Showing titles in Russia

On October 4, 1957, a time of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet Union secretly launched the Earth's first artificial moon. No bigger than a basketball, the tiny satellite was powered by a car battery. Yet, for all its simplicity, Sputnik stunned the world.

A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Economist LONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026 'This book reads like a spy novel' FINANICAL TIMES 'Entertaining and vivid' OBSERVER...

In the closing months of WW1, with the world exhausted and depleted by a long a brutal war, fifteen nations cobbled together an army of nearly 200,000 men and embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. The Intervention in Russia's civil war was spearheaded by Britain, her colonial forces and allies. It was designed to stop the Bolsheviks in their tracks, reinstate conservative regimes in the Russian Empire and ensure that Germany did not fill the power vacuum which the Russian Revolution had created.

'This book is NUTS! – in the best possible way. A relentless roller coaster ride through the heaven and hell of modern Russia' PETER POMERANZEV 'Written with all the pace and energy of a John Grisham novel … An incredible true story and a great read!' BILL BROWDER 'An astonishing glimpse...

Brought to you by Penguin. A revelatory eyewitness account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and heroism of the Ukrainian resistance by Pulitzer Prize finalist Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexeivich, read by Julia Emelin and Yelena Shmulenson. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, The Unwomanly Face of War is Svetlana Alexievich's collection of stories from Soviet women who...

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the emancipation of mankind from past oppression" or "a crime and a disaster." 

This is the concluding volume of the history of the IV SS-Panzerkorps, a relatively unknown organization that was born in battle during the last year of the war and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front. After their successful defense of Warsaw and the Vistula Front during the fall of 1944, the corps and its two famous Waffen-SS divisions, the Totenkopf and Wiking, as well as several divisions of the German Army, were sent south to reverse the military situation on the Hungarian Front.  

Brought to you by Penguin. From the prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, a gripping history of the First World War's longest and most terrible siege In the autumn of 1914 Europe was at war. The battling powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. On both the...

At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was hurtling towards the ocean floor. In Kursk (originally published as A Time to Die), award-winning journalist Robert Moore vividly re-creates this disaster minute by minute. 

Shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction 'Hotel Lux is an unforgettable book, bringing to life not only its protagonists but an entire world, and offering a new glimpse of a vanished past' Sally Rooney 'If affection is the first ground of memory, the archive is its late flowering...

According to the mainstream Western narrative, Vladimir Putin is an insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab. That story is incorrect. In reality, the United States and NATO bear much of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

‘A must-read for those fascinated by the decline and fall of the USSR and the emergence of a new Russia’ – Mark Galeotti, author of Forged in War 'Finely argued, carefully researched, and beautifully written' – Norman M. Naimark, author of Stalin and the Fate of Europe From the acclaimed...

Prize-winning historian and biographer, Carolly Erickson has created an eminently readable biography that recognizes the humanity of Great Catherine—Empress of Russia—with her majesty and immense capability. Dispelling some of the myths surrounding her voracious sexual appetite, the biographer portrays Catherine as a lonely woman far ahead of her time—achieving greatness in an era when women were executed on a husband’s whim.

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman - who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband - conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished. 

If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.  

In Polish: Applebaum presents the story of an inconceivable crime: “she describes the works of Stalin, which are only superseded by the Holocaust, but their cruelty and perfidy match the actions of Hitler” - Wacław Radziwinowicz (Polish journalist). This book describes Holodomor - the Great Famine in Ukraine between 1931 and 1933 which killed three million people and was man-made by the Soviet government.

'Wise, comprehensive and brilliantly succinct' OWEN MATTHEWS, author of Stalin's Children When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, he had been the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union for over twenty years, having presided over the ruthless modernisation of the early 1930s, the Great Purges later in the decade, the near-catastrophe and ultimate victory of World War II, and the country’s postwar emergence as a superpower. He was surrounded by a cult that made him seem godlike; no successors were in sight. His death was bound to be a deeply unsettling event, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

Brought to you by Penguin. Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels...

“Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist ...