Russia

Protests continue in Belarus in the aftermath of 2020's fraught presidential election. In this updated edition of his exploration of Belarus's complicated road to nationhood since it gained independence in 1991, Andrew Wilson has added two new chapters that reveal the extent of Aliaksandr Lukashenka's grip on power, the growth of the opposition movement and the violent crackdown that followed the vote. Wilson also examines the prospects for Europe as a whole of either Lukashenka's downfall or his survival with Russian support.

In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes listeners from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting—from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17—to understand the true extent of Putin's long war.

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society. This book is a lively distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit. 

In 2014, Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians' idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. 

An exhilarating, immersive journey into the Exclusion Zone of Chornobyl by one of Ukraine's most exciting young authors. The 1,000-square-mile Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is, for many, a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of shattered ideals and lost lives, now a toxic, dangerous no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it became a site of pilgrimage. He and dozens like him call themselves 'stalkers': wild adventurers who sneak past border patrols to spend days getting lost in this apocalyptic environment of dense swampland and desolate villages.

It is believed that the Circassians—the English translation of the Turkish term Cherkess—emerged as a discrete society or entity around the 10th century CE, although there are references to them before this. In fact, the Circassians are believed to be the oldest indigenous people of the North Caucasus and self-identified as Adyghe. Historians believe the first settlers appeared some 300,000 years ago. Nevertheless, the history and culture of Circassia and the Circassians is largely unknown in the English-speaking and wider world outside Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Cutting through the confusion and the media hype surrounding the infamous Russia-Ukraine conflict, this illuminating collection offers a factual, concise, and up-to-date account of the key events and figures in this rapidly unfolding war. With a play-by-play recap of the long-running tensions between these two countries and their places on the world stage, you’ll also discover how their struggle has spilled out to impact politics across the globe.

The Russian war effort to defeat invading Axis powers, an effort that assembled the largest military force in recorded history and that cost the lives of more than twenty-five million Soviet soldiers and civilians, was the decisive factor for securing an Allied victory. Now with access to the wealth of film archives and interview material from Russia used to produce the ten-hour television documentary Russia's War, Richard Overy tackles the many persuasive questions surrounding this conflict. 

Accessible to students, tourists, and general listeners alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past.

Ivan IV Vasilyevich, referred to as Ivan the Terrible in English, was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the very first Moscow ruler to declare himself Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584. Ivan's rule was marked by Russia's change from a Middle Ages state to an empire under the control of the tsar, but at a big cost to the people and the nation's long-lasting economy. Let’s talk about his life, his legacy, his evil deeds, and the way things occurred in history.

St. Petersburg's structures lie over the skeletons of the press-ganged servant workers who worked to build it, giving it the label "the city built on bones". Historians approximate that 100,000 18th-century serfs are buried underneath the city's stunning Italianate estates and large Parisian-style streets. They were drawn from all around the Russian Empire at the time. They dedicated their lives for the magnificence of Imperial Russia, and the city they built, St. Petersburg, stands as a testament to the Russian state's single-mindedness.

Stalingrad has changed names. It's now called Volgograd and is still one of the largest cities in Russia. But we can't ignore the fact that for a significant time in history, it was called Stalingrad, named after the tyrant and leader of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, Joseph Stalin. Let's explore the history of this city during the Second World War, and why the battles fought there were so horrendous and pivotal in history. It is just one of the bloodiest engagements in the history of warfare, with an approximated two million general losses.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a Russian mystic and self-declared holy man who befriended the family of Nicholas II, Russia's last emperor, and achieved massive power in late Imperial Russia. Rasputin was born into a peasant family in the Siberian town of Pokrovskoye. In the year 1897, while on a journey to an abbey, he had a spiritual conversion experience. In the year 1903 or the winter of 1904-1905, he checked out Saint Petersburg, where he drew in certain church and social leaders. In November 1905, he met Emperor Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, and ended up a social figure.

Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political thinker, and political leader who lived from November 7, 1879 to August 21, 1940. He developed a variation of Marxism referred to as Trotskyism after being a communist ideologically. After the Tsarist monarchy was toppled in the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky went back to Russia and signed up with the Bolshevik faction as a leader. He was a popular figure in the November 1917 October Revolution, which deposed the new Provisional Federal government, as head of the Petrograd Soviet.

From May 7, 1682 till his death in 1725, Peter the Great or Pyotr Alekséyevich governed the Tsardom of Russia, and ultimately the Russian Empire, collectively ruling before 1696 with his older half-brother, Ivan V. He got ports on the Azov and Baltic Seas, created the structure for the Imperial Russian Navy, ended undisputed Swedish control in the Baltic, and launched the Tsardom's development into a much larger empire. In 1721, he changed the former title of Tsar to the title of Emperor, and he created the city of Saint Petersburg, which stayed Russia's capital till 1917.