100 books like Soviet Fairytales

Mr. Galeotti makes Russia’s ever-changing military status read like a spy novel. You might think information about drones, tanks, aircraft, and MANPADS is boring. I beg to differ.

Starting with the disarray caused by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Galeotti tells us who changed things, who failed to, and why. He matches the retooling of the Russian military to war lessons learned in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria.

Mr. Galeotti has intimate knowledge of history, personal connections with individuals in the Russian military, and a brilliant way of putting it all together. He asked a Russian soldier his opinion of a photograph of Putin, who never served in the military, sitting at the controls of a fighter aircraft. The soldier said it was like being married to a virgin; the concept was good, but the experience wasn’t there.

This book is amazing.

Mr. Kasekamp’s book is the first substantial reference I found on the great European kingdom called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For hundreds of years, this religiously and culturally tolerant kingdom ruled the lands from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It encompassed most of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, part of Russia, Poland, and more. Andres Kasekamp tells us how it came to be, how it thrived, and how it fell. 

He goes on to tell us how the Commonwealth’s progressive ideals were reflected in the freedom that came to Poland and the Baltic countries after WWI and why the resistance to the Soviet occupation of WWII was so passionate. 

Now, when I read about Poles, Lithuanians, and others standing alongside their brothers and sisters on today’s battlefields of Ukraine, I understand that it goes beyond protecting home and hearth. It’s about a shared spiritual and political history.

This book is dense, disagreeable, confusing, uncomfortable, and marvelous. The scenes are vivid, even devastating. The descriptions ring true, from dirty windows in the library to working hard to make nothing appear like something. The characters embody the black and hopeless existence of Vilnius under Soviet rule.

Vytautas, the protagonist, flashes back to his tortured days in the labor camps in Siberia. He is haunted by evil in the persona he calls “they” who roam the streets of Vilnius. He loves and tragically stops loving.

His inflections of the Soviet system come in many forms, like the story about his dying grandfather being kicked out of a hospital before he could affect their mortality statistics. He drifts into and out of the fantastical. The last section is written from a dog’s perspective.

I loved the reality of the book. It presented the essence of an experience, albeit from a man… show more.

From the Kiev of ancient Rus’ to today, Mark Galeotti has stuffed the history of Russia into one jaw-dropping book of just over 200 pages. I loved the book because it was concise, informative, and cleared up misconceptions we may have about Russia.

Mr. Galeotti’s book provides a thoughtful perspective in an overview that brings context to today’s Russia. He claims he’s debunking myths. Were the Mongol invasions truly devastating? He offers stories we may not have heard. How did Catherine the Great really come to power? He challenges us to examine why the Russian people tolerate a man like Putin, but will we ever know for certain?

Having read The Long Walk, like so many others, I wondered about the identity of the character known as Mr. Smith, so I was intrigued to discover that Linda Willis had spent some ten years researching this character.

As I had myself spent three years trying to locate evidence to authenticate the story in my own book, I could empathize with all Linda’s frustration in following dead ends and scrabbling down rabbit warrens. 

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.

Although they are largely forgotten now, the five to six thousand Russian women who enlisted as soldiers were amongst the most photographed and written about women in the First World War, especially the charismatic but tyrannical leader of the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, Maria Bochkareva. Stoff’s book gives a highly readable and fascinating account of their formation, their military action, their ill-fated involvement in the defence of the Winter Palace when it was stormed by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, and their reception by the rest of the world as the only battalions of women to carry out officially sanctioned combat roles in the war.

Stoff uses their own memoirs alongside other first-hand accounts by American, British, and French diplomats stationed in Russian in the tumultuous year of 1917, and her book provides a balanced and nuanced analysis.

Beautifully written, the book follows the lives of Russia’s two great aristocratic families in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Their fate was typical of the entire Russian aristocracy. It is a story of the Bolsheviks' cruelty and a painful survival of their many victims.

Tibor Szamuely was the nephew of a leading Hungarian communist who was killed in the purges. In this book, completed just before his death at 47, he traces the process through which Russians were enslaved by the state. Peasants were progressively bound to the land. The Russian church accepted the fusion of political and religious authority in the person of the Tsar. After the fall of Byzantium, the tsars, as the heads of the only surviving Orthodox state, treated Moscow as the ”Third Rome” and began to claim worldwide moral and political leadership. This claim was supported by the Russian people who saw in it justification for their miserable conditions. Communism was supposed to be entirely new but as Szamuely eloquently shows, it merely modernized the Russian state tradition.

If you would like to try and understand the Soviet and post-Soviet psyche, these first-hand, verbatim interviews from 1991-2012, by Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian Nobel Laureate, question and discuss what it means and meant to be a Soviet. With a wide selection of individual testimonies from different backgrounds of the Soviet Union, from ordinary folk to officials, prisoners, relatives of those who were murdered, the executioners, the book also investigates how they coped when the Soviet Union broke down. Written from transcribed, spoken recordings, these documentary / reportage texts get to the heart of the matter—often that there is a gaping vacancy in the place of what one had previously believed in, from one's earliest of days, even before becoming a red-scarfed Pioneer. When one's whole philosophical fabric has been torn down, how do you exist? How do you cope and make sense of the world? What really is so… show more.