PFD
Drury House
34-43 Russell Street
London WC2B 5HA
Tel: 020 7344 1000
Fax: 020 7836 9543
Professor Steven Merritt Miner
Agent: James Gill

Chair of the History Department at Ohio University, Professor Miner is the author of BETWEEN CHURCHILL AND STALIN (University of North Carolina Press, 1988) and STALIN'S HOLY WAR: RELIGION, NATIONALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF ALLIANCE (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). He has written for the TLS, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the L. A. TIMES, and is a frequent contributor to the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.

He is at work on THE FURIES UNLEASHED: THE SOVIET PEOPLE AT WAR, 1941-1945, to be published by Bloomsbury.

THE FURIES UNLEASHED: THE SOVIET PEOPLE AT WAR, 1941-1945 US edition to be published by HarperCollins

BLOOMSBURY (Del 1 Sep 08)

Tamerlaine, the great Khan and conqueror of Central Asia, was buried in a sarcophagus covered by the world's largest single piece of jade. Legend had it that disturbing the tomb's cover would unleash on the world the greatest conflict ever known. Undaunted by that legend, Soviet archaeologists removed the lid on 22 June 1941. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the very same day, mobilizing the greatest army (3,500,000 men) ever known.

THE FURIES UNLEASHED: The Soviet People at War 1941-1945 is historian Steven Merritt Miner's attempt to do no less than reframe and reassess the details and impact of the Soviet-German War. In this comprehensive examination, Professor Miner will recast the military, diplomatic and social history of the USSR during the war in a way never before presented. Making use of collections of previously top-secret documents released in post-Soviet Russia - and consulting a mass of new memoirs published after the collapse of the USSR - he will assemble an updated narrative of this monumental clash, taking into account tangled ethnic, national and regional realities, while blending the cultural, social and economic factors that both devastated and made possible the bloody triumph of the Russian people. More than just a military history, THE FURIES UNLEASHED will offer a "civic history" of the Great Patriotic War.

It will be as grand and vital an undertaking as historical writing affords, and one which promises a work of incredible depth, richness and genuine historical recalibration.