Best Russian & Former Soviet Union Politics Books
Here you will get Best Russian & Former Soviet Union Politics Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery
Author: by Craig Unger
Published at: Dutton (January 26, 2021)
ISBN: 978-0593182536
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* Kompromat n. Russian for “compromising information” This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the worldincluding Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sourcesintelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB, thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian.
American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine. Among them, the book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset?
The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, and it supports that conclusion backs with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first spotted Trump as a potential asset, how they cultivated him as an asset, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points that were published in three of America’s most prestigious newspapers.
2. State and Revolution
Author: by Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Published at: Martino Fine Books (November 9, 2011)
ISBN: 978-1614271925
2011 Reprint of 1932 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. “State and Revolution” (1917) describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution.
It describes the inherent nature of the State as a tool for class oppression, a creation born of one social class’s desire to control all other social classes. Whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the State remains in the control of the ruling class.
Even in a democratic capitalist republic, the ruling class will never willingly relinquish political power, maintaining it via various strategies. Hence, according to this view, communist revolution is the sole remedy for the abolition of the state.
3. Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
Author: by Rachel Maddow
Published at: Crown; Reprint edition (February 2, 2021)
ISBN: 978-0525575481
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Big Oil and Gas Versus DemocracyWinner Take AllA rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. The New York Times Book Review In 2010, the words earthquake swarm entered the lexicon in Oklahoma.
That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabiliaincluding his iconic crystal-encrusted white glovewas sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon.
Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S.Election.
4. The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Author: by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
608 pages
1 pounds
5.31 x 0.97 x 8 inches
BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY. TimeVolume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn’s moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.George F.
KennanIt is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. David Remnick, New YorkerSolzhenitsyn’s masterpiece…. The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today. Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
5. Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
Author: by Andy Greenberg
Published at: Anchor (October 20, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0525564638
From Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg comes the true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.”Much more than a true-life techno-thriller … A tour through a realm that is both invisible and critical to the daily lives of every person alive in the 21st century.”Los Angeles TimesIn 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks.
Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world’s largest businessesfrom drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies.
At the attack’s epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damagethe largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
6. Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
Author: by Catherine Belton
Published at: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Illustrated edition (June 23, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0374238711
A Sunday Times bestseller | A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceNamed a best book of the year by The Economist | Financial Times | New Statesman | The Telegraph”[Putin’s People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism.” Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic”This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades.” Peter Frankopan, Financial TimesInterference in American elections.
The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe.War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin’s reach into the United States and Europe.
7. The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
Author: by David E. Hoffman
Published at: Anchor; Illustrated edition (May 10, 2016)
ISBN: 978-0345805973
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year It was the height of the Cold War, and a dangerous time to be stationed in the Soviet Union. One evening, while the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station was filling his gas tank, a stranger approached and dropped a note into the car.
The chief, suspicious of a KGB trap, ignored the overture. But the man had made up his mind. His attempts to establish contact with the CIA would be rebuffed four times before he thrust upon them an envelope whose contents would stun U.S.Intelligence.
In the years that followed, that man, Adolf Tolkachev, became one of the most valuable spies ever for the U.S. But these activities posed an enormous personal threat to Tolkachev and his American handlers. They had clandestine meetings in parks and on street corners, and used spy cameras, props, and private codes, eluding the ever-present KGB in its own backyarduntil a shocking betrayal put them all at risk.
Drawing on previously classified CIA documents and on interviews with firsthand participants, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting and a riveting true story of intrigue in the final years of the Cold War.
8. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
Author: by Orlando Figes
Published at: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 1, 1998)
ISBN: 978-0140243642
On the brink of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, read the most vivid, moving, and comprehensive history of the events that changed the worldIt is history on an epic yet human scale. Vast in scope, exhaustive in original research, written with passion, narrative skill, and human sympathy, A People’s Tragedy is a profound account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation.
Many consider the Russian Revolution to be the most significant event of the twentieth century. Distinguished scholar Orlando Figes presents a panorama of Russian society on the eve of that revolution, and then narrates the story of how these social forces were violently erased.
Within the broad stokes of war and revolution are miniature histories of individuals, in which Figes follows the main players’ fortunes as they saw their hopes die and their world crash into ruins. Unlike previous accounts that trace the origins of the revolution to overreaching political forces and ideals, Figes argues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and that what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.
9. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Author: by Svetlana Alexievich
Published at: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 21, 2017)
ISBN: 978-0399588822
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times The Washington Post The Boston Globe The Wall Street Journal NPR Financial Times Kirkus Reviews When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing a new kind of literary genre, describing her work as a history of emotionsa history of the soul.
Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake.
10. The Romanovs: 1613-1918
Author: by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Published at: Vintage; Illustrated edition (May 16, 2017)
ISBN: 978-0307280510
The definitive history of the Cold War and its impact around the world We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe.
From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides.
12. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World–Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It
Author: by Ken Alibek
Published at: Delta; Reprint edition (April 11, 2000)
ISBN: 978-0385334969
Read and be amazed…. An important and fascinating look into a terrifying world of which we were blissfully unaware. Robin Cook, author of ContagionAnthrax.Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destructionby doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon.
Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia’s darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret. No one knows more about Russia’s astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia’s germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs …
How Moscow’s leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent … The secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations … The startling story behind Russia’s attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon.
13. A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin
Author: by Mark Galeotti
Published at: Hanover Square Press; Original edition (July 7, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1335145703
A Library Journal 2020 Title to WatchRussia’s epic and dramatic history told in an accessible, lively and short form, from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin via Catherine the Great, the Russian Revolution and the fall of the USSR. Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnic group, no true central identity.
At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it has been subject to invasion by outsiders, from Vikings to Mongols, from Napoleon’s French to Hitler’s Germans. In order to forge an identity, it has mythologized its past to unite its people and to signal strength to outsiders.
In A Short History of Russia, Mark Galeotti explores the history of this fascinating, glorious, desperate and exasperating country through two intertwined issues: the way successive influences from beyond its borders have shaped Russia, and the way Russians came to terms with this influence, writing and rewriting their past to understand their present and try to influence their future.
14. The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West
Author: by Malcolm Nance
Published at: Hachette Books (June 26, 2018)
ISBN: 978-0316484817
A provocative, comprehensive analysis of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s master plan to destroy democracy in the age of Donald Trump. In the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world, Donald Trump was made President of the United States with the assistance of a foreign power.
For the first time, The Plot to Destroy Democracy reveals the dramatic story of how blackmail, espionage, assassination, and psychological warfare were used by Vladimir Putin and his spy agencies to steal the 2016 U.S. Election – and attempted to bring about the fall of NATO, the European Union, and western democracy.
It will show how Russia and its fifth column allies tried to flip the cornerstones of democracy in order to re-engineer the world political order that has kept most of the world free since 1945.Career U.S. Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance will examine how Russia has used cyber warfare, political propaganda, and manipulation of our perception of reality – and will do so again – to weaponize American news, traditional media, social media, and the workings of the internet to attack and break apart democratic institutions from within, and what we can expect to come should we fail to stop their next attack.
15. House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia
Author: by Craig Unger
Published at: Dutton; Illustrated edition (September 3, 2019)
ISBN: 978-1524743512
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier. The Washington PostHouse of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House.
It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City.
16. The Origins of Totalitarianism
Author: by Hannah Arendt
Published at: Diana (March 21, 1975)
ISBN: 978-5781998708
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time-Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia-which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left.
From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.
