100 Books Like Russia's War

I found the first 100 pages of this book, covering Russia’s early history, to be the clearest explanation anywhere of how the country has developed – or failed to – the way it has.

It was published in 1974, so the frame of reference is the Soviet Union – but the way Tibor Szamuely drew on Russia’s early history to explain the present day is just as valid for post-Communist Russia. That proves the point: that Russia is condemned by its own history, and no social or political upheaval to date has enabled it to break free from that trap and move forward to be a country that can co-exist with others. 

So much of what Russia and its leaders say about their own country and its place in history makes no sense to the rest of the world. And as a result, I routinely get asked whether the fantasies that Russia creates for itself are genuine beliefs or just convenient fictions to excuse the Kremlin’s attacks against other countries or its own people.

Charles Clover, a former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, charted how a particular strand of deranged nationalism took hold of Russia’s rulers – laying the groundwork for the war on Ukraine. This book helps understand not only the dangerous ideas promoted by Russia’s nationalist gurus but also how they now drive the Russian state to war.

It’s a sobering read and essential for understanding what it would take to divert Russia from being intent on regaining its empire. 

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. 

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.

Russians are not intrinsically good, bad, or ugly, they’re just like the rest of us. But living in Putin’s era often forces all kinds of compromises on people, especially if they want to live well and make a difference to the world around them. New Yorker’s Yaffa digs deep into the experiences of eight such ambitious Russians, some of whom deformed themselves to thrive, others of whom were all but broken by the experience. It’s not always the easiest book to read, but it’s an excellent exploration of what living in today’s Russia can mean.

Most studies of modern Russia, under the shadow of Vladimir Putin, start from the top down. This elegantly quirky study, by a journalist working in Russia, looks bottom up: why has Russia so often been ruled by autocrats, and why did the Russian people – at first, at least – accept this rather grey ex-KGB officer as their new tsar so enthusiastically? It’s a biography of modern Russia more than anything else, framed around a range of characters Arutunyan encountered in her travels around this fascinating country.

As the 1930s unfolded in Britain, news from Germany increasingly dominated the national conversation. Everyone was talking about Germany. And, as Julia Boyd’s absorbing book reveals, Britons from all walks of life were travelling there, too. I loved the sheer breadth of people featured, from holidaying teenagers and hard-bitten journalists to MPs, academics and curious adventurers.

Thomas Cook was offering holidays in Germany throughout the 1930s, despite proliferating accounts of injustice and downright persecution under Nazi rule. Some British visitors were clearly dazzled by National Socialism, others horrified. Most seemed aware that they were watching history unfold – and their accounts of everything from theatrical mass rallies to brutal street fights are all the more vivid as a result.

This transformative book explores the early years of the Cuban Revolution from the ground up, arguing that revolutionary leadership constructed hegemony gradually—gaining popular support by creating a “grand narrative” that envisioned the Revolution as an opportunity for spiritual and political redemption. Guerra shows that leaders also censured alternative narratives and voices that challenged their monopoly over power. And because government organizations deputized citizens to defend the state, they inadvertently created “unintended dissidents,” as well as vast numbers of supporters. These arguments and more make this exceptional book a controversial one as well.  

Political scientists and economists have long argued that voters are rationally ignorant.

On this theory, people tend to acquire and retain information only if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs. This explains why students cram material to pass a test but let themselves forget it afterward, why Americans who speak English at home don’t usually bother to learn a foreign language but so many people learn English, or why you don’t bother attempt to memorize your local phonebook.

It also explains why voters know so little. Since individual votes make so little difference, individual voters can afford to remain ignorant. Political information is a collective action problem: what we know matters, but what any one of us knows does not. 

Caplan adds an innovation. This point also applies to how we think, not just what we know. Political psychologists have long found that voters process what little information they… show more.

A brilliant and incisive reading of European-Caribbean relations from the first encounters on Christopher Columbus’s voyages.

Peter Hulme shows how central the Caribbean was to English and European thinking about the world and how the region defined English approaches to the rest of the world in the first age of the British Empire.