The Lenin Plot

The surprising story of one of the darkest episodes in espionage history: the 'midnight war' devised by America and Allied powers to depose Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and invade Russia.

The surprising story of one of the darkest episodes in espionage history: the ‘midnight war’ devised by America and Allied powers to depose Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and invade Russia.

This is the extraordinary story of the British plot in the summer of 1918 to overthrow the Bolshevik government in Russia, murder the Bolshevik leaders, and install a new government in Moscow that would re-open the war against the Germans on the Eastern Front. Conceived by the British envoy to the Bolsheviks, Robert Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane 30-year-old Scot, and involving French, American, and Russian accomplices, the planultimately failed - which is why it has until now remained shrouded in mystery. It was a plot in which the fate of the Revolution and the future shape of world history were upfor grabs, and the story behind it is a thrilling one involving a game of cat and mouse with the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, as well as murder, attempted murder, and a passionate love affair between Lockhart and one of his Russian accomplices, the beautiful Russian aristocrat Moura von Benckendorff.

Recounts the extraordinary and thrilling story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia, led by Mansfield Cumming, who would one day pioneer the field of covert action and become MI6, and their mission to foil Lenin's plot for global revolution. 40,000 first printing.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.

Meet Morris and Lona Cohen, an ordinary-seeming couple living on a teacher's salary in a nondescript building on the East Side of New York City. On a hot afternoon in the autumn of 1950, a trusted colleague knocked at their door, held up a finger for silence, then began scribbling a note: Go now. Leave the lights on, walk out, don't look back. Born and raised in the Bronx and recruited to play football at Mississippi State, Morris Cohen fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and with the U.S. Army in World War II. He and his wife, Lona, were as American as football and fried chicken, but for one detail: they'd spent their entire adult lives stealing American military secrets for the Soviet Union. And not just any military secrets, but a complete working plan of the first atomic bomb, smuggled direct from Los Alamos to their Soviet handler in New York. Their associates Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who accomplished far less, had just been arrested, and the prosecutor wanted the death penalty. Did the Cohens wish to face the same fate? Federal agents were in the neighborhood, knocking on doors, getting close. So get out. Take nothing. Tell no one. In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the full, true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI's nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies - an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends, and very good at their work. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.

1917 -- St. Petersburg has been renamed Petrograd. There are riots and breadlines, the rumblings of revolution. The secret police, the Cheka, and Red Guards roam the streets. Somerset Maugham and Lloyd Osbourne have been tasked with locating the Great Orlov, the stolen Imperial jewel, whose value could fund the war effort against Germany. Maugham and Osbourne must negotiate a world of spies and double agents in order to take down the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who has ordered the execution of Lloyd Osbourne. -- amazon.com

Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man. Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin's personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin "desired the good . . . but created evil." This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin's system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights. In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history. (With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs)

Traces the transformation of Lenin's brother, Alexander Ulyanov, from student to terrorist and examines how a failed plot to assassinate the tsar and Alexander's subsequent execution shaped the ideals and motivations of Lenin.