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As the first extermination camp established by the Nazi regime and the prototype of the single-purpose death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, the Chełmno death camp stands as a crucial but largely unexplored element of the Holocaust. This book is a comprehensive work that details all aspects of the camp's history, organization, and operations, and to remedy the dearth of information in Holocaust literature about Chełmno, which served as a template for the Nazis' “Final Solution.” It reveals events leading to the establishment of the camp, how the mobile killing squad employed the world's first gas van to terminate the lives of mentally ill patients, and the assembly-line procedure employed in the camp to commit genocide on the Jewish population. Based on over 20 years of careful research, the book provides a single-volume history of the camp and its handful of survivors, and includes previously unpublished first-hand accounts and photographs.

After World War II, an atomic hierarchy emerged in the noncommunist world. Washington was at the top, followed over time by its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and then Israel, with the postcolonial world completely shut out. An Indian diplomat called the system “nuclear apartheid.” Drawing on recently declassified sources from U.S. and international archives, this book offers a study of nuclear apartheid, casting a spotlight on an ideological outlook that nurtured atomic inequality and established the United States—in its own mind—as the most legitimate nuclear power. Beginning with the discovery of fission in 1939 and ending with George W. Bush's nuclear policy and his preoccupation with the “axis of evil,” the book uncovers the deeply ideological underpinnings of U.S. nuclear policy—an ideology based on American exceptionalism, irrational faith in the power of technology, and racial and gender stereotypes. The unintended result of the nuclear exclusion of nations such as North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran is, increasingly, rebellion. The book presents an illuminating look at how an American nuclear policy based on misguided ideological beliefs has unintentionally paved the way for an international “wild west” of nuclear development, dramatically undercutting the goal of nuclear containment and diminishing U.S. influence in the world.

World War II coincided with cinema's golden age. Movies now considered classics were created at a time when all sides in the war were coming to realize the great power of popular films to motivate the masses. Through multinational research, this book reveals how the Grand Alliance—Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States—tapped Hollywood's impressive power to shrink the distance and bridge the differences that separated them. The Allies, it shows, strategically manipulated cinema in an effort to promote the idea that the United Nations was a family of nations joined by blood and affection. The author revisits Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, Flying Tigers, and other familiar movies that, he argues, helped win the war and the peace by improving Allied solidarity and transforming the American worldview. Closely analyzing film, diplomatic correspondence, propagandists' logs, and movie studio records found in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union, he rethinks traditional scholarship on World War II diplomacy by examining the ways that Hollywood and the Allies worked together to prepare for and enact the war effort.

When Vladimir Putin first took power in 1999, he was a little-known figure ruling a country that was reeling from a decade and a half of crisis. In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles have guided Putin's economic policies? What patterns can be discerned? In this new analysis of Putin's Russia, Chris Miller examines its economic policy and the tools Russia's elite have used to achieve its goals. Miller argues that despite Russia's corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin's economic strategy has been surprisingly successful. Explaining the economic policies that underwrote Putin's two-decades-long rule, Miller shows how, at every juncture, Putinomics has served Putin's needs by guaranteeing economic stability and supporting his accumulation of power. Even in the face of Western financial sanctions and low oil prices, Putin has never been more relevant on the world stage.

For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play in the country's dissolution? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that Gorbachev and his allies tried to learn from the great success story of transitions from socialism to capitalism, Deng Xiaoping's China. Why, then, were efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism so much less successful than in China? Making use of never-before-studied documents from the Soviet politburo and other archives, Miller argues that the difference between the Soviet Union and China--and the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse--was not economics but politics. The Soviet government was divided by bitter conflict, and Gorbachev, the ostensible Soviet autocrat, was unable to outmaneuver the interest groups that were threatened by his economic reforms. Miller's analysis settles long-standing debates about the politics and economics of perestroika, transforming our understanding of the causes of the Soviet Union's rapid demise.

Focusing on one of the most dramatic and controversial periods in modern Greek history and in the history of the Cold War, this book provides a study employing a wide range of international archives—American, Greek, English, and French—together with foreign language publications to shed light on the role the United States played in Greece between the termination of its civil war in 1949 and Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus. It demonstrates how U.S. officials sought, over a period of twenty-five years, to cultivate Greece as a strategic Cold War ally in order to check the spread of Soviet influence. The United States supported Greece's government through large-scale military aid, major investment of capital, and intermittent efforts to reform the political system. The book examines the ways in which American and Greek officials cooperated in—and struggled over—the political future and the modernization of the country. Throughout, it evaluates the actions of the key figures involved, from George Papandreou and his son Andreas, to King Constantine, and from John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

During the final fifteen years of the Cold War, southern Africa underwent a period of upheaval, with dramatic twists and turns in relations between the superpowers. Americans, Cubans, Soviets, and Africans fought over the future of Angola, where tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers were stationed, and over the decolonization of Namibia, Africa's last colony. Beyond lay the great prize: South Africa. This book uses archival sources, particularly from the United States, South Africa, and the closed Cuban archives, to provide an international history of this theater of the late Cold War. These sources all point to one conclusion: by humiliating the United States and defying the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro changed the course of history in southern Africa. It was Cuba's victory in Angola in 1988 that forced Pretoria to set Namibia free and helped break the back of apartheid South Africa. In the words of Nelson Mandela, the Cubans “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor … [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa.”

Winning the Third World examines afresh the intense and enduring rivalry between the United States and China during the Cold War. Gregg A. Brazinsky shows how both nations fought vigorously to establish their influence in newly independent African and Asian countries. By playing a leadership role in Asia and Africa, China hoped to regain its status in world affairs, but Americans feared that China's history as a nonwhite, anticolonial nation would make it an even more dangerous threat in the postcolonial world than the Soviet Union. Drawing on a broad array of new archival materials from China and the United States, Brazinsky demonstrates that disrupting China's efforts to elevate its stature became an important motive behind Washington's use of both hard and soft power in the "Global South."