human mills and it's aftermath. The great suffering endured by them and the waste of lives and souls is great evidence of these terrible whirling years into which a whole generation was engulfed.

A german child growing up inside USSR in the dark age of stalin. Growing up as a young stalinist through the scholar sistem and with his mother prisoner in the gulag. His experience sufering the repression of 1937 - 1938, the WWII and finally the build of the DDR (GDR). This is the vision from an experience and high training soviet scholar, and his progressive discover of the hard and inhuman reality of the soviet system.
Leonhard is one of the most important experts in marxism.

This book is incredible. It really makes you understand what it was like for the people in the USSR as the euphory of communism in the 20's was drowned in the bloodbath of the Stalinist purges.

It is basically a Romeo and Juliet theme set in hell.

This book provides a comprehensive history of child and family welfare policy in Russia post-revolution through the Yeltsin era. It is quite interesting reading and provides a good starting point for anyone seeking information on this topic. The author managed to condense a large amount of information into a very concise, readable and well-referenced book. Anyone within an interest in international child and family welfare will want to read it.

I love this book it has so much info about the Czar.Ilove the maps time lines and charts one of the best Czar books I ever read.

THis work comes out of the "Braaten/Jenson Ecumenical Center" which has provided so many great books on Christian reunion. The center isn't called that, but those two untiring Christians have done so much that it should be named after them!

Now this book doesn't solve any problems per se, but it does put them into context and it avoids the unhelpful, silly, and unscholarly straw man arguments that the cheaper scholarship throws out as to why we should be Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or "Protholidox"! WHile it is a great book for those interested in reunion, it is certainly a must-read for those who have read Ut Unum Sint, "that all may be one".

See my review of Brian Tierney's "Origins of Papal Infallibility" for a great selection of books that deal indepth with the subject of reunion between east and west as it relates to the papacy. Enjoy!

This analytical and thorough work builds nicely on the current critical look at Churchill's achievements. Carlton reminds us that Churchill, at bottom, was just another politician. Certainly, he believed passionately that the Soviet empire was evil and tyrannical; yet, in his zeal to be remembered as a world statesman (rather than just one of the protagonists in World War II) he was willing to flip flop whenever it suited him. Carlton also, repeatedly, reminds us that Churchill probably thought the Russians to be more wicked than the Germans and that he advocated the preemptive postwar use of nuclear weapons before the Soviets had developed a nuclear arsenal. Churchill's duplicity, vanity and senility in his last years are also brilliantly illustrated in this book. This is not the Churchill that many of us were taught by our history masters. Thanks to David Carlton, we now have a readable account of the whole man and not just the man as he would have us remember him. A must read.

Anyone who wants to understand the movies of the Soviet Union should start with this book. It is very thorough and written in a lively, bright style that is free of academic jargon.

Kenez begins with the pre-Revolutionary film industry and shows how it broke down and was built back up by the Soviets. He pays equal attention to the "high art" films that were famous in the West for decades (those of Eisenstein and Pudovkin) and the entertainment films that attracted the average Soviet citizen (such as the musical comedies of the 1930s, like "Volga-Volga.") He shows how Soviet movies responded to the imposition of Socialist Realism, World War II, and the cultural freeze of the late Stalin era.

The only problem with this book is that it is TOO SHORT. Upon reaching the end, the reader wants to see Kenez tackle the films of the Khrushchev Thaw and the Brezhnev era. However, one should be thankful for what one has, and in this volume, one has a truly indispensible book.

David Bordwell, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, has produced as complete and insightful a guide to the cinemagraphic artistry of Sergei Eisenstein as any film lover could hope for. In addition to covering the director's life and "rehabilitation" to rightful prominence years after his death, Dr. Bordwell spends measured time dissecting and describing Eisenstein's theories of montage and "Social Realist" cinema in a most understandable and fluent way. For anyone who has marveled at the dramatic power of the "Odessa Steps" sequence in "The Battleship Potempkin" or the heroic sweep of "Alexander Nevsky," this book will take you behind the scenes and reveal how these masterworks were made, and why. Very readable, and filled with hundreds of illustrations from films both completed and unmade, "The Cinema of Eisenstein" will satisfy the serious movie-goer and the student of Soviet cultural history. A compendious bibliography and suggested reading list is included. Comrades, get this book!