"The Story of Russia is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia's history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it. No other country has reimagined its own story so often, in a perpetual effort to stay in step with the shifts of ruling ideologies. From the founding of Kievan Rus in the first millennium to Putin's war against Ukraine, Orlando...

"Impressive."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Spanning 1800 years of Russia's history, people, poltics, and culture, Edward Rurtherford, author of the phenomenally successful SARUM: THE NOVEL OF ENGLAND, tells a grand saga that is as multifaceted as Russia itself. Here is a story of a great civilization made human, played out through the lives of four families who are divided by ethnicity but united in shaping the destiny of their land.
"Rutherford's...

"Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999-a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin's books into an enormous...

"In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin's body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By 1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. To turn these reporters into Kremlin mouthpieces, Stalin imposed the most draconian controls--unbending...

"Chevengur is a philosophical novel that is also rich in psychological, social, and sensuous detail. Although it was never publishable in the USSR, it now stands as one of the most celebrated of Soviet novels, and along with The Foundation Pit, it is the most ambitious and moving of Andrey Platonov's efforts to take the measure of a world undergoing revolutionary transformation. The full text of Chevengur is here translated into English for the first...

"The 1917 Revolution sent shockwaves throughout the globe, setting a chain of events in motion that would change the entire course of the 20th century. With the overthrow of the Romanov Dynasty, Russia was plunged into the political unknown and, from the crucible of social unrest, ideological conflict and violent civil war, the world's first communist state was forged. This book provides an incisive overview of one of the most complex and turbulent...

"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment,...

"Vassily Grossman (1905 - 1964) has become well-known in the last twenty years - above all for his novel Life and Fate. This has often been described as a Soviet (or anti-Soviet) War and Peace. Most readers, however, do not realize that it is only the second half of a dilogy. The first half, originally titled Stalingrad but published in 1952 under the title For a just cause, has received surprisingly little attention. Scholars and critics seem to...

The classic account of the social, economic, and political dynamics of the first socialist revolution as told by one of its central leaders. Trotsky describes how, under Lenin s leadership, the Bolshevik Party led the working class, peasantry, and oppressed nationalities to overturn the monarchist regime of the landlords and capitalists and bring to power a government of the workers and peasants one that set an example for toilers the world over....

"Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union-but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya's dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs,...