100 books like Lenin on the Train

This book is incredible, because it tells the story of Stalinist terror through a single house. Moreover, Slezkine creates a world history around this house of victims and perpetrators, which literally begins in the primordial mud and ends on the Day of Judgment. Slezkine takes no prisoners: either you follow him and the apocalyptic horsemen, or you don't, he doesn't care. Like a man possessed, he tells the story of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and I found it almost impossible to escape his spell. 

This book took me into the abysses of Soviet society, but in a very different way than the books on terror: Dobson does an incomparable job of describing what it meant for Soviet people to take in millions of Gulag returnees after 1953, and to do so in a society that was far from leaving the ravages of war behind, that itself had barely any housing and enough to eat, that on the one hand was severely traumatized by Stalin's terror, but on the other hand was in large part unwilling to accept the Gulag returnees as innocent victims. They were perceived as troublemakers and competitors for the few resources, their language as vulgar and outrageous, their culture as an attack on Stalinist "culturedness." Anyone who wants to understand what Stalinism did not only to the victims, but to society as a whole, must read this book. But be aware:… show more.

This book is the best proof that history can also be simply fun and insanely comical. The ten days that Khrushchev spent traveling through the U.S. in 1959, visiting both Hollywood and the farm of President Eisenhower, who gave him a calf, show, as if in a snow globe, all the comedy and tragedy of Soviet-American relations: the mutual fascination, the great similarities of wanting to please the world and dominate space, and the great mistrust that both sides could never quite put aside. And yet, these ten crazy days invite us to dream and speculate what would have been if the relations between the USA and the USSR had always been as good and cordial as in that September 1959. The US-Soviet story as a road movie with a happy ending!

This book grabbed me and I devoured it like a thriller. This is not just simply a history book about the biggest nuclear disaster of the 20th century, it is at the same time investigative journalism, exposing the international nuclear lobby that successfully downplayed the scale of the casualties and consequences, and exposing the do-gooderism of the West that thought it could patronizingly show that it was much better equipped to deal with such a disaster, when in fact the real experts on radiation sickness were in the Soviet Union, quietly doing their job without PR. Anyone who wants to know why workers in a wool spinning mill were rightly given the "liquidator" status of firefighters from day one and why jam made from berries from the Pripyat marshes around Chernobyl still end up on the European breakfast table must read this book.

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

I love the movie and musical adaptations of Anastasia, so it’s no wonder I love this magical family saga from Nadine Brandes. Brandes effortlessly weaves magic into the tale we thought we knew about Anastasia Romanov. And yes, there is both magic and romance.

With the leader of the Bolshevik army after her, Anastasia “Nastya” Romanov is given a mission to smuggle an ancient spell that might be her family’s only salvation into exile in Siberia. Nastya has barely dabbled in magic, but her only chances of saving herself and her family are to release the spell and deal with the consequences, or to enlist help from Zash, the handsome Bolshevik soldier who seems to be different. This story does contain violence, but overall is another read I both love and could recommend to anyone.

Hoffman tells the previously little-known story of Soviet military engineer Adolf Tolkachev, whose disgust with the communist regime inspired him to turn over enormously valuable secrets to the CIA station in Moscow beginning in the late 1970s. Hoffman’s careful reporting allows him to describe in meticulous and fascinating detail the remarkable techniques and great risks involved in running an agent in Moscow late in the Cold War.

It is rare for a KGB spy to reveal so many secrets about the Soviet Union and Russian intelligence operations in the West and so this book is a revelation. 

Kalugin was a KGB officer based in the USA in the 1970s and he describes all their dirty tricks - fake letters, disinformation, honey trapping, and even attempts to bug the US Congress.

One of the most heartwrenching stories of POW books you will ever read. This time the author gives an honest yet horrific account of German POWs at the hands of their Russian captors after WWII. Not a book for the faint-hearted and has no happy endings. A story about how cruel mankind can be.

Being Palestinian is a collection of essays by Palestinians reflecting on their identity and experiences living outside of their homeland.

I’ve chosen it here because few works are so effective in conveying both the commonalities and the diversity of the Palestinian refugee experience. The contributors range from Ivy League professors to activists campaigning for justice in the Middle East today; they include figures who grew up in refugee camps and those raised in some of the wealthiest cities in the world.

In many ways Being Palestinian is the perfect introduction to learning more about the subject, because it is accessible and highly personal without being simplistic.