On September 11, 1984, I was taken hostage by the Soviet Union and held captive in Siberia. This is the story of what happened. Few have the courage to follow their dream. Mine led from a small town in upstate New York to a dingy cell in Siberia. Leaving my hometown with a yearning for adventure, my travels brought me to Alaska where I obtained work on a merchant ship skippered by one of the youngest ship captains in the United States. Two years later, on a freight-hauling mission to the Arctic, our ship was seized by the Soviet Union and taken hostage to Siberia. Held at gunpoint and threatened with 30 years in prison, this is the story of our interrogation and interaction with high-ranking officers in the Soviet military.
This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.
"In this work, Maslov relates the fate of those generals who fell into German captivity. After relating the grisly circumstances of their ordeal in German prisoner-of-war camps, Maslov then tells the sordid tale of how an ungrateful Soviet state condemned for treason against their homeland many of those who had served it loyally both in combat and in German prisoner-of-war camps. By exploiting unprecedented archival materials, Maslov demonstrates how Stalin and the Soviet security organs condemned and shot many of the returnee-generals, most on trumped-up charges, in part as scapegoats for the real crimes committed by Stalin and the Soviet military leadership during the tragic initial period of the war."--Publisher's description.
A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."
A lost classic by beloved novelist Joseph Heywood that helped put the writer on the map, THE BERKUT begins at dusk as SS Colonel Gunter Brumm parachutes silently through the sulphuric haze in the smoldering ruins of Berlin, past the Soviet troops that encircle the skeleton that the city has become in April 1945. With the precision and skill that has marked his brilliant military career, Brumm has completed the first stage of a simple yet seemingly impossible mission: to evade the Allied forces swarming over Europe and to smuggle "Herr Wolf," the greatest war criminal of the twentieth century, to safety. Less than twenty-four hours later a special Russian team snakes its way into Berlin's city limits, headed for the Reich Chancellery. It is led by Vasily Petrov, "the Berkut"—named after the Russian eagles trained to hunt wolves, a man handpicked by Stalin himself for his ability to track down his quarry and driven by the knowledge that failure means certain death. THE BERKUT is a classic story of pursuit, of hunters and the hunted, that pits two elite teams against each other—both of them brave, resourceful, of great physical prowess and so fully motivated that only the winners will survive. Scores of other characters populate this engrossing thriller: priests, deserters, partisans, Nazis on the run, Swiss guides, Austrian refugees—as well as a larger-than-life OSS operative who is the only person among the hundreds of thousands of Allied troops in Europe who realizes that Herr Wolf is not only alive but on the verge of escaping justice. Joseph Heywood's novel is a story of enormous conviction and urgency, made even more compelling for being based on facts that have yet to be proven fiction.
Originally published in 1955, this must be one of the most dramatic adventures of our time. Clemens Forell, a German soldier, was sentenced to 25 years of forced labour in a Siberian lead mine after the Second World War. Rebelling against the brutality of the camp, Forell staged a daring escape, enduring an 8000-mile journey across the trackless wastes of Siberia, in some of the most treacherous and inhospitable conditions on earth. Bauer's writing brilliantly evokes Forell's desperation in the prison camp, and his struggle for survival and terror of recapture as he makes his way towards the Persian frontier and freedom.
