How the Cold War Began
On September 5, 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko severed ties with his embassy in Ottawa, Canada, reporting allegations to authorities of a Soviet espionage network in North America. His defection sent shockwaves through Washington, London, and Ottawa. In her riveting narrative, Amy Knight documents how Gouzenko’s defection, and the events that followed it, triggered Cold War fears and altered the course of modern history. Knight sheds new light on the Gouzenko Affair, showing how J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit the Truman administration by incriminating U.S. government insiders Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. She also probes Gouzenko’s motives for defecting and brilliantly connects these events to the strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West that marked the beginning of the Cold War. |
Who Killed Kirov?
The 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Communist Party chief and a rising star in Stalin’s inner circle, marked the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Russian historyAStalin’s Great Terror, in which millions of Soviet citizens were imprisoned, exiled or killed. Knight goes beyond the usual questions about the Kremlin’s greatest mystery to take a closer look at the people and events that enabled Stalin to not only authorize the murder of a respected colleague but also to repeat the tactic without any kind of personal repercussion. Knight expertly unravels the layers of the Kirov coverup in which newly empowered party and police officials found themselves compelled to discard fact for fiction in a vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous brand of “traitor” or “collaborator.” |
Spies without Cloaks
This book offers a compelling and comprehensive account of what happened to the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world’s most powerful and dangerous secret police organization was uncloaked. As Amy Knight shows, the KGB was renamed and reorganized several times after it was officially disbanded in December 1991–but it was not reformed. Knight’s rich and lively narrative begins with the aborted August 1991 coup, led by KGB hard-liners, and takes us through the summer of 1995, when the Russian parliamentary elections were looming on the horizon. The failed coup attempt was a setback for the KGB because it led to demands from Russian democrats for a complete overhaul of the security services. As a result, the KGB’s leaders were fired, its staff reduced, and its functions dispersed among several agencies. But President Yeltsin was reluctant to press on with reforms of the security services, because he needed their support in his struggle against mounting political opposition. |
Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant
This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career. |
The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union
From The Library Journal: |