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Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
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Publisher's summary
If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.
Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article "The Hell of Treblinka" became evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin.
We are only now able to examine Grossman's prose, which has the everlasting quality of great art, as well as his life and legacy, which Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates.
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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The Zhivago Affair
- The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
- By: Peter Finn, Petra Couvée
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak knew his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an assault on the 1917 Revolution, so he allowed it to be published in translation all over the world.
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Read this to understand Doctor Zhivago and Russia
- By KathrynVB on 10-16-14
By: Peter Finn, and others
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Adolf Hitler
- A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Duke Holm
- Length: 2 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Explore the rise of Adolf Hitler. Was Hitler, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost 10 years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.
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Awesome little book
- By Bryan T. on 02-02-19
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The Lemon Tree
- By: Sandy Tolan
- Narrated by: Sandy Tolan
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly 20 years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.
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Steeping The Lemon Tree
- By Faithfull Fan on 04-11-18
By: Sandy Tolan
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Lenin's Tomb
- The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
- By: David Remnick
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 29 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this best-selling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.
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The moral complexity of a comic book
- By Tot on 02-22-19
By: David Remnick
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Prague Winter
- A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
- By: Madeleine Albright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Albright
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history.
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History from a Personal Perspective
- By Jeanette Finan on 02-22-13
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Trotsky
- Downfall of a Revolutionary
- By: Bertrand M. Patenaude
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall ofa Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.
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Good Trotsky Book, BAD conclusions at end
- By Darius on 02-09-15
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Gulag
- A History
- By: Anne Applebaum
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 27 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gulag - a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners - was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.
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Nice compliment to Solzhenitsyn
- By Thucydides on 08-03-17
By: Anne Applebaum
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Defying Hitler
- The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule
- By: Gordon Thomas, Greg Lewis
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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An enthralling story that vividly resurrects the web of everyday Germans who resisted Nazi rule.
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The Righteous Few
- By Linda on 05-19-19
By: Gordon Thomas, and others
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Year Zero
- A History of 1945
- By: Ian Buruma
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the greatdrama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and anew, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come across Asia and all of continental Europe. It was the greatest global powervacuum in history, and out of the often vicious power struggles thatensued emerged the modern world as we know it.
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Great historical overview
- By marykk on 10-14-13
By: Ian Buruma
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Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad. This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.
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Almost as good as Life and Fate.
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Stalingrad
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The story told in Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family. Even as the Germans advance, the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, refuses to leave Stalingrad. Far from the front, her eldest daughter, Ludmila, is unhappily married to the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. Viktor's research may be of crucial military importance, but he is distracted by thoughts of his mother in the Ukraine, lost behind German lines.
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One of the best audiobooks of all time
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By: Vasily Grossman, and others
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Ayn Rand
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Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), one of America’s most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships––experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist.
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In Russian literary marriages, the wives of some of the most famous authors of all time did not resent taking a "secondary position", although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers' illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West.
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A sinister cabal of corrupt law enforcement personnel, intelligence agents, and military officials at the highest levels of government plotted to overthrow a president. Even after they failed, they continue to secretly pull the levers of power without any accountability to the American people. This isn’t the synopsis of a fictional spy thriller. This is what is actually happening in the United States government.
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A Book Whose Time Has Come
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Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad. This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.
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Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate
- By Alifa on 02-13-12
By: Vasily Grossman
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Stalingrad
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- Narrated by: Full Cast, Kenneth Branagh, Greta Scacchi, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Almost as good as Life and Fate.
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Performance
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By: Alexandra Popoff
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The Wives
- The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants
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By: Alexandra Popoff
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What listeners say about Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- peter
- 12-10-22
Most memorable part
How prisoners in the gulag were dismayed about Stalin's death, because they all thought they were there because of a mistake, but thier fellow inmates were truly enemies of the people.
and how Stalin distrusted everyone around him, killed of his own army top, but trusted Hitler no not attack.
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- J.Brock
- 12-04-20
LEARN From His Life
Vasily Grossman lived a most extraordinary life, in the most tumultuous time of the 20th century. He observed the horrors of the Nazis extermination of the Jews, namely his adored mother, first hand. He witnessed the battle of Stalingrad and was able to communicate to the world what that was like for those under Stalin's brutal communism. To ill-informed westerners of today who love the idea of flirting with communism, Grossman observed that the battle of Stalingrad was FREEDOM for those who were there. That in itself should be a wake up call to what true fascism is. Grossman equated Nazism with Communism in that they are mirror images of each other. His book was actually arrested at one point! Take heed America in 2020 what this acclaimed author had to say in his lifetime.
Stefan Rudnicki's narration is spectacular. He does Russian works so well. BRAVO!!!
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- A. M.
- 08-22-21
History Starts Here...
To know this history from the perspective of the first person is to read the first person's books. In my opinion, WWII and USSR history starts with William Shirer and Vasily Grossman.
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- DFK
- 12-11-20
Very important work
The subject deserves 5 stars, but I felt that the presentation or organization could be improved upon. There was a lot of jumping around between years, back and forth in time. I’m sure it is difficult to avoid this, but it was a bit confusing. The subject itself is extremely important - both the author Grossman and the messages portrayed by him and by his biographer, Popoff. Denial of atrocities, of genocide, of mass murder are all too common, as is the whitewashing of history. But history must be known and acknowledged, if humans are to learn anything about the value of human life and the tragedy of the destruction of human life. I listened to Stalingrad and was impressed that Grossman is probably the best author of the 20th century, and under appreciated. I plan on reading Life and Fate (though I’m holding out for a while in hopes of an unabridged audio version) and I’m glad I listened to this so as to acquire a deeper understanding of the greatness of Grossman’s writing and efforts. Popoff brings us up to current times, and provides the reader with excellent insight into the psyche of the Russian people and their leaders today. Actually, quite a tragic “end”, though I hope the “end” improves.
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- James Messelbeck
- 06-25-19
What? Nazism = communism?
Popoff finally writes the historical truth other historians dance around though never identifying the two ideologies as isomers of each other. Can’t wait to listen to Life and Fate. I hope Audible produces Grossman’s Stalingrad soon.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Trace
- 01-11-23
Grossman's contributions are invaluable
Grossman's contributions are invaluable to understanding the 20th century. A Popoff's moving and comprwhensive biography transported me to the world Grossman inhabited, introduced me to the people he interacted with and circumstances that he was immersed in. Now I re-read Grossman's work with even greater interest and emotion. Gratitude.
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- Jeff Lacy
- 01-16-20
Courageous Russian writer
Vasily Grossman was a humanist, intellectual, and journalist, essayist, and novelist. He described the Russian soldiers’ experience on the front line at Stalingrad, following the Red Army through the gates of Nazi death camps, battling the Stalinists for the publication of his fiction. Enlightening and engaging, it brings the social, political, economic, intellectual, military, and literary history of the USSR.
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1 person found this helpful
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- William R Urban
- 01-18-23
Great reading of a great book
I read Life and Fate in college never having heard of the reader. This was an excellent reading of an excellent biography of a great writer and how he lived in the Soviet Union through persecution and censorship.
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