Here are 16 books that The Vory fans have personally recommended if you like
The Vory.
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Robert Littell’s novel about the Russian vory reads like he’s done that and been there. But at its heart, it’s a love story.
The novel takes place during the Great Turf War after the break-up of the Soviet Union. In a lawless Moscow, the vory provide order by protecting the interests of those who pay.
The characters are well developed. The relationships are powerful. The exposé of prison tats is fascinating. The nods to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliete are amusing.
A brand-new novel from New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell, A Plague on Both Your Houses is a thrilling tale of love and war.
On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceases to exist.
Into the vacuum—before a new democracy has time to put down roots—surged the Russian mafia, supplying what the new state could not: krysha, or “roof”—protection for the privately owned businesses sprouting…
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 run…
This is a series of nine spy novels involving the CIA and Russia. The books are complex and well-crafted.
The characters are memorable, although their actions can be predictable. There’s a lot of sex. The bad guys are very bad. The good guys do bad things for good reason.
Saul Herzog made me cringe—in a good way. A manipulative woman undergoes plastic surgery to look like a man’s dead fiancée. A leader in the Russian intelligence organization is a physical and mental creep-fest. Saul conjures up a meal I’d never want to eat.
If you like espionage thrillers, you’ll love the Lance Spector series.
Montana, USA When Lance Spector quit the CIA, he swore he was out for good. One more government lie and he would go off the deep end. They could find someone else to do their dirty work. As far as he was concerned, Washington, Langley, the Pentagon could all go to hell.
Yekaterinburg, Russia A secret Russian expedition returns with a devastating new pathogen, harvested from the frozen corpses of mammoths. It's the biological super-weapon they've been looking for, an apocalypse-level pathogen, a virus more deadly than anything ever to come from a Russian lab. Something that will stop NATO…
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.
Mr. Galeotti makes Russia’s ever-changing military status read like a spy novel. You might think information about drones, tanks, aircraft, and MANPADS is boring. I beg to differ.
Starting with the disarray caused by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Galeotti tells us who changed things, who failed to, and why. He matches the retooling of the Russian military to war lessons learned in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria.
Mr. Galeotti has intimate knowledge of history, personal connections with individuals in the Russian military, and a brilliant way of putting it all together. He asked a Russian soldier his opinion of a photograph of Putin, who never served in the military, sitting at the controls of a fighter aircraft. The soldier said it was like being married to a virgin; the concept was good, but the experience wasn’t there.
The Financial Times - Best books of 2022: Politics
'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' The Times
A new history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.
Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also…
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 had…
David Satter is a leading commentator on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of five books on Russia and the creator of a documentary film on the fall of the U.S.S.R. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He has been a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and an associate of the Henry Jackson Society in London.
The late Karen Dawisha offers the best account so far of Putin's early career and the connections and corruption that paved his path to power. Her historical examples of Putin's greed and connections with organized crime shed important light on the way Russia is ruled today.
The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.
Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin’s kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive new evidence about the Putin circle’s use of public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the US; the…
It’s all about the stories. Although I have been a professor, a think-tanker, and a secondee to the Foreign Office, by training I am a historian, so I love compelling, vivid, extraordinary stories, and for me, the best ones come from Russia. Having been traveling there since Soviet times, done my Ph.D. on it, drunk there with spooks and gangsters, talked late in the night in the kitchens of artists and journalists, I am as hooked as I ever was, and privileged to be able to write, teach, lecture and think about this splendidly bizarre place.
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.
GETTING TO GRIPS WITH RUSSIA’S 21ST CENTURY TSAR Vladimir V. Putin has confounded world leaders and defied their assumptions as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. The Putin Mystique takes the reader on a journey through the Russia of Vladimir Putin, named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as the most powerful man in the world. It is a neo-feudal world where iPads, WTO membership, and Brioni business suits conceal a power structure straight out of the Middle Ages, where the Sovereign is perceived as both divine and demonic, where a man’s riches are…
I’ve lived, learned, and loved Russian politics since before the collapse of communism. My Vodka Politicsbook takes a deep dive into Russian history but is ultimately focussed on better understanding contemporary social, economic, and political developments in Russia, where Putin and Putinism are at the core. Having taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Russian and post-Soviet politics for the past fifteen years, I find it essential to keep up-to-date on the latest scholarship. There are many great works out there by gifted journalists, writers, and scholars, many of which illuminate perhaps only part of Russia’s personalized autocracy. The ones I’ve listed here I feel present the most well-rounded picture, from a wide variety of perspectives.
Of course, it takes more than one man to run a country, and in All the Kremlin’s Men, opposition journalist Mikhail Zygar expands that scope to examine various important figures within Putin’s inner circle. From good friends to politicians, important bureaucrats, and oligarchs—and in many cases, the lines between those categories are very much blurred. Zygar builds on a decade’s worth of interviews and investigative journalism to give a rare, behind-the-scenes look at Russia’s elites, how they relate to one another, and to Putin. The book presents an immensely readable history of post-Soviet Russian politics, moving the chronology forward from 1980s reformism to the tumultuous 1990s, and into the era of High Putinism, with each chapter highlighting the role of this leader or that. The Russian-language original, Vsya kremlevskaya rat’, quickly became a bestseller in Russian nonfiction, which also resulted in ever greater political pressure by the Kremlin…
All the Kremlin's Men is a gripping narrative of an accidental king and a court out of control. Based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin's inner circle, this book presents a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. The image of Putin as a strongman is dissolved. In its place is a weary figurehead buffeted--if not controlled--by the men who at once advise and deceive him.
The regional governors and bureaucratic leaders are immovable objects, far more powerful in their fiefdoms than the president himself. So are the gatekeepers-those officials who guard the pathways to…
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 she…
It’s all about the stories. Although I have been a professor, a think-tanker, and a secondee to the Foreign Office, by training I am a historian, so I love compelling, vivid, extraordinary stories, and for me, the best ones come from Russia. Having been traveling there since Soviet times, done my Ph.D. on it, drunk there with spooks and gangsters, talked late in the night in the kitchens of artists and journalists, I am as hooked as I ever was, and privileged to be able to write, teach, lecture and think about this splendidly bizarre place.
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
In this penetrating exploration of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa meets a variety of Russians - from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians - who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each has found that compromise is essential for survival and success. Between Two Fires is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation much discussed but little understood, and an urgent lesson about the nature of modern authoritarianism.
I am passionate about words and reading, and I love books that examine and record the chaos and mayhem of human existence. When I think about why I don’t want to die, it’s mainly because I can't bear the thought of missing out on what happens next. I feel privileged to be alive during this strange, fraught time of epochal change and to be able to use my skills as a writer to record not just the facts of what happens but how it feels to witness it all, the sensibility of our time, the recording of which is, I believe, the essence of great literature.
This is a book about the real-life effects of the work of the character in the first book I recommended.
I loved it because, as a journalist confronting for the first time in my career, large-scale distrust in agreed upon reality (“fake news”), the stories of societal crackup in post-Soviet, disinformation-addled Russia form the ultimate cautionary tale.
In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship--far subtler than twentieth-century strains--that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook…
I am teacher of Russian History in the University of York and have been in both countries many times. Russia’s war against Ukraine is something that has touched me personally and professionally in the most profound way: witnessing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has been heartbreaking. Understanding why that war happened and what its consequences will be is of vital importance for anyone interested in the modern world, in justice, and the future of Europe. These books offer clear, passionate, and compelling accounts of the war, explaining the historical background, the immediate causes, the principle actors, and the Russian way of waging of the war.
Owen Matthews is a journalist with unrivalled knowledge of the Russian political establishment.
A native Russian and English speaker, he spent many years working for the Moscow Times. He presents a fascinating account of the inner working of the Russian elite, not only of Putin, but of those in a position to influence him.
He charts the process, step by step, how Putin came to take his disastrous decision to launch the war against Ukraine, which in a matter of weeks has undone 30 years of development and progress in Russia. Disconcertingly but convincingly, he concludes that the Russian elites and the majority of the population still share Putin’s imperial fantasies, especially regarding Ukraine.
An astonishing investigation into the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol.
The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin apparently lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at risk of destruction. Why?
Drawing on over 25 years' experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as…
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 world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
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.
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war-and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault-on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament-the…
