So Simon Sebag Montefiore has broken my heart yet again with a beautiful story about 20th century Russia/Soviet Union. This is the story of Sashenka starting in 1916 and ending when we find out in 1994 what happened to her in the end and to her husband and children. Sashenka is 16 in 1916, the da...
It's finally over!!!I usually really like these kinds of books but I just couldn't bring myself to like this one. I never liked Lenin or his minions and later Stalin, and I can't understand how any person wanted to be like them.I couldn't like Sashenka. She seemed too cold and idealistic through ...
Montefiore writes about Russia and Stalin's awful government alongside, in a distorted mirror sort of way, the lives of the elite Soviet men and women in Moscow. They are all linked by a school, their children, and their amazing lives of luxury amid a ruined, damaged Russia. The catalyst for the ...
ستالين الشاب زعيماً وشاعراً ولصاً وكاهناً وزير نساء في عام 2005 م نشر المؤرخ البريطاني سيمون سيباغ مونتيفيوري المتخصص في تاريخ الشرق الأوسط والتاريخ الروسي كتاباً يتناول حياة الطاغية الشهير ستالين بعنوان (ستالين: بلاط القيصر الأحمر)، معتبراً في كتابه هذا ستالين أحد أكثر الشخصيات التي صاغت شكل ا...
His parents had whispered about it in the bathroom as parents did in those days – with the taps running. ‘Can he be guilty?’ asked Tamara. ‘Read this,’ answered his father. Tamara quietly read out: ‘“Protocols of Interrogation of Mendel Barmakid . . .” But they could have used excessive methods,’...
If you do not, I am sorry for you, and that is the end of the matter. Stanley Baldwin Charles Dickens was the English writer of his age. Rambunctious, touching, tragic and comic by turns, his novels captured the public’s imagination like no others before or since. He transmuted the realities he s...
She poured herself a shot of vodka—for courage and to overcome her exhaustion. Through her little window, the red stars of the Kremlin glowed. Judge Satinov: How did you procure this cyanide? Tell the Tribunal! Katinka imagined Sashenka standing at the end of the Tshaped t...
The family were traditionally amirs of Mecca but the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid had kept him in luxurious limbo in Istanbul for over fifteen years while appointing other members of the family. Then in 1908, the Young Turks, faced with a lack of other candidates, despatched him to Mecca (where his...