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A Telegraph Book of the Year, soon to be a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation. 'Extraordinary.' Philippe Sands 'We are touched by the courage and dignity of Andrew Harding's characters - qualities that the author must surely possess in equal measure.' - Andrey Kurkov 'A story of extraordinary heroism by...

Bloomsbury presents Putin's Wars by Mark Galeotti, read by David Sibley. THE FINANICAL TIMES – BEST BOOKS OF 2022 'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' – The Times A history of how Putin and his conflicts have...

A New York Times Bestseller The definitive history of Ukraine from antiquity to today. “An admirable new history.... In his elegant and careful exposition of Ukraine’s past, Mr. Plokhy has also provided some signposts to the future.” ―Economist As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing...

Oleg Gordievsky was the highest ranking KGB officer ever to work for Britain. For eleven years, he acted as a secret agent, reporting to the British Secret Intelligence Service while continuing to work as a KGB officer. He gave such a clear insight into the mind and methods of the KGB and the...

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.

On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down twenty-three steps into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg. The eldest was twenty-two, the youngest only seventeen. Together with their parents and their thirteen-year-old brother, they were all brutally murdered. Their crime: to be the daughters...

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Kursk: A Time To Die by Robert Moore, read by Pete Cross. At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack...

At the end of September 1941, more than a million German soldiers lined up along the frontline just 180 miles west of Moscow. They were well trained, confident, and had good reasons to hope that the war in the East would be over with one last offensive. Facing them was an equally large Soviet force, but whose soldiers were neither as well trained nor as confident. When the Germans struck, disaster soon befell the Soviet defenders.

During the second half of 1943, after the failure at Kursk, Germany’s Army Group South fell back from Russia under repeated hammer blows from the Red Army. Under Erich von Manstein, however, the Germans were able to avoid serious defeats, while at the same time fending off Hitler’s insane orders to hold on to useless territory. Then, in January 1944, a disaster happened.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

Brought to you by Penguin. Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad -...

Почему на протяжении веков России так трудно давалась модернизация? Дмитрий Травин показывает, что корни многих проблем развития страны лежат не в особенностях национального характера, а в исторической ловушке, возникшей из стремления государства любой ценой поддерживать мощную армию и вести войны. Логика постоянной военной мобилизации во многом определила устройство государства, социальные отношения и политическую систему России.

Bloomsbury presents Meat Grinder by Prit Buttar, read by Nathan Osgood. An engrossing history of the desperate battles for the Rzhev Salient, a forgotten story brought to life by the harrowing memoirs of German and Russian soldiers. The fighting between the German and Russian armies in the Rzhev...

Deadly enemies, dangerous games... CIA agent Sam Hudson has been hunting Konstantin, a Russian deep cover operative responsible for numerous murders on US and UK soil, for years – and he finally thinks he's picked up his trail in Geneva. But just as Sam is about to get vital intelligence, his...

Dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle. A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler's ambition and the German military machine.

This is the extraordinary story of Vasily B. Emelianenko, the veteran pilot of one of the Soviet Union's most contradictory planes of the Second World War - the I1-2. Having flown 80 combat sorties against the Germans, Emelianenko was awarded the highest decoration - the Hero of the Soviet Union. He went on to complete a total of 92 sorties; his plane was shot down three times; and on each occasion, he managed to pilot the damaged aircraft home. Emelianenko's vivid memoirs provide a rare insight into the reality of fighting over the Eastern Front and the tactics of the Red Army Air Force.

Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the 20th century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent - more than 1,000,000 people. A century later, the Armenian genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian versions of events.

Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western listeners can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.

Sometime in 1965, James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission: recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet- and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerilla movements against a pro-Western government. He knew the United States must preserve deniability, so he would be abandoned in any life-threatening situation; he did not know that Che Guevara was attempting to export his revolution a few miles away. Cold War Navy SEAL gives unprecedented insight into a clandestine chapter in US history through the experiences of Hawes, a distinguished Navy frogman and later a CIA contractor. His journey began as an officer in the newly-formed SEAL Team 2, where Hawes commanded boats in the CIA's series of covert, hit-and-run raids into North Vietnam. Those raids directly instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.