Books like Code Red

I found it hard to choose between several of Edward Crankshaw’s books explaining Russia. Each, in its own way, uncovers a particular aspect of history or society that makes the country what it is. In the end, I settled on this, his first: published in 1947, not long after Crankshaw had been posted to Moscow during WWII, and while he was still reeling from the vast gulf between what he experienced there and the image of the USSR that was being sold abroad. 

Crankshaw was sometimes accused of being too sympathetic to Russia, but while he does his best to explain why the country behaves as it does, he doesn’t seek to excuse it. For that reason I find this one of the most clear-headed appraisals of Russia. And given the continuities that run through all of Russian history, his rationalising of how Russia works and what it does is… show more.

This is another historical couple whose love story and family dynamics I found worth learning from: she was not merely a rich and beautiful princess but proved to be a very wise woman who turned the flamboyant playboy Felix Yusupov into a model husband and father.

After surviving with the pair of them through his tumultuous youth and her difficult childbirth, the murder of Rasputin, revolution, escape from Russia, and more, I didn’t want to say goodbye to the characters in this amazing saga. 

Russia in the 1990s was a strange place in a strange time, and Andrew Miller does a great job of capturing some of that strangeness in some of its more revolting extremes.

It’s fiction – supposedly - but the parallel world it describes will be instantly recognisable to anyone who was there or even brushed its edges. And if you weren’t, I think this is a better explanation of what happened than plenty of serious history books. And that, in turn, is essential for understanding where Russia is today – thirty years later, but with the echo of the mad years still shaping the country now. 

This group of interconnected stories—set mostly in Russia and Chechnya—take place before, during, and after the Cold War. In the opening story, “The Leopard,” Anthony Marra perfectly captures the suffocating terror of life under Stalin. 

The narrator is a disillusioned Soviet censor whose job is editing images of disgraced victims of Stalinist show trials out of official photographs and despoiling many other works of art for propaganda purposes.

Lines between work and life start to blur. The censor finds it increasingly hard to discern fact from fiction.

Things turn deadly when he himself becomes a victim and the truth (as he knows it) becomes irrelevant in the struggle against counter-revolutionaries.

From these troubled origins the Cold War began. The ability to discern truth from falsehood seems in our present times more pressing than ever.

Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany only to commit suicide upon arrival in Spain.

This book captures an earlier time in his life, when he was still hopeful, an idealist in search of intellectual adventures and political transformation. He went to Moscow to define his political vision and found a city both seductive and elusive. The intense winter scenes in the deep Muscovite cold are unforgettable, even though he mentions them almost in passing.

Benjamin had another reason to go to Moscow: he was in love. But the woman he wished to pursue was also elusive, unavailable both in practical and emotional terms. The book speaks to the fascination Western leftist intellectuals have had with Russian culture and politics, turning to Russia as an alternative to a corrupt West.

Benjamin’s reflections about philosophy, history, and the Moscow of the 1920s makes me fantasize about our… show more.

If you want to understand why so many Russians today (including President Vladimir Putin) believe that their national identity has roots in Kyiv, Faith Hillis’s book is a must-read. As I wrote in a review for The Moscow Times, Russian colonial settlers in and around the Ukrainian city increasingly began to push a narrative that they were all “children of Rus’,” a reference to the political entity that existed in the region from the 9th to the 13th centuries.

From the 1830s until the outbreak of World War I, as Hillis writes, this group shaped imperial policies about the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians even while they urged the imperial government to “protect” them from the Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians living all around. When Putin justified the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as one where Russia needed to “return” the “lands of ancient Rus’” and to “protect” Russian-speakers in Ukraine,… show more.

In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the “timeless questions” about human nature, fate, and politics. Morson’s analysis clearly shows that novelists and poets allow for much more complexity and nuance in their worldviews than ideologues. The famous Russian writers, in other words, appear to excel in the type of open-minded thinking that I argue is conducive to liberal democratic values.

By reading Morson’s book, one sees clearly the importance of Russia’s literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human existence.

Robert Dugoni has created the nearly perfect American spy in Charles Jenkins, an unassuming father, husband, and gentleman farmer who wants nothing more than to be left alone after a brilliant career ends in shambles.

But above all else Jenkins is a patriot who reenters Russia, his old stomping grounds, to rescue his most-prized confidential informant and spirit her out of the country before she's captured and murdered by Putin’s thugs. Dugoni and his characters breathe new life into the spy genre.

Νumerous books about the troubled relationship between Russia and the West. But it is extraordinarily challenging to manage to condense the history of a rich and varied relationship within a few hundred pages.

In this book, the author succeeds in covering several centuries of history and numerous complicated topics and subtopics within the span of fewer than 300 pages.

A splendid work precisely because it is concise, it covers the history of this relationship from Medieval times up to the modern era.

Plokhy is a renowned Ukrainian-American historian who makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. His partisan, pro-Ukraine narrative of the war and its origins is vigorous and informative.

Of particular value is his highly illuminating account of the triangular relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in the run-up to the war.