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This is the story of the rise and fall of one man against the background of his country's history - bloody, tumultuous, yet immensely significant - since the revolution in 1917. Nikita Sergei Khrushchev was born in 1894, the child of peasants driven from the land by poverty. The infant Khrushchev was one of a vast family of nearly one hundred million peasants, mainly illiterate, latterly liberated from serfdom. He was a child without history, and as an infant, lucky to survive. Sixty years later, nevertheless, he was to become the dominant leader of the Soviet Empire. In this biography Edward Crankshaw describes how this was achieved. Crankshaw provides a vivid and convincing appreciation of Khrushchev's extraordinary and contradictory character within the context of Russian history and society. "[Khrushchev's] career is sketched and his personality analyzed in vivid, readable book by the British Kremlinologist." -Chicago Tribune
The Grim story of the most vicious Terror Agency of all time-Its sinister Power and Barbaric acts, and the twisted men who led it-Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann. This is the brutal expose of the rotten core of Nazi Germany. Here is revealed the true story of Hitler's terror police, the in-famous Gestapo-the madmen who headed it, the sadists who staffed it, the degenerate party that spawned it.
The awesome figure of Otto von Bismarck, the 'Iron Chancellor', dominated Europe in the late 19th century. His legendary political genius and ruthless will engineered Prussia's stunning defeat of the Austrian Empire and, in 1871, led to his most dazzling achievement - the defeat of France and the unification of Germany. In this highly acclaimed biography, first published in 1981, Edward Crankshaw provides a perceptive look at the career of the First Reich's mighty founder - at his brilliant abilities and severe limitations and at the people who granted him the power to transform the shape and destiny of Europe. "Bismark is a biographical masterpiece, an opus that is truly magnificent." -The Spectator
When Edward Crankshaw's Maria Theresa was published in 1969, it was the first full length study of Maria Theresa to be written in English for sixty years. Called to the throne in 1740, at the age of twenty-three, Maria Theresa was wholly unprepared for the events that were to confront her, and trusting in the honour of her fellow monarchs, the young queen found herself with a virtually nonexistent army at the head of a bankrupt and disaffected empire - an empire shortly to be set upon by half Europe intent on shattering the Habsburg power for ever. Married to an amiable but ineffectual husband whom she adored, surrounded by shortsighted advisers senile to the point of decrepitude, her only w...
Exactly 175 years ago, on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, a failed uprising ignited a process that would, one red October, finally sweep the autocracy away. The Shadow of the Winter Palace recounts an extraordinary century of Russian history, a politically tempestuous time that was also a Golden Age of intellectual and artistic achievement—the century of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. A master stylist and a distinguished historian, Edward Crankshaw limns dazzling portraits of the czars, the revolutionaries, and a host of other unforgettable characters—and provides a riveting, sweeping history "jam-packed with information about the past and implications for the present"(Atlantic Monthly).
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"This is a full-length study of Maria Theresa. Called to the throne in 1740, at the age of 23, she was unprepared for events that were to confront her. Her only weapons were her charm, unbreakable will, and her courage"--Publisher's description.