The book ‘Deal with the Devil: German-Russian Relations between the First and Second World Wars’ is a compact and extremely engaging presentation of the history of the Russian and German peoples, filled with events of historic proportions. With captivating dynamism and literary precision, Sebastian Hafner describes the twists and turns in relations between nations that sometimes fought each...

Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian, journalist, or, as he puts it, ‘a European writer and historian writing in Russian.’ His heroes include Wenceslas Hollar, Franz Kafka, Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Mann, Edward Gibbon, the author himself, and all of us who unfortunately found ourselves in this time and place.

In this seminal work, celebrated political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a provocative, revolutionary geostrategy for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The United States’ crucial task, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasia and prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass,...

On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as Jacques Mornard into his study. Mornard waited for Trotsky to sit, then smashed an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat into Trotsky’s skull. For over a decade, Trotsky’s greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin, had been trying to arrange his murder. Stalin’s agents had hunted him across Europe and into a lonely, bitter exile in Mexico. He...

During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany’s...

In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

This book is dedicated to *oberegs*—magical means of protecting an individual and their world from danger. Drawing upon the pan-Slavic tradition, it presents—for the first time—a comprehensive model of the *obereg*, describing its semantics and the specific forms of its manifestation in ritual texts, actions, objects, and ceremonies; it also provides an analysis of the pragmatics of the verbal...

This book represents yet another attempt to unravel the phenomenon known as the Russian banya. Alongside historical and practical sections—which allow readers to trace the traditions of banya culture, or to independently build a banya, construct a stove, install a plunge pool, and prepare and administer wellness treatments—this volume offers a unique perspective on the banya experience,...

This book is the first fundamental collection of documents and testimonies concerning domestic cinema during the Great Patriotic War. Many aspects of film history are revealed within it for the first time, and with a completeness never before witnessed.

From the tender and intimate stories of people caring for their loved ones as they deteriorate from radiation sickness to the moving stories of the people in the surrounding cities told suddenly to abandon their homes, this definitive translation of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived...

They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with...

Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all...