For People Who Devour Books

Book Reviews by subject:
Russia & the Soviet Union

September 2016 Issue

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Behind Every Great Book…

Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago

By Anna Pasternak

October 1979 Issue

Paul Wilkinson, Anthony Storr

The Evil that Men do…

The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate': The Story of the CIA's Secret Efforts to Control Human Behaviour

By John Marks

February 1998 Issue

A N Wilson

He Dared to Tell Them their History, Now Forgotten

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life

By D M Thomas

July 2016 Issue

Donald Rayfield

Black Sea Battleground

Crimea: A History

By Neil Kent

The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest

By Brian Glyn Williams

July 2016 Issue

Anna Reid

‘Things only ever got worse’

Second-Hand Time: The Last of Soviets

By Svetlana Alexievich (Translated by Bela Shayevich)

September 1980 Issue

Martin Walker

Nuclear Blackmail

John Gray

Romantic Rebel?

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

By Aileen M Kelly

Catherine Brown

From Odessa to Paris

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

By Teffi (Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson & Irina Steinberg)

Rasputin and Other Ironies

By Teffi (Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France & Anne Marie Jackson)

September 1997 Issue

Jonathan Haslam

A Foolish Gesture to Boys in Short Trousers

‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958–1964

By Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

October 1983 Issue

Christopher Hitchens

Last, Best Hope

The Making of the Second Cold War

By Fred Halliday

December 2015 Issue

Oleg Gordievsky

Power Lines

Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence

By Jonathan Haslam

November 2015 Issue

Alan Judd

Spider in the Web

The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle

By Geoff Andrews

November 2015 Issue

Adam Sisman

Agent Reckless

Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess

By Andrew Lownie

June 1984 Issue

Christopher Hitchens

Dead Men on Leave

Record of a Life

By George Lukács

October 2015 Issue

Donald Rayfield

The Cook’s Grandson

The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin

By Steven Lee Myers

The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War

By Arkady Ostrovsky

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

By Garry Kasparov

October 2015 Issue

Nikolai Tolstoy

Eastern Approaches

Beware the Rugged Russian Bear: British Adventurers Exposing the Bolsheviks

By John Ure

October 2015 Issue

Piers Brendon

Learning the Lambeth Walk

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932–1943

By Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed) (Translated by Tatiana Sorokina & Oliver Ready)

July 2015 Issue

Donald Rayfield

From the Kremlin to Ladbroke Grove

Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

By Rosemary Sullivan

July 2015 Issue

Anna Reid

Ration Book

The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl’s Life in the Siege of Leningrad

By Valentin Kovalchuk, Aleksandr Rupasov & Aleksandr Chistikov (edd) (Translated by Amanda Love Darragh)

July 2015 Issue

Jonathan Meades

Postmodernism in the USSR

Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings

By Owen Hatherley