Name: Up Against the Wall: The KGB and Latvia, Paperback/Vincent Hunt
Brand: Helion & Company
Price: 216.99 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

A hard-hitting history of the Soviet security police in totalitarian Latvia - with Latvians as both oppressors and oppressed. Through the stories of people held as prisoners, never told before in English, Up Against the Wall details the methods of a brutal totalitarian regime and the bloody twists and turns of Latvia's long and complicated relationship with the Soviet security police. This is not for the squeamish. At the KGB headquarters in Riga - the Corner House, or St ra m ja - suspects were questioned and executed during the 'Year of Terror' in 1940-41. When the Soviets returned in 1944 vast numbers of Latvians fled and a war of resistance fought from the forests by partisans lasted nearly a decade. The years of Soviet rule ended only in 1991. The author presents harrowing personal testimonies of those imprisoned, tortured and deported to Siberian gulags by the KGB, drawing from museum archives and interviews translated into English for this book as well as from declassified CIA files, KGB records, and his own research in Latvia. He interviews human rights activists, partisans, KGB experts, and those who led Latvia to independence in the 1990s and explores the role of Latvian KGB double agents in defeating anti-Soviet partisan groups and the West's Cold War spying missions. Ironically, it was the feared Latvian Riflemen who helped crush the Bolsheviks' political rivals after the 1917 Revolution and defeat the British-backed White generals in the vicious Civil War of 1918