The best books on Russia

Owen Matthews is a journalist with unrivalled knowledge of the Russian political establishment.

A native Russian and English speaker, he spent many years working for the Moscow Times. He presents a fascinating account of the inner working of the Russian elite, not only of Putin, but of those in a position to influence him.

He charts the process, step by step, how Putin came to take his disastrous decision to launch the war against Ukraine, which in a matter of weeks has undone 30 years of development and progress in Russia. Disconcertingly but convincingly, he concludes that the Russian elites and the majority of the population still share Putin’s imperial fantasies, especially regarding Ukraine.

Before being drafted into the German Army in 1941, Willy Peter Reese was a bank clerk who spent his time engaged in reading German literature and attempting to become a writer in his own right.

The memoir is a compilation of his journal entries as he reflected on his transition from civilian to soldier. Originally published in German, Reese’s journal demonstrates the way in which a relatively naïve and carefree intellectual became involved in the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union.

The transformation from a bookish, sensitive, and brooding teenager into a soldier who lost empathy for the people suffering under German occupation demonstrates how some German youth became actors and accomplices in the Nazi regime’s crimes.

Jason Matthews is the real deal, a 30-year-veteran of the CIA’s Operations Directorate and he gives the reader a ringside seat both into the Agency’s operations as well as Putin’s vast spy network and advanced training programs that recruits beautiful young woman to seduce and exterminate foreign assets.

This is one of the steamiest spy novels ever produced.

This Cretan writer, who is most often identified as a Greek, asks us to probe our deepest identity, to be honest with ourselves. I think that that should be the first premise of an honest writer…an honest person. When you are born you are told early what to believe. Why you should believe. Who you and what you should believe or not believe in. At some point in your own life, you must resolve what you yourself accept for your own belief system. You should determine what is or is not important to you. Only then can you live YOUR LIFE.

When I met John J. Stephan for the first time in 2017 in Honolulu, I immediately recognized the wit, irony, and ascetic prose style that I had encountered in his monographs about the Kurile Islands, Sakhalin Island, and the Russian fascists of Manchuria. Stephan has always succeeded in bridging the ideological schisms separating Russian, Chinese, and Japanese historians as a politically uninvolved bystander and avid traveler. Since the 1960s, Stephan was a frequent visitor of the Soviet Far East. He had many friends and colleagues who shared their hopes, worries, and anecdotes. His most important work is The Russian Far East. Published in 1994, it is the result of almost three decades of research and the ultimate proof that even in a Cold War world without access to archives, historians do not have to resort to wild guessing but can produce accurate, intimate, and entertaining historiography. His comprehensive history of… show more.

John Mole tells his stories the same way an Iban man would when he returns from a particularly harrowing work travel. I personally think that the memoir is a tragedy disguised as a comedy because some parts of his description of life in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union made my stomach cramp with emotion. At the same time, they also made me laugh because his imageries are so comical. His first-world naiveté either gets him scammed or rescued, but his survival instincts always kick in when it matters. So, if you are interested in a modern Wild-Wild-West adventure, this is the book for you.

Though this book is technically not a young adult title, it’s one that young adult figure skating fans will enjoy. Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov are the classic real-life romance story when it comes to pair skating. When I first started drafting my own book, I had a romance like theirs in mind. In this book, Ekaterina details how she and Sergei met, and, through their years together, fell in love. Warning: their story will take your heart and rip it to pieces.

Luke Harding is a journalist who has spent many years as The Guardian correspondent in Ukraine including the present war.

The book is a mixture of historical analysis and on-the-spot reporting which makes it read like a thriller. It is vivid and at times harrowing, particularly the reports from Bucha after the massacres there. Harding pulls no punches, arguing the brutality of the war comes from Putin himself: ‘His apparent goal: the annihilation of a country, a culture and its citizens.’

Complicit in this genocidal operation are the Russian media elite who frequently openly call for the extermination of the Ukrainian nation. An excellent account from an impeccable source. 

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 was on my favorite TV show as a kid, In Search of… starring Leonard Nimoy, that I first heard of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The tsar was murdered with his entire family in 1918 – or so it was thought. So who was this old woman living in Virginia claiming to be Anastasia? Decades later, I saw the headlines reporting that DNA tests proved Anderson was an imposter, but I never knew one percent of the story before diving into The Resurrection of the Romanovs. Reading along while a mystery from my childhood was so painstakingly solved was great fun. If only now they could find the Loch Ness Monster.

Slawomir Rawicz was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by Russian intelligence agents after the German invasion of Poland in 1941. His book describes how he and six others escaped from the Siberian Gulag and travelled on foot through the Gobi Desert to Tibet, the Himalayas, and India. Much like Henri Charriere’s Papillon, Rawicz’s story is so fantastical that many have questioned its veracity. But the book still appealed to me as, the more I have read such stories the more I have understood that the truth really is stranger than fiction, and often they faithfully convey an experience, even if memory has clouded the detail of specific incidents.

This book doesn’t tell the story of one expedition, it recounts many, launched by men of nine different nationalities, all intent on breaking into the closed world of Tibet. I am not alone in considering Hopkirk to be one of the great masters of what might be described as ‘historical travel’ books, and this is surely one of his best. Populated by a wonderful cast of characters, all determined to be the first westerner to reach the sacred, and forbidden, city of Lhasa. I can’t recommend it highly enough – and, enjoy one of Hopkirk’s books, and you’ll enjoy them all.  

An extraordinary, high-pitched, Munchausenesque account of a visit to only-just-post-Soviet Leningrad during an especially overheated period of recent history. Not at all like the genteel memories of champagne receptions at the Mariinsky Theatre followed by strolls down the Moika during the White Nights that one gets in other travelogues.

Thompson was a photographer from Kansas who went to Europe to cover the First World War and found himself in Russia as 1917 dawned. His book is drawn from letters he wrote home to his wife Dot, and his eyewitness reporting is better than his analysis. His account of the day police opened fire on protesters in Petrograd with machine guns is chilling. Thompson believed that the Germans were behind the revolution, which wasn’t the case, but his photos of soldiers and barricades and protesters amount to a great visual document of the moment. Read this in conjunction with Runaway Russia, by Florence MacLeod Harper, a magazine reporter with whom he teamed up to cover the revolution.

I’ve read this book several times and I don’t believe I ever manage to get through it without shedding a few tears. Have tissues handy. A Mennonite family living in Ukraine in the 1920s has their village destroyed by Russian soldiers. The central character, ten-year-old Peter Neufeld, makes a decision to help his older brother Otto escape after he’s participated in counter-attacks, going against the family’s adherence to passive resistance. The Neufelds decide to leave a land of oppression and move to Canada where they will make an effort to assimilate rather than live apart as they have in Ukraine. It’s a journey filled with challenges and heartbreak, but always with the strength of love of family and humanity as a sustaining factor.

This is a painstaking investigation into corruption at the highest level in Putin's Kremlin. 

The book demonstrates in vivid detail how Putin installed a group of former KGB officers in power who then carved up Russia's strategic assets for themselves.

They targeted one company after another, probing weaknesses and exploiting the chequered past of every businessman who had made a fortune in the chaos of privatisation during the 1990s.

The Cold War wasn’t always so cold, especially not in the icy depths where American and Soviet submarines faced off on a daily basis.

Taking an anthology approach to narrative nonfiction, Blind Man’s Bluff covers the wildest, most ambitious, and deadly stories of the era, including tapping undersea cables, secret spying operations, nuclear close calls, and how the CIA enlisted eccentric innovator Howard Hughes to steal a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine off the bottom of the ocean.

Here’s a really tricky one. If you’ve ever heard of the True Blood series, you know this author. An Easy Death begins an unusual series for her. This is an alternate history western with a fantasy twist. Some people don’t see alternate history as historical fiction, but I do. This novel follows a similar vein to The Man in the High Castle, where one major shift in history changes everything.

After the assassination of FDR in the 1930s, the US collapses and is picked off by the UK, Canada, Mexico, and Russia. We find ourselves in the Southwestern states, now known as Texoma. It is here that the gunnie Lizbeth Rose tries to piece out a life, running security on runs from Texoma across the border to Mexico.

It’s an amazingly rich story woven into an alternate western setting. If you love to bend the rules of history, you… show more.

In this beautifully written, well-researched book, Showalter explains how German generals won a spectacular victory on the eastern front. Although able to deploy only one army group – while seven were deployed in the west – they prevailed in the famous Battle of Tannenberg (1914) against two ineptly led and poorly armed Russian armies. Germany achieved the kind of success that eluded them in the west, but was unable to knock Russia out of the war – in fact, the victors had only bought time against enemy forces increasing in number. Not until the communist revolution three years later would Germany wriggle free of enemies in the east.

British historian Madariaga, an expert in the field of eighteenth-century Russia, gives the reader a balanced, up-to-date, and insightful, multi-faceted yet concise, description of the vast empire that constituted Catherine’s Russia.  The author describes how a minor German princess seized the Romanov throne, how she contrived to become an autocrat ruling over all the Russias, and, how during her thirty-four-year reign, Catherine guided her country into becoming a major player in international power politics.