Harold Shukman – författare

'Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently ...' M. R. D. Foot, SpectatorLambasted by the Soviets as a 'spy school', the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Its pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who went on to a diversity of glittering careers: professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics; the historian Sir Martin Gilbert; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; stage director Sir Peter Hall; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a displaced Carmelite friar. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record Office, in order to reveal this fascinating story for the first time.'A highly entertaining read ... No one interested in late 20th century theatre or literature can afford to ignore this book.' Spectator'Elliott and Shukman write with style and wit ... They record something more than a byway in the history of the cold war, a true contribution to British history.' Michael Bourdeaux, Times Higher Education Supplement'An engaging, quirky account of this strange offshoot of the Cold War ... a kind of Virgin Soldiers for clever clogs.' Michael Leapman, Independent

'Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently ...' M. R. D. Foot, SpectatorLambasted by the Soviets as a 'spy school', the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Its pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who went on to a diversity of glittering careers: professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics; the historian Sir Martin Gilbert; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; stage director Sir Peter Hall; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a displaced Carmelite friar. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record Office, in order to reveal this fascinating story for the first time.'A highly entertaining read ... No one interested in late 20th century theatre or literature can afford to ignore this book.' Spectator'Elliott and Shukman write with style and wit ... They record something more than a byway in the history of the cold war, a true contribution to British history.' Michael Bourdeaux, Times Higher Education Supplement'An engaging, quirky account of this strange offshoot of the Cold War ... a kind of Virgin Soldiers for clever clogs.' Michael Leapman, Independent

This single volume is an authoritative and accessible guide to the background and progress of the Revolution, written by a team of over forty specialist contributors. Beginning with the radical movements of the mid-nineteenth century, the Encyclopedia covers the development of the revolutionary movement created by the intelligentsia; the condition of the peasants, that of the working class, and of the army; the role of the Tsarist secret police; the 'agents provocateurs'; the revolutionaries' own underground. A substantial section is devoted to the emergence of liberation movements among the national minorities of the borderlands. The Encyclopedia also considers the formation of Soviet institutions, and examines too the emergence of revolutionary culture well before 1917, the avant-garde in art and theatre, and the relationship to the revolution of three major Russian writers, Blok, Gorky and Mayakovsky.

The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. His crowning achievement is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure. Having utilized his still-unequaled access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and secret Presidential Archive, Volkogonov sheds new light on some of the major events of twentieth-century history and the men who shaped them. We witness Lenin’s paranoia about foreigners in Russia, and his creation of a privileged system for top Party members; Stalin’s repression of the nationalities and his singular conduct of foreign policy; the origins and conduct of the Korean War; Kruschev’s relationship with the odious secret service chief, Beria, and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Brezhnev’s vanity and stupidity; a new view of Poland and Solidarity; the ossification of Soviet bureaucracy and the cynicism of the Politburo; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Leninism and his role in history. By profiling the seven successive Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, Volkogonov also depicts in painstaking detail the progressive self-destruction of the Leninist system. In his clear-eyed character assessments and political evaluations, lucidly translated and edited by Harold Shukman, Dmitri Volkogonov has once again performed an invaluable service to twentieth-century history.

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.

Born in 1879 in Georgia, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. These edited papers reassess the deeds, policies and legacy of a man who was responsible for innumerable deaths and untold human misery.

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.

Born in 1879 in Georgia, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. These edited papers reassess the deeds, policies and legacy of a man who was responsible for innumerable deaths and untold human misery.

Born in 1879 in Georgia, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. These edited papers reassess the deeds, policies and legacy of a man who was responsible for innumerable deaths and untold human misery.

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.

Joseph Stalin was one of the most ruthless and authoritarian dictators in world history, who plunged Russia into a barbarous nightmare, leaving behind a damaged nation and a legacy of grief.This concise biography presents Lenin’s heir from his humble and troubled beginnings to the highest rank of all: General Secretary of the Communist Party. Stalin: A Pocket Biography is an accessible account of a complex tyrant, perfect for students or anyone taking a first look into modern Russian history.

Gregory Rasputin features in Russian history as a malign and destructive force, a man with an unhealthy influence on the Empress Alexandra and undue power in Russian politics. Yet his purposes were ostensibly beneficent. An uneducated peasant, he left Siberia to become a wandering 'holy man' and soon acquired a reputation as a healer. The empress was desperate to find a cure for haemophilia from which her son Alexei suffered, and in 1905 Rasputin was presented at court. His positive effect on the heir's health made him indispensible. But his religious teachings were unorthodox, and his charismatic presence aroused in many ladies of the St Petersburg aristocracy an exalted response, which he exploited sexually. Shady financial dealings added to the atmosphere of debauchery and scandal, and he was also seen as a political threat. He was assassinated in 1916.

When Britain was compelled to introduce conscription in 1916, the question arose of what to do with its 'friendly aliens' - its 30,000 Russian-Jewish refugees of military age. The Tsar didn't want them back to serve in his army, and they had no desire to help his war effort. But when sections of the British press commented that as asylum seekers they should show gratitude and join up, a campaign with strong anti-Semitic overtones took off and became Parliamentary business. Then the Tsar was overthrown, and by the summer of 1917 the question was settled with the new regime: Russian Jews of military age had to choose either to join the British Army or to return to Russia to serve there. MI5 and Special Branch kept watch on the Communist Club in the West End, where Russian revolutionaries agitated tailors, cobblers and cabinet-makers who agonised over what to do. Many ended up in the British Army or were exempted for war work, but nearly 4,000 chose to go back to Russia-for a variety of reasons. Arriving there via the Arctic within weeks and days of the Bolshevik revolution, they found a vacuum of authority, which soon turned into the chaos and dangers of civil war. How they fared and how they struggled to return to their families in Britain is the story of War or Revolution. With the help of personal documents, official British and Russian archives, and interviews of survivors and their families, the author illuminates an unknown corner of the First World War and sets it against the background of the period.