From Red Terror to Terrorist State

'Detail worthy of a John le Carre novel.' Telegraph The history of modern Russia traditionally has Communism at its centre: Lenin defines its rise, Gorbachev its fall, and Putin its aftermath. In this radical new history, Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Popov, however, introduce a new historical axis: the Cheka-the Bolsheviks' nebulous revolutionary intelligence service. Wrapped around the Party in a fight to the death from 1918 under its first head Felix Dzerzhinsky, only Stalin was able to resist its stranglehold at the cost of enormous bloodshed. Luring Russia into submission over less than a century, its murder-plots and unrivalled scheming culminated in the capture of the Kremlin in 2000. Drawing on Popov's secret documents of over two decades as a senior officer in one of the KGB's key covert sections, and on Felshtinsky's encyclopedic knowledge of Russian state archives open in the 1990s, little-known sources, and access to leading oligarchs, a new Russian history emerges. The story they tell is often unexpected while introducing a new cast of characters still of great influence-potentially surpassing Lenin's role-on our world today. From Red Terror to Terrorist State is the first complete history of the Cheka. Written from the inside, it fundamentally transforms our understanding of Russia and rethinks the way today's Kremlin views itself and the rest of the world. Animated by lifelong study, this authoritative narrative by two exceptional Russian-intelligence experts presents ground-breaking new insights based on an unrivalled wealth of new factual details.

Yuri Felshtinsky is a historian of the Russian secret service with close ties to leading defectors. He co-authored bestseller Blowing Up Russia (Gibson Square) with poisoned KGB Lt-Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, and his books have been published in twenty-two languages. He was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and was the first US citizen to receive a doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of History. He has appeared as news commentator on MSNBC, NPR, PBS, BBC and Sky TV, and in British and European media such as the Telegraph, Spectator, New European, Brussels Times, Daily Mail, el Mundo, el Pais, Die Zeit, L'Express, Svenska Dagbladet, Washington Post.