Books like Code Red — picked by fans

I recommend this book because it tells the inside story of what it is like to actually negotiate and get a nuclear arms accord ratified. The word “negotiate” means several things here. For Rose Gottemoeller—as with any head of a delegation—nearly everything required some form of negotiation.

At times I found myself thinking: one-on-one sessions with her hawkish Russian counterpart (Anatoly Antonov, who is currently the Russian Ambassador to the United States) must have been the most pleasant part of the whole ordeal. In that setting, at least you know where the other side stands. There is also mutual empathy between the top negotiators regarding bureaucratic turf wars and demands from on high—such as “get this done by X date.”

Previous nuclear agreements came about during a time of relative political consensus—when President Barack Obama sent Gottemoeller to Capital Hill to generate support for New START after he signed it… show more.

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 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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

This is a lovely book about a Siberian Tiger that stocked and killed hunters who had been hunting tigers. Vaillant situates this fascinating story into the collapse of the Soviet Union. People on the far eastern edge of Russian Siberia, the Amur River area, were desperate to survive as the economy collapsed.

At the same time, China is taking off, and the affluent will buy tiger parts at great cost to increase their sexual stamina. Thus, desperate Russian hunters arrive. Vaillant does a great job following a game warden as he tries to solve the crime of a tiger seemingly bent on revenge.

I think he shows that good people are still out there trying to do right, no matter the cost.

During my time working in the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, we would "throw out a line to see if anything bit." By that, I mean we'd leak information into the terrorism community to see their response.

That response often determined which direction we'd take an investigation. That's what the plot of The Russia House does. The CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service get a taste of information from an inside Russian military source, but can it be believed?

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.