Soviet Union

A dazzling spy thriller about a female CIA agent whose extraordinary facial recognition powers lead her into the dangerous heart of the Soviet Union—and the path of a killer who shouldn’t exist. ​ It is 1990 when Melvina Donleavy arrives in Soviet Belarus on her first undercover mission...

In this “engrossing, well-documented, and highly readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller, three veteran reporters draw on top sources inside and outside the U.S. government to reveal Washington's secret strategies for combating germ warfare and the deadly threat of...

As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, “Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics.” In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky’s life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

Russian meddling: These are two words that just about everyone has come to know very well in the last few years. Only a fool - or someone with an agenda of a sinister kind - would deny that such meddling occurred. But how many know that, for decades, the Russians secretly used the UFO phenomenon as a means to try and destabilize the West?

The Russian Revolution was the most important and progressive political event of the 20th century. There is a lot to learn from these explosive political episodes and many remarkable stories to discover.

Danny Jabo returns to sea, this time as second-in-command of a Trident submarine, the USS Maine. An international arms treaty makes the crew prepare for a once unthinkable level of cooperation with the Soviets, but the Maine's real enemy is an adversary no one saw coming.

The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but. In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, DC intelligence...

Historians know that great wars hinge not just on grand strategies, but also on small decisions—moments of hesitation, chances not taken. With Britain now out of the fight, the world stands at a precipice, and Germany’s full strength is unleashed upon an unsuspecting Soviet Union. Stalin, blind to the threat, refuses to see the warnings of impending doom. As millions of German troops surge across the border, the very fate of nations hangs in the balance.

In December 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a speech about a conflict that had some leading figures in Britain and France, including Churchill himself, briefly discussing the idea of going to war with the Soviet Union, even though they were already fighting Adolf Hitler. Of course, war makes strange bedfellows, and one year later, Churchill would find himself allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Finland. It’s an interesting saga, one with roots in imperial Russian history and the desire of the Finns to be free in their northern forests.

The Palace of the Soviets was an unrealized project for the construction of a high-rise administrative building in Moscow to be used for sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and mass demonstrations. The height of the Palace of the Soviets, together with the 100-meter statue of Vladimir Lenin, would be 415 meters. The palace was to become the center of the new Soviet Moscow and the tallest building in the world, symbolizing the victory of socialism. This audiobook examines the grand designs envisioned by the USSR, and how the horrors of war indefinitely scrapped the project.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous “cult of silence” has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese...

This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a twenty-first-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion.

Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine saw confrontation between Moscow and the West spill over into open conflict once again. But Russia has also been waging a clandestine war against the West for decades. Hostile acts abroad, from poisoning dissidents to shooting down airliners, interfering in elections, spying, hacking, and murdering, have long seemed to be the Kremlin's daily business. But what is it all for? Why does Russia consistently behave like this? Keir Giles explains how and why Russia pushes for more power and influence wherever it can reach, far beyond Ukraine.

The thrilling never-before-told story of Agent Sniper, one of the Cold War's most effective counter-agents Michal Goleniewski, cover name Sniper, was one of the most important spies of the early Cold War. For almost three years, as a Lieutenant Colonel at the top of Poland’s espionage service...

Two opposing narratives vie to explain the strategic future of Europe, one geopolitical and one economic, and both center on the same resource: natural gas. In The Bridge, Thane Gustafson, an expert on Russian oil and gas, argues that the political rivalries that capture the lion's share of media attention must be viewed alongside multiple business interests and differences in economic ideologies. With a dense network of pipelines linking Europe and Russia, natural gas serves as a bridge that unites the region through common interests.

Among the leaders of the 20th century, arguably none shaped the course of history as much as Vladimir Lenin. If Adolf Hitler had not inflicted the devastation of World War II upon Europe, it's quite likely that the West would consider Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) the 20th century's greatest tyrant. Along with Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky led the October Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and held crucial posts in the early Soviet governments.

A thrilling account of how Russia is waging a hidden war against America and the West, using espionage, corruption, fake news, and KGB-style murder March 2018. Two Russian assassins arrive in a provincial English city to kill a former officer from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency. His crime?...

The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking “bulldozer,” wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev’s authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin.

In Collisions, Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war.