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Beria
This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career.
How the Cold War Began
Just weeks after World War II had ended, a young cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with secret papers stuffed under his shirt and headed straight for the offices of a city newspaper. His action would change the course of the twentieth century. Gouzenko's defection sent shockwaves through Washington, London, Moscow, and Ottawa. It was the first from a Soviet Embassy, and the smuggled documents, which suggested that agents in North America were feeding atomic secrets to Moscow, sparked a witch-hunt for spies, including not only Americans and Canadians, but a leading British nuclear scientist, Allan Nunn May. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover used Gouzenko's de...
Orders to Kill
Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, his critics have turned up dead on a regular basis. According to Amy Knight, this is no coincidence. In Orders to Kill, the KGB scholar ties dozens of victims together to expose a campaign of political murder during Putin’s reign that even includes terrorist attacks such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Russia is no stranger to political murder, from the tsars to the Soviets to the Putin regime, during which many journalists, activists and political opponents have been killed. Kremlin defenders like to say, “There is no proof,” however convenient these deaths have been for Putin, and, unsurprisingly, because he controls all investigations, Putin is never seen holding a smoking gun. Orders to Kill is a story long hidden in plain sight with huge ramifications.
Putin's Killers
Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, his critics have been turning up dead. According to Amy Knight, one of the West's foremost scholars of the KGB, this is no coincidence. Here, she links together dozens of deaths, exposing a far-reaching campaign of killing that is even tied to the Boston Marathon bombing. Russia is no stranger to political murder, from the Tsars and the Soviets through to the current regime, during which many journalists, activists, and political opponents have been slain. However convenient these deaths are for the Russian president, Kremlin defenders assert that there is no evidence against him. Because he controls all the murder investigations, Putin will never be seen holding a smoking gun. With new information about the most famous cases—such as Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, and the Salisbury poisoning victims—Knight assesses Putin's role in these deaths, and asks: is there nothing we can do to stop him?
How the Cold War Began
On September 5, 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko severed ties with his embassy in Ottawa, Canada, reporting allegations to authorities of a Soviet espionage network in North America. His defection — the first following the end of WWII, occurring less than a month after atomic bombs exploded over Japan — sent shockwaves through Washington, London, and Ottawa. The three allies, who until weeks earlier had been aligned with the Soviets, feared that key atomic secrets had been given to Russian agents, affecting the balance of postwar power. In her riveting narrative, Amy Knight documents how Gouzenko's defection, and the events that followed it, triggered Cold War fears and altered the course of modern history. Knight sheds new light on the Gouzenko Affair, showing how J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit the Truman administration by incriminating U.S. government insiders Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. She also probes Gouzenko's motives for defecting and brilliantly connects these events to the strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West that marked the beginning of the Cold War.
Spies without Cloaks
This book offers a compelling and comprehensive account of what happened to the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world's most powerful and dangerous secret police organization was uncloaked. As Amy Knight shows, the KGB was renamed and reorganized several times after it was officially disbanded in December 1991--but it was not reformed. Knight's rich and lively narrative begins with the aborted August 1991 coup, led by KGB hard-liners, and takes us through the summer of 1995, when the Russian parliamentary elections were looming on the horizon. The failed coup attempt was a setback for the KGB because it led to demands from Russian democrats for a complete overhaul of the security...
The Kremlin's Noose
In The Kremlin's Noose Amy Knight tells the riveting story of Vladimir Putin and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who forged a relationship in the early years of the Yeltsin era. Berezovsky later played a crucial role in Putin's rise to the Russian presidency in March 2000. When Putin began dismantling Boris Yeltsin's democratic reforms, Berezovsky came into conflict with the new Russian leader by reproaching him publicly. Their relationship quickly disintegrated into a bitter feud played out against the backdrop of billion-dollar financial deals, Kremlin in-fighting, and international politics. Dubbed the "Godfather of the Kremlin" by the slain Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, Bere...
The KGB
This book, first published in 1990, examines the origins and evolution of the security police, considering the continuities as well as changes in its function as guardian of the regime’s security. It analyses the KGB’s involvement in Kremlin politics, the structure and organisation of the KGB, its formal tasks and legal prerogatives as set forth by the Party leadership, and the actual functions it performs on behalf of the Soviet regime. Underlying this analysis is an attempt to assess the power and authority of the KGB relative to other political institutions and to explain the crucial dynamics of the Party- KGB relationship.
Who Killed Kirov?
The 1934 murder of the charismatic politician Sergei Kirov sparked Stalin's brutal purges, and speculation about it still fascinates the Russians. Who killed Kirov, and why? In Russia, conspiracy theories about Kirov have abounded, and scholars throughout the world have tackled various pieces of the story -- but definitive evidence has eluded them. Now Amy Knight has combed the recently opened Russian archives to reconstruct this fascinating crime and analyze its effect on the Russian people. The result is at once an intriguing murder mystery and a major piece of scholarship that sheds new light on the terrors of Stalin.
Contemporary Issues in Soviet Foreign Policy
This survey of writings on the debates about and events relating to Soviet foreign policy concentrates on the Gorbachev period. Changes in Soviet theory and foreign policy decision making are covered in the first section. Twelve articles examine Gorbachevs policy towards a number of different geographic regions, and several more assess the permanence of Gorbachevs foreign policy changes.
