Russia Books

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Michael Dobbs

Amazon Price: $19.11 List Price: $28.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Knopf Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $14.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> Caribbean & West Indies -> Cuba
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1960s
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon.

Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev’s plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev—rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion—agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro—never swayed by conventional political considerations—demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator’s overthrow.

Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a riveting account of history’s most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Steve Coll

Amazon Price: $12.24 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 67 new & used starting at $9.25

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> Afghanistan
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> Central Asia
Subjects -> History -> Middle East -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 140 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 offers revealing details of the CIA's involvement in the evolution of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the years before the September 11 attacks. From the beginning, Coll shows how the CIA's on-again, off-again engagement with Afghanistan after the end of the Soviet war left officials at Langley with inadequate resources and intelligence to appreciate the emerging power of the Taliban. He also demonstrates how Afghanistan became a deadly playing field for international politics where Soviet, Pakistani, and U.S. agents armed and trained a succession of warring factions. At the same time, the book, though opinionated, is not solely a critique of the agency. Coll balances accounts of CIA failures with the success stories, like the capture of Mir Amal Kasi. Coll, managing editor for the Washington Post, covered Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992. He demonstrates unprecedented access to records of White House meetings and to formerly classified material, and his command of Saudi, Pakistani, and Afghani politics is impressive. He also provides a seeming insider's perspective on personalities like George Tenet, William Casey, and anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke ("who seemed to wield enormous power precisely because hardly anyone knew who he was or what exactly he did for a living"). Coll manages to weave his research into a narrative that sometimes has the feel of a Tom Clancy novel yet never crosses into excess. While comprehensive, Coll's book may be hard going for those looking for a direct account of the events leading to the 9-11 attacks. The CIA's 1998 engagement with bin Laden as a target for capture begins a full two-thirds of the way into Ghost Wars, only after a lengthy march through developments during the Carter, Reagan, and early Clinton Presidencies. But this is not a critique of Coll's efforts; just a warning that some stamina is required to keep up. Ghost Wars is a complex study of intelligence operations and an invaluable resource for those seeking a nuanced understanding of how a small band of extremists rose to inflict incalculable damage on American soil. --Patrick O'Kelley

Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia

Marshall I. Goldman

Amazon Price: $18.45 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $16.78

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> International
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the aftermath of the financial collapse of August 1998, it looked as if Russia's day as a superpower had come and gone. That it should recover and reassert itself after less than a decade is nothing short of an economic and political miracle.
Based on extensive research, including several interviews with Vladimir Putin, this revealing book chronicles Russia's dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In his deft, informative narrative, Marshall Goldman traces how this has come to be, and how Russia is using its oil-based power as a lever in world politics. The book provides an informative overview of oil in Russia, traces Vladimir Putin's determined effort to reign in the upstart oil oligarchs who had risen to power in the post-Soviet era, and describes Putin's efforts to renationalize and refashion Russia's industries into state companies and his vaunted "national champions" corporations like Gazprom, largely owned by the state, who do the bidding of the state. Goldman shows how Russia paid off its international debt and has gone on to accumulate the world's third largest holdings of foreign currency reserves--all by becoming the world's largest producer of petroleum and the world's second largest exporter. Today, Vladimir Putin and his cohort have stabilized the Russian economy and recentralized power in Moscow, and fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) have made it all possible.
The story of oil and gas in Russia is a tale of discovery, intrigue, corruption, wealth, misguidance, greed, patronage, nepotism, and power. Marshall Goldman tells this story with panache, as only one of the world's leading authorities on Russia could.

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.)

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Modern Classics Amazon Marketplace: 24 new & used starting at $11.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Former Soviet Republics & Siberia
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best book I have read in years! A real eye-opener. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

For any who have any nostalgia for the Soviet Union, this book should put it to rest. This book is hard to categorize; it is more than one man's opinion, but less than an objective history. It is, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, "an experiment in literary investigation": a combination memoir and dissertation on the evils of Communism and its inevitable product, the forced labor camp. Some have criticized Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Communist/pro-Western polemicist, but that is not an accurate description. He is a realist, showing not only the faults of Communists, but also those of the West and Western leaders. This should be required reading for European and world history classes. Volume 1 (of 3) describes the arrest and interrogation procedures, as well as life in the Gulag.

Aleksandr is The Great 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is vintage Solzhenitsyn; his brilliant mind shines forth splendidly. A book that is difficult to put down, places one inside his mind to see what he describes, so much from having spent hours memorizing while in the camps so he could later give us a glimpse of the horror that millions upon millions of human beings endured.

Editorial Review:

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society

The Cold War: A New History

John Lewis Gaddis

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $7.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1945 - Present
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> History -> World -> 20th Century

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Scholarly Example of Cold War Biases 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History (2005) is an example of counter post-revisionism. The subtitle to Gaddis's work is misleading; stating his work is a new history carries an implication that there are new sources that change the interpretation of the Cold War. Gaddis restates traditionalist arguments in the wake of post-revisionism. Gaddis clearly reveals his bias in the preface, "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it." Central to Gaddis's argument is the perception Stalin wanted to dominate Europe. The domination of Europe would appease Stalin's need for self-security, which Gaddis argues was more important to Stalin than Marxism-Leninism. He argues Stalin's megalomania and determination to secure his own position placed the United States on the defensive, and created "Machiavellians" of U.S. political leaders, which undermined the democratic traditions and morality leading to operations such as the Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Gaddis justifies the actions of the U.S. by juxtaposing them with the overtly aggressive nature of the Soviet Union. The Cold War is a successor to traditionalists, and a counter to revisionists and post-revisionists who are apt to view the Cold War without the lens of early U.S. foreign policy, and more inclined to support their work with new archival material in Russian and English. Gaddis regurgitates Cold War biases that have been disproved by new sources in the former Soviet Union. Tony Judt best sums up Gaddis's treatment of the Cold War: "Gaddis's version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for 'a fireside fairytale with a happy ending'" (Reappraisals, 381).

Editorial Review:

The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

Tim Tzouliadis

Amazon Price: $19.77 List Price: $29.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin Press HC, The Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $18.35

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Russia

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A remarkable piece of forgotten history—the story of how thousands of Americans were lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives only to meet a tragic, and until now forgotten, end

The Forsaken starts with a photograph of a baseball team. The year is 1934, the image black and white: two rows of young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms around one another’s shoulders. They are all somewhere in their late teens or twenties, in the peak of health. We know most, if not all, of their names: Arthur Abolin, Walter Preeden, Victor Herman, Eugene Peterson. They hail from ordinary working families from across America—Detroit, Boston, New York, San Francisco. Waiting in the sunshine, they look just like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms.

These men and thousands of others, their wives, and children were possibly the least heralded migration in American history. Not surprising, maybe, since in a nation of immigrants few care to remember the ones who leave behind the dream. The exiles came from all walks of life. Within their ranks were Communists, trade unionists, and radicals of the John Reed school, but most were just ordinary citizens not overly concerned were politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigrants: the search for a better life. And to any one of the millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, even the harshest Moscow winter could sustain that promise.

Within four years of that June day in Gorky Park, many of the young men in that photograph will be arrested and along with them unaccounted numbers of their fellow countrymen. As foreign victims of Stalin’s Terror, some will be executed immediately in basement cells or at execution grounds outside the main cities. Others will be sent to the “corrective labor” camps, where they will be starved and worked to death, their bodies buried in the snowy wasteland. Two of the baseball players who survive and whose stories frame this remarkable work of history will be inordinately lucky. This book is the story of these mens’ lives—The Forsaken who lived and those who died.

The result of years of groundbreaking research in American and Russian archives, The Forsaken is also the story of the world inside Russia at the time of Terror: the glittering obliviousness of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the duplicity of the Soviet government in its dealings with Roosevelt, and the terrible finality of the Gulag system. In the tradition of the finest history chronicling genocide in the twentieth century, The Forsaken offers new understanding of timeless questions of guilt and innocence that continue to plague us today.

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom

Slavomir Rawicz

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: The Lyons Press Amazon Marketplace: 63 new & used starting at $5.91

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 293 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A good read. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

After reading snippets of this book for years, I finally got it. The story was interesting and entertaining from the initial captivity in the European prisoner camp, through the trek to the Siberian camp, until the end of the long walk that led from Siberia to freedom.

Fraud or Not, It's Compelling-as 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Well, the story itself may be untrue, and come to a point where it's even farcical in what it tries to put over on readers (seeing a pair of menacing yetis in the Himalayas while crossing the mountains in winter with all of rusty wire and animal dung as provisions). But! This is a moot point, because as a tale, it's first-rate. If you can allow the fraud (and there's no real reason to get upset about it), there are large rewards to be had from The Long Walk. The story of the trek to freedom is incredible and very compelling, page b' page. The prose isn't the best, but it serves its singular point well in keeping the action moving and gripping. It's entirely designed in this way, to be a terrific story, and true or not, it only assists itself with all its narrative tendencies.

Editorial Review:

Cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and was sent to the Siberian Gulag along with other captive Poles, Finns, Ukranians, Czechs, Greeks, and even a few English, French, and American unfortunates who had been caught up in the fighting. A year later, he and six comrades from various countries escaped from a labor camp in Yakutsk and made their way, on foot, thousands of miles south to British India, where Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army and fought against the Germans. The Long Walk recounts that adventure, which is surely one of the most curious treks in history.

Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia

Steve Levine

Amazon Price: $17.16 List Price: $26.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $15.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> History -> World -> General
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Russia

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The new Russia is marching in an alarming direction. Emboldened by escalating oil wealth and newfound prominence as a world power, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has veered back toward the authoritarian roots planted in Imperial/Czarist times and firmly established during the Soviet era. Though Russia has a new president, Dmitri Medvedev, Putin remains in control, rendering the democratic reforms of the post-Soviet order irrelevant. Now, in Putin’s Labyrinth, acclaimed journalist Steve LeVine, who lived in and reported from the former Soviet Union for more than a decade, provides a penetrating account of modern Russia under the repressive rule of an all-powerful autocrat. LeVine portrays the growth of a “culture of death”–from targeted assassinations of the state’s enemies to the Kremlin’s indifference when innocent hostages are slaughtered.

Drawing on new interviews with eyewitnesses and the families of victims, LeVine documents the bloodshed that has stained Putin’s two terms as president. Among the incidents chronicled in these pages: The 2002 terrorist takeover of a crowded Moscow theater–which led to the government gassing the building, and the deaths of more than a hundred terrified hostages–seen here from new angles, through the riveting words of those who survived; and the murder of courageous investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, shot in the elevator of her apartment building on Putin’s birthday, purportedly as a malicious “gift” for the president from supporters. Finally, a shocking story that made international headlines–the 2006 death of defector Alexander Litvinenko in London–is dramatized as never before. LeVine traces the steps of this KGB-spy-turned-dissident on his way to being poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope. And in doing so, LeVine is granted a rare series of interviews with a KGB defector who was nearly killed in strangely similar circumstances fifty years earlier. Through LeVine’s exhaustive research, we come to know the victims as real people, not just names in brief news accounts of how they died.

Putin’s Labyrinth is more than an immensely readable exposé. It is highly personal, with the flavor of a memoir. It is a thoughtful book that examines the perplexing question of how Russians manage to negotiate their way around the ever-present danger of violence. It calculates the emotional toll that this lethal maze is exacting on ordinary people, even as they enjoy a dramatically heightened standard of living. Most ominously, it assesses the reopening of hostilities with the West, and the forces that are driving this major new confrontation.

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Robert F. Kennedy

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton & Company Amazon Marketplace: 84 new & used starting at $6.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> Caribbean & West Indies -> Cuba
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1945 - Present
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1960s

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

AS WE APPROACH IN HALF A YEAR THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS FBI ASSASSINATION LET US RECALL WHEN WISDOM AND DIPLOMACY RULED 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Here we have in Robert Kennedy's own account how the world kept out of annihilating nuclear warfare nearly a half century ago, rather than the current highly profitable rushes to war with untold, uncounted millions of innocent victims these past few decades.

Here we can read how true, wise, competent and democratically elected national leaders kept us out of war, Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford Nuclear Age Series).

The only lamentable sectio of this chronicle may be, as ever, Schlesinger's introduction. The rest let us read and pray once more for leaders of peace and morality, not of corrupt as profitable war-mongering.

There are several accounts of those thirteen days, and films. Let us best begin with this book.

Editorial Review:

The unique, gripping account of the perilous showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In a clear and simple record, he describes the personalities involved in the crisis, with particular attention to the actions and attitudes of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. He describes the daily, even hourly, exchanges between Russian representatives and American. In firsthand immediacy we see the frightening responsibility of two great nations holding the fate of the world in their hands.

The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West

Edward Lucas

Amazon Price: $17.79 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Palgrave Macmillan Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $16.73

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> History & Theory

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In late 1999 when Vladimir Putin was named Prime Minister, Russia was a budding democracy. Multiple parties campaigned for seats in the Duma, the nation’s parliament. The media criticized the government freely. Eight years later as Putin completes his second term as president of Russia and announces his bid for prime minister, the country is under a repressive regime. Human rights abuses are widespread. The Kremlin is openly hostile to the West. Yet the United States and Europe have been slow to confront the new reality, in effect, helping Russia win what experts are now calling the New Cold War.

Edward Lucas, former Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, offers a harrowing portrait from inside Russia as well as a sobering political assessment of what the New Cold War will mean for the world. In this big, hard hitting and urgently needed book, he shows how

* Russia is pursuing global energy markets
* Neighboring nations are being coerced back into the former Soviet orbit
* Journalists and dissidents are being silenced
* Foreign investments and private enterprises are routinely defrauded
* Putin is laying the groundwork for controlling industry and planning his new role as prime minister

Drawing on new and hitherto reported material, The New Cold War brilliantly anticipates what is in store for the new Russia and what the world should be doing.