An epic new account of the conflict that reshaped Eastern Europe and set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century.
Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin. […Learn More]
A major new history of the Cold War that explores the conflict through the minds of the people who lived through it.
More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures—not only in our politics, but in our own thoughts and fears. […Learn More]
In 2014 Crimea shapes the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized by the ancient Greeks. […Learn More]
A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise
In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. […Learn More]
The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the gulags to become Russia’s much-feared crime class: the vory v zakone
Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. […Learn More]
It remains the most audacious spy plot in American history—a bold and extremely dangerous operation to invade Russia, defeat the Red Army, and mount a coup in Moscow against Soviet dictator Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After that, leaders in Washington, Paris, and London aimed to install their own Allied-friendly dictator in Moscow as a means to get Russia back into the war effort against Germany. […Learn More]
An essential exploration of how authoritarian regimes operate at the local level
How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? Building on recent innovations in the theory of dictatorship, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk examine these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. […Learn More]
The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.
Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own–as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. […Learn More]
As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today’s crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine’s sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. […Learn More]
Based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House–Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how the United States successfully overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO to more than 900 million people. But it also reveals how Washington’s hardball tactics transformed the era between the Cold War and the present day, undermining what could have become a lasting partnership. […Learn More]