Soviet War

Charlie Wilson's War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the rise of militant Islam. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the agency's history.

Mansur Abdulin fought in the front ranks of the Soviet infantry against the German invaders at Stalingrad, Kursk, and on the banks of the Dnieper. This is his extraordinary story. His vivid firsthand account of a ruthless war on the Eastern Front gives rare insight into the reality of the fighting and into the tactics and mentality of the Red Army's soldiers.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key...

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West. More than a century...

In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, two men -- the Soviet world chess champion Boris Spassky and his American challenger Bobby Fischer -- met in the most notorious chess match of all time. Their showdown in...

An essential new history of Central Europe, the contested lands so often at the heart of world history  Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the...

Dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle. A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler's ambition and the German military machine.

"The Last Days of Budapest is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing." -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New...

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE...

Named a Best History Book of the Year by The Times (London) From “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced” (The New York Times) reporters comes a gripping and urgent exploration of why the Soviet Union’s collapse was incomplete and the Cold War was never over—revealing the resurgence...

A thrilling, vivid, and “compelling” (Wall Street Journal) account of the epic siege during one of World War II’s most important battles, told by the brilliant British editor-turned-historian and author of Checkpoint Charlie. To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to...

Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the "sixties" era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced” (The New York Times) reporters—the first work by a Russian author to reveal his country’s history of oppressing Ukraine, providing an unprecedented overview of the war for Ukrainian independence that...

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.

During the height of the Cold War, a group of small-town young men would lead their underdog hockey team from the little country of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. As they battled on the ice, the young players would keep their people's quest for freedom alive, and forge a way to fight back against the authoritarian forces that sought to crush them. Freedom to Win tells a story that ranges from iconic moments in history to courageous individual stories.

A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia—from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature “A landmark.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century For more than three...

The Arkady Renko book that started it all: the #1 bestseller Gorky Park, an espionage classic that begins the series, by Martin Cruz Smith, “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times). It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen...

A finalist for the 75th National Jewish Book Award in nonfiction A major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II—tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia In the West, World War II is commonly...

A "riveting" (Wall Street Journal) book tells the unbelievable true story of an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall--the people who built it, the spy who betrayed it, and the media event it inspired. In September 1961, at the height of the Cold War, 22-year-old Joachim Rudolph escaped from East...

A powerful, unsparing new history of World War II, recasting the conflict as a brutal struggle for survival among declining and ascendant imperial powers In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires...