Historian Patenaude, a lecturer at Stanford, concentrates on the period from 1937, when Trotsky arrived in Mexico, to his assassination in 1940, painting a vivid portrait of Lenin's former right-hand man: his stormy relations with his flamboyant Mexican champion (and later enemy), artist Diego Rivera; his dealings with his American supporters; and the relentless efforts of Stalin's GPU to kill him.

"A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world. It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler...

"Oleg Gordievsky was a spy like no other. The product of a KGB family and the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Russian eventually saw the lies and terror of the regime for what they were, a realization that turned him irretrievably toward the West. His KGB career took flight in Copenhagen in 1966 and eventually brought him to the highest post in the KGB's London station -- but throughout that time he was secretly working for MI6,...

"From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment, using his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of material about the latest advances in aviation technology, alerting the Americans to possible developments years in the future. He was one of the most productive and valuable spies ever to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation...

"In their relentless battle against Hitler, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were comrades ... or at least comrades-in-arms. Hollywood joined the fight with Mission to Moscow, based on Ambassador Joseph E. Davies' bestseller about his pre-World War II experiences in the Soviet Union. The film features Academy Award winner Walter Huston as Davies, plus accomplished actors playing the headline-dominating figures of Churchill, Stalin, von Ribbentrop, Litvinov,...

"The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but...