Category: Russian History
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The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015) by Steven Lee Myers
The improbable rise and frightening reign of Russian president Vladimir Putin is surely one of the most fascinating stories of the early twenty-first century. How did a low-level, low-key former KGB officer become president of a global nuclear power without ever having served in political office and with little national name-recognition at the time of…
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The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1990) by Peter Hopkirk
In the annals of imperial history, few conflicts have captured the imagination quite like the Great Game – that shadowy, century-long struggle between the British and Russian empires for dominance over Central Asia. Peter Hopkirk’s masterful work, “The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia” (1990), stands as the definitive account of this…
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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003) by William Taubman
Nikita Khushchev was an unlikely giant of the twentieth century. His improbable decades-long march to supreme leadership of a world girdling communist empire was matched only by his improbably well-orchestrated fall from power in 1964. The riddle that Tubman seeks to unwrap in this excellent single-volume biography is: How exactly did someone like Khrushchev, this…
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Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011) by Robert K. Massie
I’m a passionate reader of non-fiction. My living room wall is lined with books from floor to ceiling. Just the other day, as I scanned my hundreds of books – including a wide variety of biographies on presidents, writers, generals and business titans – it occurred to me that I did not own and had…
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Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993) by David Remnick
In the summer of 1994 I departed for a semester study abroad program at Moscow State University. It was barely three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it would prove to be a wild, often unforgettable experience. A few months before I left, David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the…
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