From imperial frontiers to fractured modern states, Central Europe:The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea explores a region forever caught between worlds. Luka Ivan Jukic reveals how Central Europe’s cultural brilliance, political turmoil, and shifting borders forged an enduring identity, even as the idea itself is constantly reborn...
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals by Maurice Casey uncovers the hidden lives of exiled revolutionaries from Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe who fled fascism, only to navigate Stalin’s secretive, dangerous world. Casey shows how their ideals, friendships, and loyalties were constantly tested and often crushed...
How Russia Got Big explains how centuries of conquest and diplomacy turned a modest principality into the greatest land power in history. This sweeping history reveals how geography, ambition, ideology and sheer endurance forged a global superpower with a legacy that still echoes across continents today spanning from Siberia to Europe and beyond...
"A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia" – Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine
"A century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it" – Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riot
In "Motherland", Julia Ioffe traces modern Russia through its women – from re...
In “Rebel Russia”, Anna Arutunyan traces five centuries of revolt, from Ivan the Terrible’s rebellions to Navalny’s protests, showing how rebels and rulers shaped each other. Her deeply reported history reveals how each challenge to authority was a dance of power: while often crushed, it left lasting marks and fragile seeds of hope for the futur...
Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025.
'A timely and important book' - Orlando Figes
'Spellbinding' - Andrei Kurkov
From pagan rites to Putin’s Russia, The Baton and the Cross traces how faith and power have continually reshaped a nation. This gripping history shows how the church’s alliances, confrontations and compromises helped st...
“The Death of Stalin” plunges us into the 1953 power vacuum after the Soviet dictator’s death, blending political analysis with dark humour. Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on her unmatched expertise of Stalin’s inner circle to expose the bizarre, brutal and often overlooked machinations that reshaped the USSR and echoed all the way to Putin’s Russia.
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"A beautifully-written account of one of the most extraordinary and little-known episodes of the Second World War – a scientific feat and act of collective self-sacrifice the consequences of which continue to be felt today" – Adam Higginbotham, author of Challenger
“The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad” plunges into the harrowing Siege of 1941–44,...
'Sinister, clandestine and deadly - this is essential history, and it is happening now.' - Simon Sebag Montefiore
'A riveting spy thriller, which doubles as a secret history of Russia.' - Peter Pomerantsev
“The Illegals” by Shaun Walker pulls back the curtain on Russia’s most audacious spy programme – deep‑cover agents who lived as foreign aris...
The compulsively readable new book from The Rest is Classified host Gordon Corera. About how one man – Vasili Mitrokhin – turned first disaffected dissident and then traitor to the KGB, stealing the most secret Soviet archives and smuggling them to the West.
How do you steal a library? Not just any library but the most secret, heavily gu...
“The World of the Cold War” by Vladislav Zubok offers a sweeping, original history of the Cold War from its roots in post‑WWII Europe to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Zubok shows how decolonisation, Soviet weakness, intelligence failures, and the accidents of history – not just ideology – shaped the global struggle between East and Wes...
The gripping, untold story of how six epic journeys launched the three communist revolutions that changed world history forever. From the streets of Petrograd during the heady autumn of 1917, to Mao's stunning victory in October 1949, and Fidel's triumphant arrival in Havana, in January 1959, the history of the twentieth century was transformed ...
Winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025.
"To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause" traces how Soviet dissidents – from famed figures like Sakharov to ordinary activists – used the regime’s own laws and moral courage to challenge totalitarian rule, and how their strategies helped erode the Soviet system and still resonate in Russia today.
Begi...