1925-1953

After the wife and daughters of Leo Demidov, a former member of Moscow's secret police, are killed while on a "Peace Tour" to New York City, he watches helplessly from the other side of the world as the tragic event unfolds. Leo sets out on a quest to find out exactly what really happened that fateful night in New York even if it takes decades to get the answer from the one man who knows the truth.

A former member of Russia's secret police must stay behind when his wife and two daughters travel to New York and become involved in a political conspiracy that turns tragic.

Honored as a hero for his role in stopping a serial killer three years earlier, post-Stalinist Soviet MGB officer Leo Demidov is placed at the head of a newly formed Moscow homicide department and is forced to undertake a mission in the criminal underworld.

"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.

Examines the life of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, drawing from Soviet archival film and a wealth of interviews, including a discussion with Mikhail Gorbechev, to reveal the atrocities of Stalin's twenty-nine-year reign of tyranny.

A detailed portrait of the complex Russian leader that probes his psychological motivations and legacy.

The personal drama of a young girl's struggle to survive with her family, between the opposing German and Soviet armies, in Eastern Europe.

An aging revolutionary is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the political party to which he has dedicated his life, and he recalls a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a totalitarian government.