Here are 100 books that The Russian Far East fans have personally recommended if you like
The Russian Far East.
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Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoplesâ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the worldâs largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the Russia-China border, one of the world's least understood and most politically charged frontiers.
The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Bille and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world's most consequentialâŠ
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to runâŠ
Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoplesâ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the worldâs largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
In recent years, we have seen a surge in books on contemporary Russia-China relations. Gregory Afinogenovâs Spies and Scholars takes us back to their humble beginnings in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This pioneering study sheds new light on how the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power was shaped through intelligence gathering in imperial China. A must-read not only for historians.Â
The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like theâŠ
Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoplesâ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the worldâs largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
Chris Miller has written a well-argued account of Russiaâs various attempts to gain great power status in the Asia-Pacific over the five centuries â and its repeated setbacks. Russiaâs imperial expansion to Alaska, Hawaii, and California reminds us that Russiaâs expansionist dreams often amounted to little. Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine is another example that Putinâs ambitions in the East are restrained by the countryâs firm rooting in Europe.
An illuminating account of Russia's attempts-and failures-to achieve great power status in Asia.
Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory.
But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that Russia's ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the coreâŠ
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother hadâŠ
Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoplesâ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the worldâs largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
Published in 1999, David Wolffâs To the Harbin Station was a pioneering work that paved the path for many historical studies that followed, and which remains an unparalleled analysis of Russiaâs only colony and its imperial expansion into China in the two decades leading up to the 1917 revolution. The monograph is more than an urban history of Harbin. It is the history of a region, a railroad, and the nature of late tsarist imperialism.
In 1898, near the projected intersection of the Chinese Eastern Railroad (the last leg of the Trans-Siberian) and China's Sungari River, Russian engineers founded the city of Harbin. Between the survey of the site and the profound dislocations of the 1917 revolution, Harbin grew into a bustling multiethnic urban center with over 100,000 inhabitants. In this area of great natural wealth, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American ambitions competed and converged, and sometimes precipitated vicious hostilities.
Drawing on the archives, both central and local, of seven countries, this history of Harbin presents multiple perspectives on Imperial Russia's only colony. TheâŠ
Sara Wheeler is a prize-winning non-fiction author. Sara is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Contributing Editor of The Literary Review, a Trustee of The London Library, and former chair of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award. She contributes to a wide range of publications in the UK and US and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio. Her five-part series, âTo Strive, To Seekâ, went out on Radio 4, and her book Cherry was made into a television film.
The writerâs account of a journey across Siberia and into the Russian Far East to investigate prison conditions on an island in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan. A book of investigative journalism and a finely worked travel narrative conjuring spongy mud, âsmoky, dreamy mountainsâ and âlitheâ rivers while the author dreams of turbot, asparagus and kasha.
In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates.
Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov's motivations and objectives for visiting the colonyâŠ
Iâm a professional explainer of Russia. For over 20 years Iâve been studying the country and trying to understand what makes it (and its leaders and people) so intent on attacking those around it and perceived adversaries further afield. Thatâs never been more important to understand than today when Ukraine and its soldiers are the only thing preventing Russia from once again rampaging across Europe. These books are ones that have helped me understand one part or several parts of the Russia problem, and I think theyâll be helpful for anybody else who wants to, too.
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.
Itâs fiction â supposedly - but the parallel world it describes will be instantly recognisable to anyone who was there or even brushed its edges. And if you werenât, 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 â thirty years later, but with the echo of the mad years still shaping the country now.Â
Snowdrops. That's what the Russians call them - the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers.
Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Yet as Nick fell for Masha, heâŠ
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man sheâŠ
I covered the FBI and CIA for years, first as a print reporter in Washington and then as the head of the NBC News investigative unit. So I have covered my fair share of spy scandals, and with my colleague Pete Williams helped NBC break the story of Robert Hanssenâs arrest. I was immediately drawn to the Ana Montes Cuba spy story when it broke and then learned that Montes had bought her condo from my close friend and college roommate, John. That meant I had spent hours inside Anaâs DC apartment, and that odd connection rooted me in her story in a deeper way. Â
This book is a fascinating and comprehensive account of one of the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history. It is about Robert Hanssen, the late FBI Agent and Russian turncoat who was corrupt, sullen, imperious, and endlessly fascinating.
We know about a lot of his misdeeds and personality disorders because of this groundbreaking book by David Wise. David is a brilliant and accomplished espionage writer who died in 2018. He explains how the FBI spent $7 million to steal Hanssenâs personnel files from the KGB. Those secret Russian files led directly to Hanssenâs 2001 arrest.
Wise also conducted exclusive interviews with the psychiatrist who met Hanssen in his jail cell more than 30 times. Finally, Wise chronicles Hanssenâs bizarre sex life, including the hidden video camera he used to record his wife, so he could share the videos with his best friend.Â
Spy tells, for the first time, the full, authoritative story of how FBI agent Robert Hanssen, code name grayday, spied for Russia for twenty-two years in what has been called the âworst intelligence disaster in U.S. historyââand how he was finally caught in an incredible gambit by U.S. intelligence.
David Wise, the nationâs leading espionage writer, has called on his unique knowledge and unrivaled intelligence sources to write the definitive, inside story of how Robert Hanssen betrayed his country, and why.
Spy at last reveals the mind and motives of a man who was a walking paradox: FBI counterspy, KGBâŠ
I am an Associate Professor of political science at Colgate University. I grew up in a home with tremendous ideological diversity and rigorous political disputes, which caused my interest in learning more about why and how people become their political selves. This interest developed into an academic background in the field of political psychology, which uses psychological theories to understand the origins and nature of political attitudes. Out of this scholarship, I developed a theory about the relationship between closed minds and partisan polarization, which I examine in my book. Now I am looking for ways to create open minds and foster a less polarized community.
In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the âtimeless questionsâ about human nature, fate, and politics. Morsonâs 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 Morsonâs book, one sees clearly the importance of Russiaâs literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human existence.
A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.
Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.
Morson describes the Russian literary tradition asâŠ
After spending many years as a historian, I could be really negative about humanity. We have done many bad things to each other and the planet, but I donât think there is a downward trajectory. I donât believe in fate. My last published works have been about using fear and conspiracy to gain certain ends, but 99% of those were imagined connections, not some sophisticated plans of evil geniuses. The imagined conspiracy came after the actions. So, the books I have listed that I think are excellent are ways out of terrible situations, some of our own making, but often not. I hope you enjoy the books.
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.
'An unbelievable tale, expertly told' Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
'A superb book ' Daily Mail * 'Masterful . . . mesmerising, rangy and relentless' Sunday Telegraph
A man-eating tiger is hunting villagers in the snowy forests of Far Eastern Russia.
A small team of men and their dogs must hunt the tiger in turn. As evidence mounts, it becomes clear that the tiger's attacks aren't random: it is seeking revenge. Injured, starving and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he tracks the tiger's deadly progress, John Vaillant draws an unforgettableâŠ
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the worldâs most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the bookâŠ
I write about Eastern Europe, both past and present, and what it means to have Russia as a neighbor. I write historical fiction and historical thrillers with a soupcon of espionage. I talk about the politics of the day, whether the story is set during WWII or in modern times. While my stories and characters are fictional, I constantly strive to accurately reflect time, place, and, most of all, history. I hope that my novels entertain and inform about a corner of the world folks may not know much about.Â
From the Kiev of ancient Rusâ to today, Mark Galeotti has stuffed the history of Russia into one jaw-dropping book of just over 200 pages. I loved the book because it was concise, informative, and cleared up misconceptions we may have about Russia.
Mr. Galeottiâs book provides a thoughtful perspective in an overview that brings context to todayâs Russia. He claims heâs debunking myths. Were the Mongol invasions truly devastating? He offers stories we may not have heard. How did Catherine the Great really come to power? He challenges us to examine why the Russian people tolerate a man like Putin, but will we ever know for certain?
'Fascinating... One of the most astute political commentators on Putin and modern Russia' Financial Times
'An amazing achievement' Peter Frankopan
Can anyone truly understand Russia?
Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone's 'other'. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries.
In this essential whistle-stop tour of the world's most complex nation, Mark Galeotti takes us behind the myths toâŠ
