From a National Jewish Book Award–winning author: The "revelatory and shocking" investigation into the CIA's liberation of Nazi war criminals ( Kirkus Reviews). How did Gen, Karl Wolff, one of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party's Waffen-SS, who personally oversaw the deportation of three hundred thousand Jews to the Treblinka extermination camps, escape prosecution at the Nuremberg trials? As revealed in this groundbreaking investigation—culled from recently uncovered archival documents—the answer lies within the US government, which buried reports on the Final Solution and was complicit in the recruitment of Nazi war criminals, all to protect the world economy. Among the key players was CIA director Allen Dulles, who was not only instrumental in Wolff's exoneration but also responsible for installing former slave-labor specialists into positions of power in postwar Germany. In this damning exposé of American government malfeasance, author Christopher Simpson traces the roots of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler's Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. Detailing how the existing structures of international law and commerce have encouraged mass killings, corporate looting, and profiteering at the expense of innocent victims, The Splendid Blond Beast is a disturbing and profound book about the success of evil in our time. The award-winning author of Blowback and Science of Coercion, Simpson also served as research director for Marcel Ophüls's Oscar-winning documentary, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.

The British Isles have only been successfully invaded and occupied once since 1066: the German occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940-1945. This book commemorates a defining period in the history of the islands and an important aspect of contemporary British history.

The Apocalypse of Peter is the first modern collection of studies on this intriguing Early Christian book, that has mainly survived in Ethiopic. The volume starts with a short survey of the Forschungsgeschichte and a discussion of the old question regarding its eventual inspiration: Greek or Jewish. It is followed by a new look at the circumstances of its finding, the composition of the codex and its character, and also by a new edition of the Bodleian and Rainer fragments. The major part of the book studies various aspects and passages of the Apocalypse the nature of the Ethiopic pseudo-Clementine work that contained the Apocalypse, false prophets, the Bar Kokhba hypothesis, Paradise, the post-mortem 'baptism' of sinners, the grotesque body, the pattern of justice underlying our work, the Old Testament quotations and the reception of the Apocalypse in ancient Christianity. The book concludes with a study of the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter. As has become customary, the volume is rounded off by a bibliography and a detailed index.

This book takes stock of arguments about the historical legacies of communism that have become common within the study of Russia and East Europe more than two decades after communism's demise and elaborates an empirical approach to the study of historical legacies revolving around relationships and mechanisms rather than correlation and outward similarities. Eleven essays by a distinguished group of scholars assess whether post-communist developments in specific areas continue to be shaped by the experience of communism or, alternatively, by fundamental divergences produced before or after communism. Chapters deal with the variable impact of the communist experience on post-communist societies in such areas as regime trajectories and democratic political values; patterns of regional and sectoral economic development; property ownership within the energy sector; the functioning of the executive branch of government, the police, and courts; the relationship of religion to the state; government language policies; and informal relationships and practices.

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Insightful analysis of how regional politics shaped the executive branch's ability to retain power and govern under Yeltsin and Putin

This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.

Reveals how the legacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union affects modern politics, society and economic development in post-Communist Russia.

Stalinist Society offers a fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation ruled over by Stalin and his henchmen from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Drawing on declassified archival materials, interviews with former Soviet citizens, old and new memoirs, and personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship, this book offers a non-reductionist account of social upheaval and social cohesion in a society marred by violence. Combining the perspectives from above and from below, the book integrates recent writing on everyday life, culture and entertainment, ideology and politics, terror and welfare, consumption and economics. Utilizing the latest archival research on the evolution of Soviet society during and after World War II, this study also integrates the entire history of Stalinism from the late 1920s to the dictator's death in 1953. Breaking radically with current scholarly consensus, Mark Edele shows that it was not ideology, terror, or state control which held this society together, but the harsh realities of making a living in a chaotic economy which the rulers claimed to plan and control, but which in fact they could only manage haphazardly.