soviet union

Introduces the history, geography, people, culture, government, and economy of the Soviet Union.

"Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Her eponymous heroine is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. As her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom, Sofia Petrovna joins the long lines of women waiting outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia Petrovna goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves."--back cover.

A biography of the brilliant and controversial First Lady of the Soviet Union tells the story of her childhood problems, her academic truimphs, and her marriage to and partnership with the leader of her country.

Grisha Kossover, arriving in Russia in 1972, twenty years after his father, poet Paltiel Kossover, was executed by Stalin, is finally able to read the written testament his parent left behind and finds that it illuminates the shadowed places of his own life.