Soviet Union

What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete. Everyday War considers where peace can be cultivated at an everyday level.

With exclusive insider status as Nikita Khrushchev’s great grand-daughter, and an ex-pat living and reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since 1993, Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler offer a poignant exploration of the largest country on Earth through their recreation of Vladimir Putin’s fabled New Year’s Eve speech planned across all 11 time zones.

If you want to discover the captivating history of Armenia, then pay attention...The tale of Armenia has its beginnings as a glorious ancient kingdom, one that commanded the respect of nations as mighty as Egypt and Babylonia. For a long and ugly part of its history, Armenia struggled under the yokes of one empire after another. Yet through it all, Armenia, time and time again, emerged as a nation with a powerful identity, one that caused much grief over the years, but one that still remains a pillar of strength to its people in good times and in bad.

Adventures of an Elephant Boy is another brilliant political satire filled with heart and humor by the author of The Mouse That Roared. Living in a quiet village on the Ganges River with the freedom to do as he pleases, a simple elephant boy named Hari Ranjit Singh is selected by the Best of All Possible Nations (any resemblance to the U.S.A. being wholly intentional) to be its personal guest. On his way there, Hari learns that in order to have liberty and happiness in the rest of the world, you need lots of laws…lots and lots of laws. “Some writers have a talent for narrative. Some ...

In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there.

In this rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa introduces listeners to some of the country’s most remarkable figures - from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians - who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise.

In this groundbreaking account, Kimmo Rentola traces the epochal shifts in Soviet-Finnish relations. From the Winter War to Finland's exit from World War II in 1944, a possible Soviet-backed coup in 1948, and Moscow's designation of Finland as an enemy state in 1950, Finland was forced to navigate Stalin's outsize political and territorial demands. Rentola presents a dramatic reconstruction of Finland's unlikely survival at a time when the nation's very existence was at stake.

The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.

As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, “Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics.” In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky’s life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

Michal Goleniewski, cover name Sniper, was one of the most important spies of the early Cold War. For two and a half years at the end of the 1950s, as a Lt. Colonel at the top of Poland’s espionage service, he smuggled more than 5,000 top-secret Soviet bloc intelligence and military documents, as well as 160 rolls of microfilm, out from behind the Iron Curtain. In January 1961, he abandoned his wife and children and made a dramatic defection across divided Berlin with his East German mistress to the safety of American territory.

"Madam President. The nuclear bombs just detonated in China, Russia, and off the coast of the United States did not, I repeat, did not originate from the planet Earth. It is my opinion, and the opinion of everyone here, that the Earth can no longer be defended from the Earth." President Carolina Garcia sat in the Roosevelt Room across the hall from the Oval Office and gazed at the four people sitting opposite her in unblinking shock.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime—and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey.

In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols.

Although the 163rd Division was destroyed at the Battle of Suomassalmi the danger is far from over. The Soviet 44th Motorized Rifle Division is still a powerful force that outnumbers the Finns three to one. In addition to the forces of the 44th, Soviet High Command has dispatched reinforcements to rescue the beleaguered fighters of the 44th, further skewing the odds. Amongst this new force is a group of trained snipers. Now, plagued by a swarm of snipers, the Finnish 9th Division is losing their hold on the trapped men of the Soviet 44th Division. To make matters worse, the enemy sniper ...

The Soviet plan to cut Finland in half failed spectacularly with the destruction of the 163rd and 44th Divisions at Suomassalmi and The Raate Road. Undeterred by the disaster, Soviet High Command crafted a new strategy to bisect Finland, targeting the crucial crossroads in the town of Kuhmo. Learning from their mistakes, they deployed the formidable 54th Mountain Division, seasoned in Arctic warfare, to achieve the objective. When ten thousand Red Army soldiers stormed across the border, the Finnish 9th Division, led by Colonel Siilasvuo, raced to intercept them. After days of fierce combat...

History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America’s leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, authoritarian rule is on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones as she examines how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule.

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.

The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking “bulldozer,” wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev’s authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin.

The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad—while Western spies watched in horror as their governments failed to guard against the threat. Unflinchingly documenting the growing web of death on British and American soil, Heidi Blake bravely exposes the Kremlin's assassination campaign as part of Putin's ruthless pursuit of global dominance—and reveals why Western governments have failed to stop the bloodshed.

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of Hells Angels convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, bohemian theatre directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators and oligarch revolutionaries.