The Last Tsar

The Last Tsar: The Life And Death Of Nicholas II

by Edvard Radzinsky

Historians have long believed that Lenin personally ordered the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918; this contradicts the official Soviet version, in which Siberian Bolsheviks ordered the executions without Moscow's clearance. Radzinsky, a Russian playwright, adds many valuable pieces to the jigsaw puzzle in an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the slaying, based on royal diaries and newly uncovered eyewitness accounts from the executioners. The author unearthed the testimony of Lenin's bodyguard, who said that Lenin had ordered him to destroy a secret telegram (and its transmittal ribbon), which contained the top Bolshevik's order to carry out the executions. Oral testimony by a soldier who participated in the killings, given decades later to an informant whom Radzinsky interviewed, alleges that two bodies were missing from the truck that took the executed royal family to an unmarked grave; this will fuel speculation that Anastasia and Alexei, heir to the throne, survived the fatal night. Using the diaries of Czar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, Radzinsky also presents a fragmentary account of Romanov family life, their kidnapping and the abortive plots to save them.

Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

abridged by Edward E. Ericson

Solzhenitsyn's gripping epic masterpiece, the searing record of four decades of Soviet terror and oppression, in one abridged volume, authorized by the author.

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

"The greatest charter of our movement."
---Rosa Luxemburg

"An integral and systematic exposition of [Marx's] doctrine . . . the best to this day."
---Lenin

"Laid the foundation for modern socialism."
---Karl Kautsky

"[A] model philosophy of history . . . cannot be corrected."
---Arturo Labriola

Over 150 years after its publication, Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto continues to inspire and provoke students, activists and citizens.

The principles embodied within in it lie at the heart of thousands of academic and literary works. It is the starting point for millions of people who refuse to accept that capitalism represents the final and optimum stage of human development. After reading this book, it is impossible to remain convinced that There Is no alternative to unrestrained neoliberalism and difficult to claim that there is anything more crucial than finding one.