The Purges in the USSR The purges in the USSR started in the mid-1930's and continued throughout the late 1930's. Joseph Stalin had shared power with Zinoviev and Kamenev in the time after the death of Lenin (1924) and he had no intention of ever being put in that position again. By the mid-1930's Stalin believed that the Bolshevik Party 'Old Guard' represented a threat to him and unless he did something about them they would remove him from power.

History states that Heinrich Himmler, to cheat the gallows, bit on a cyanide tablet embedded in one of his teeth and died as a result. Himmler, after the death of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, was probably the most prized catch out of all the senior figures in Nazi Germany. Arrested with two other men by a British soldier at a bridge at Bremervorde in Northern Germany as he travelled to Switzerland, the small dishevelled figure with a patch over his left eye, was put into a guardroom.

Bright Eyes of Danger - An Account of the Anglo-Sikh Wars 1845-1849, Bill WhitburnBright Eyes of Danger - An Account of the Anglo-Sikh Wars 1845-1849, Bill WhitburnIn some respects this a quite an old fashioned book, looking at one of Britain& 39;s Imperial wars without the post-imperial baggage. The British in India are seen as one of many competing powers, no more or less valid than any of the others taking advantage of the decline of the Mogul empire.

I know that Christians were persecuted during Marcus Aurelius's lifetime. I believe he mentions them only once in his Meditations, in which he scorns them. But that's really all I know about the su…

Roman society was literate, and like other literate societies, it liked to mark events and honor achievements with memorial stones or commemorative slabs. This commomerative slab fragment might have...

Archaeology – the name conjures up images of someone carefully sifting the sands for traces of the past and then meticulously putting those relics in a museum.