From the position he held prior to Stalin's death, he seemed to be an unlikely leader. However, Khrushchev quickly gained control and popularity attaining the leadership status. Much of the support Khrushchev gained was due the agricultural success he initiated under Stalin and his condemnation of Stalin's brutal leadership after Stalin's death.

While Khrushchev achieved positive things for the Soviet Union, the economic, specifically agricultural failures he experienced as leader haunt his reputation. This book focuses on Khrushchev's those agricultural decisions with little mention being...

On the morning of April 26, 1986, a Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl (near Kiev) exploded, pouring radioactivity into the environment and setting off the worst disaster in the history of nuclear energy. Now a former Soviet scientist gives a comprehensive account of the catastrophe. Photographs.

In March 1985, without the usual long delay and speculation, Mikhail Gorbachev, at fifty-four years of age, became the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin. Gorbachev belongs to a new generation of Communist leaders, a generation that did not experience the suffering and fear that Gorbachev's predecessors did who came to power under Stalin. He is a product of the system, not one of its creators. Within a year his vigorous style had made him a well-known political figure throughout the world. In this book, Zhores A. Medvedev, author of an acclaimed biography of Yuri Andropov and many other...

Late in 1957 a huge explosion occurred in the disposal section of the Soviet atomic weapons industry located in the Southern Urals where atomic wastes had been stored for over ten years. The result was devastating. The primary radioactive contamination covered between 800 and 1200 square miles, an area almost as large as Rhode Island. People died--whole villages had to be evacuated and bulldozed. All that remained, both plant and animal life, received such a massive dose of radiation that its effects will probably be felt for as long as a century.

Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet biochemist and outspoken critic of the Soviet bureaucracy, who was railroaded into a mental hospital, and his brother, historian Roy Medvedev, who rallied the Soviet scientific and intellectual community in protest, together tell the story of "repression by psychiatry" in Russia today.

Josef Stalin remains one of the greatest enigmas of modern history. Unflinching, impenetrable, inhuman in his cruelty, bathed in misery himself, he represents to many a very paradigm of evil - perhaps, in his icy rationalism, even more so than Hitler himself. More than a hundred biographies of Stalin have been written since his death in 1953, but this study looks at the torrent of new material unleashed with the opening of the secret Soviet archives when the Union collapsed. The truths extracted from these long-secret archives provide a radically fresh insight into the life and career of one...