Soviet Science

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.

In June 2023, the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take control of Moscow. The last person to attempt such a venture was Adolf Hitler. Wagner’s power began from patronage, then grew from international theft and extortion, until it was so great it exposed the weakness of Russia’s conventional military and became a threat to the Russian state, one that was not demonstrably eliminated until a private jet containing Wagner’s core commanders was blown up in midair.

Wartime Russia is drowning in fascist symbols. Zealous patriots attack journalists, opposition activists, and anyone suspected of betraying the motherland. Russians are urged to join the cause by hordes of online trolls and sleek videos of angry young men bellowing patriotic slogans. State television terrifies viewers with trumped up tales of anti-Russian conspiracies and genocidal yearnings. Child soldiers proudly parade across Red Square. This is Russia in the 2020s: a land of performative rage and nationalist untruth, where play-acting, pretense, and broken promises are a way of life.

Moscow’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers, and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?

The heroic story of Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies. On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral.

This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a twenty-first-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion.

What is Vladimir Putin up to? This book examines how the mentality of Putin and his team - the code of Putinism - has shaped Russian politics over the past two decades. It explains not only the thoughts and ideas that motivate Putin's decisions, but also the set of emotions and habits that influence how Putin and his close allies view the world. While some observers portray Putin as either a cold-blooded pragmatist or a strident Russian nationalist, Taylor provides a more nuanced and compelling interpretation of Putin's motives and actions.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanov Sisters, Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eyewitness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold.

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg, and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.

No espionage missions have been kept more secret than those involving American submarines. Blind Man's Bluff reveals for the first time how the Navy sent subs wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables, as well as other secrets as deep as the sea.

History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals - the two opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners.

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.

Et si la philosophie russe nous aidait à comprendre la stratégie de Vladimir Poutine ? Cette idée n’a rien d’absurde, tant les prophètes du conservatisme, de “la Voie russe” et de “l’empire eurasiatique” ont le vent en poupe au Kremlin et le soutien de toutes les extrêmes-droites européennes, le FN en tête.

Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even influence. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in the wake of Donald Trump's victory.

Nell'agosto 1991, Tiziano Terzani - che già nel febbraio precedente ha potuto visitare le isole Curili e Sachalin, estremo avamposto dell'Unione Sovietica - inizia, come membro di una spedizione sovietico-cinese, un lungo viaggio sul fiume Amur per osservare da vicino la situazione del paese nelle sue zone asiatiche più periferiche.

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.

The State and Revolution (1917), by Vladimir Lenin, describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin began the composition of an early draft of State and Revolution while in exile in Switzerland in 1916, under the title "Marxism on the State". "Soviets", legislative bodies of workers and peasants were the de facto governments of Petrograd and many smaller cities.

In Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the dramatic endgame of America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan’s central role in shaping the world we live in today. On May 31, 1988, Reagan stood on Russian soil and addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University, delivering a remarkable - yet now largely forgotten - speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital.

Lending intimate historical detail and thrilling historical narrative, swinging from Moscow to Paris to Mexico, and taking in a cast of morally conflicted Russian spies, fanatical Mexican painters, and innocent American idealists, The Death of Trotsky delves into the lives of two fascinating, complex men locked in a life-or-death struggle that will bend the course of history.

In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes listeners from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting - from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17 - to understand the true extent of Putin's long war.