Showing titles in Russian & Soviet

A provocative, comprehensive analysis of Vladimir Putin and Russia's master plan to destroy democracy in the age of Donald Trump. In the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world, Donald Trump was made President of the United States with the assistance of a foreign power. For...

From the Wall Street Journal's award-winning international investigations team comes a spellbinding account of a spy war between the U.S. and Russia that transformed into a ruthless game of hostage-taking, in which Putin held all the cards. Narrated with the propulsive drive of a spy thriller...

A bestselling national security expert delivers a chilling analysis of how Western indecision and apathy made possible the return of brutal Russian expansionism – with catastrophic consequences. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, six US presidential administrations of both parties pursued...

A "Best Non-Fiction to Read This Year" Selection from The New Statesman A magisterial, revisionist narrative history of the Soviet Union in its post-Stalin heyday, bringing a forgotten society to vivid life and offering a new explanation for how it suddenly collapsed. To those of us in the West...

The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions imposed by the West transformed European politics. The conflict did not escalate to the levels originally feared but nor was either side able to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Ukraine suffered a loss of territory but was not forced into changing its policies away from the Westward course adopted as a result of the EuroMaidan uprising of February 2014. President Putin was left supporting a separatist enclave as Russia's economy suffered significant damage.

For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills—from the Mongol yoke, to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, Soviet atheism, the chaotic 1990s and now two decades of Vladimir Putin. In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population in a way never seen before. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes are trying to drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.

The chilling and revelatory story of how Russia’s confrontation with the West went global. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a rupture with the United States and Europe not seen since the Cold War. As a result, Russia refocused its entire state machinery on one purpose: To outlast...

In 2015, Russia’s Anti-Doping Centre was suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) following revelations of an elaborate state-sponsored doping programme. Involving a nearly undetectable steroid delivery system known as ‘Duchesse cocktail’, tampering and switching of urine samples and a complex state-sanctioned cover-up, the programme was masterminded by Grigory Rodchenkov. The Rodchenkov Affair tells the full, unadulterated story that was first glimpsed in Bryan Fogel’s award-winning documentary and still continues to captivate and shock the world. 

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on seventeen years of on-the-ground coverage.

I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous attempt to document Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doc­tors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself. At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly journey. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it.

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War While...

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself.

A Pulitzer grantee’s timely work of reportage from the borderlands of Europe, Russia, and Turkey, where brewing conflicts mark a significant fault line in shifting geopolitics. Hannah Lucinda Smith, a Pulitzer grantee and acclaimed foreign correspondent, has devoted well over a decade to...

Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies - and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.

In the tradition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a terse and piercing look at a critical episode in the Ukraine War, from the award-winning author of They Will Have to Die Now. In March of 2022, three weeks after invading Ukraine, Russian forces bombed the shelter housed in the Donetsk Regional...

In this book Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his sucessor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appearance of a pluralist state. As the threat represented by Russia becomes increasingly clear, Satter's description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale...

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing - creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

For the first time ever, New York Times bestselling author and former CIA operative Robert Baer tells the explosive story of how insiders believe a KGB mole rose to the highest ranks of the CIA. In the aftermath of the Cold War, US intelligence caught three high-profile Russian spies. However...

Vladimir Lenin lies in a tomb in Moscow's Red Square. History has not been kind to this Russian leader, his teachings reviled by modern mainstream politics. But in today's capitalist society, riven by class inequality and imperialist wars, perhaps it is worth returning to this communist icon's demand for "Peace, Land and Bread", and his radical understanding of democracy.