Showing titles in Russia

It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world, and dominates Western media coverage of it to an extraordinary extent. In Russia itself, he is likewise the centre of attention for detractors and supporters alike. But as Tony Wood argues, this overwhelming focus on the president and his personality means that we understand Russia less than we ever did before.    

“A story as fascinating as it is undersung . . . a riveting account” (The New York Times Book Review, Best Books of 2025 So Far) of the CIA’s secret program to smuggle millions of books through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War “Brimming with poetic detail, spring-loaded with...

Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar takes listeners inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and the impact they had on international broadcasting, United States-Soviet relations, Russian history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A mother is a dissident, a refusenik, and a prisoner in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her daughter, eleven years old, is left without a family. A grandmother is in the USA, waiting for her daughter and granddaughter and not knowing if she'll ever see them again. "I am fine," the three of them write to each other in their letters. How can you be "fine" when you have to fight to survive? When you must be silent? When the place that you love turns against you?

Yuri Bezmenov (1939-January 5, 1993) was a Soviet journalist for RIA Novosti and a former KGB informant who defected to Canada in 1971. After being assigned to a station in India, Bezmenov eventually grew to love the people and the culture of India. At the same time, he began to resent the KGB-sanctioned repression of intellectuals who dissented from Moscow's policies and he decided to defect to the West. Bezmenov is best remembered for his anti-communist lectures and books published in the 1980s under the alias of Tomas David Schuman.

This insightful study explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the judiciary to his friends from the KGB, he has enriched his business friends from Saint Petersburg with preferential government deals. Thus, Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism. 

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Abraham Ascher offers a skillful blend of engaging narrative and fresh analysis in this concise introduction to Russian history. Newly updated on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, it covers the growing political tensions between Russia and its neighbors and the mounting divergence between Russian and US foreign policies. This stimulating and beautifully written introduction will prove enlightening for students, scholars, and travelers alike.

A riveting true-life thriller and revealing memoir from the daughter of an American intelligence officer the astonishing true story of two spies and their families on opposite sides of the Cold War. In the summer of 1975, seventeen-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her...

Stuart Goldman convincingly argues that a little-known, but intense, Soviet-Japanese conflict along the Manchurian- Mongolian frontier at Nomonhan influenced the outbreak of World War II and shaped the course of the war. The author draws on Japanese, Soviet, and western sources to put the seemingly obscure conflict - actually a small undeclared war - into its proper global geo-strategic perspective.The book describes how the Soviets, in response to a border conflict provoked by Japan, launched an offensive in August 1939 that wiped out the Japanese forces at Nomonhan.

In one year Admiral Kolchak fell from being Supreme Ruler of All the Russias to the victim of a show trial. This text traces his downfall, whilst providing a broader history of Russia in a time of crisis and revolutionary change.

* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME * Winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * “A haunting book of rare courage.” —Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent and author of On All Fronts To be a journalist is to...

A thrilling dramatic narrative of the top-secret Cold War-era spy plane operation that transformed the CIA and brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An explosive exposé that lays out the story behind the Steele Dossier, including Russia’s decades-in-the-making political game to upend American democracy and the Trump administration’s ties to Moscow. “Harding…presents a powerful case for Russian...

From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history–and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the...

Écrit au début du XXe siècle, ce texte réfléchi explore ce que l’amour révèle d’un pays et de ses mœurs. Claude Anet observe, compare et interroge les relations amoureuses en Russie, confrontant sensibilités, usages et attentes, et laissant paraître, en creux, les écarts culturels qui façonnent les cœurs.

Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing. Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union...

In The Red Mirror, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova uses social identity theory to explain Putin's leadership. The main source of Putin's political influence, she finds, lies in how he articulates the shared collective perspective that unites many Russian citizens. Under his tenure, the Kremlin's media machine has tapped into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation - derived from the Soviet transition in the 1990s - and has politicized national identity to transform these emotions into pride and patriotism.

The Way Things Were is a collection of stories and novellas by Ukrainian writer Marko Vovchok focused around the lives of Russian and Ukrainian serfs during the last decade of slavery in the Russian Empire. Marko Vovchok's stories are not epic, historically significant episodes, but rather small everyday vignettes from the lives of serfs and their masters, made all the more powerful by their serene, conversational style bringing the reality of the era into stark relief.

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. 

El triunfo de la Revolución rusa transformó al mundo y fue trascendental para la historia de la política contemporánea. Este audiolibro, riguroso y ameno, nos ayudará a entender los motivos que provocaron el derrocamiento de los Románov y el triunfo de la Revolución.