Reading Twitter threads is fine, but if you want a deeper understanding of an issue, it’s a good idea to read books. Below is a look at books to read on Russia and Ukraine that will enhance your knowledge of the war and both countries.
Vladimir Putin: Many experts agree that without Vladimir Putin, Russia likely would not have launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. An excellent place to learn more about the Russian leader is Syracuse University Professor Brian D. Taylor’s The Code of Putinism, which explains the worldview of Putin and his closest supporters. Another outstanding book about Putin is journalist Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, subtitled “How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West.” In All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin, Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar paints a vivid portrait of those around Putin and the influence of the security apparatus.
In Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, Timothy Frye argues that Putin is similar to other autocrats—much weaker than he appears, in part because he must rely on weak state institutions. Journalist Shaun Walker’s The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past gives context to what became Putin’s ultimate plan for Ukraine. He writes that Putin used “a simplified narrative of the Second World War to imply Russia must unite once again against a foreign threat.”
Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia is an inside look from a former TV producer at the early freedom on Russian TV in the post-Soviet period—and how Putin and his allies snuffed out that freedom. In Between Two Fires, New Yorker Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa explains Putin’s control of Russian media, the belief in the need for a strong central leader, the compromises many Russians make and events that hinted at the wider invasion of Ukraine.
The lost opportunity of Russia becoming a Western-style democracy with an economy not encumbered by corruption—if that opportunity existed—can be found in several books about reforms during Boris Yeltsin’s rule before Putin became president. These books include Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution, Anders Åslund’s Russia’s Capitalist Revolution and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy, where she argues that a “kleptocratic tribute system [is] underlying Russia’s authoritarian regime.”
In Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, M. E. Sarotte provides a comprehensive history of the expansion of NATO following the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 and Timothy Garton Ash’s The Magic Lantern: The Revolution ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague explain why so many people in Eastern Europe wanted their countries to join NATO.
A genre of books exists that could be called “You should have listened to me about Putin.” They include Garry Kasparov’s Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, and Mark Galeotti’s We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong, where Galeotti correctly predicted: “It is hard to see any substantive improvement in relations with Russia, so long as Putin is in the Kremlin.” A post-February 2022 entry is The Russia Conundrum by Mikhail Khodorkovsky—who suffered for years in a Russian prison but believes “Russia can be saved from an endless succession of dictatorships, that she can become a normal country.”
Putin’s Other Wars: Russian armed forces have committed widespread human rights abuses in Ukraine, including torture, bombing hospitals and attacking civilians. Anna Borshchevskaya describes similar atrocities in Putin's War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America's Absence.
Mark Galeotti explains the brutal tactics used in Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994-2009. (Galeotti will release Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine in 2022.) Ronald Asmus describes Russia’s invasion of Georgia and the world’s response in A Little War that Changed the World: Georgia, Russia and The Future of the West.
Soviet and Russian History: Books on the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes and Sheila Fitzpatrick are an excellent place to begin learning about the Soviet period, as well as Antony Beevor’s new book Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. Beevor’s book reads like a novel. Orlando Figes takes a longer perspective in Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History and The Story of Russia. A broad overview of Russian history can be found in Mark Galeotti’s A Short History of Russia, while Rodric Braithwaite writes about Russia: Myths and Realities.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment describes the Soviet government’s mass killings and repressions, while Anne Applebaum (Gulag: A History) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) detail the horrors of the Soviet prison camp system. Two more good books are Paul R. Gregory’s Terror by Quota and Lenin’s Brain And Other Tales From The Secret Soviet Archives, which describes the perversity of Soviet terror under Stalin, noting authorities used central planning to “assign execution and imprisonment targets . . . on a regional basis.”
A small number of the lives Stalin destroyed are depicted in My Father’s Letters: Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag (by Memorial) and in such classic works as Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned by writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of poet Osip Mandelstam.
Biographies of Stalin include two by Robert Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power) and two by Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941).
Simon Sebag Montefiore and Robert Service are also biographers of Stalin whose works should be read. Service also wrote Lenin: A Biography, A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century and The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991. William Taubman wrote biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Dmitri Volkogonov, a former Soviet colonel who became a notable Russian historian, writes short, compelling portraits of the USSR’s leaders in Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime.
Ukraine: An excellent history of Ukraine accessible to Western readers is The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy. Another well-written book on Ukraine is Anna Reid’s Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, where, like Plokhy, she details tragic events in Ukraine that include Russian suppression of its culture, language and aspirations, Stalin’s famine, the Holocaust, World War II and Chornobyl, followed by its vote for independence and Russian interference and aggression in the years after that vote. Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow and Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine provide comprehensive examinations of the Soviet-created famines that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.
Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin describes how Ukrainians (and others) suffered before and during World War II: “In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people. . . . This is a history of political mass murder.” He separates these 14 million from the casualties caused by military conflict. (Snyder has made his course lectures on Ukraine available free online.) In The Devils' Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941, Roger Moorhouse rejects “the Kremlin’s postwar exculpatory line that Stalin was merely buying time by signing the pact.”
For a longer frame of reference on Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, there is The Crimean War: A History by Orlando Figes, who writes, “As for the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the Crimean War, he was partly driven by inflated pride and arrogance, a result of having been tsar for 27 years, partly by his sense of how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker neighbors, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other powers would respond to his actions.” Readers will find parallels to the present.
Journalist Tim Judah (In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine) writes, “For too long Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent’s most under-reported places.” That is no longer the case.
Books about Ukraine’s post-Soviet period make clear that Russia’s war against Ukraine started in 2014, not in February 2022, as many in Western countries may think. In A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister, Olesya Khromeychuk tells a heartbreaking story about her brother. He died fighting in the Donbas for the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2017. The book reminds us how many lives a war can damage.
Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev, author of In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas, writes about the “underground torture chambers in Donetsk” where he found himself: “It was here, in prison, that I witnessed dozens of lives broken . . . but also the power of human will in situations that seemed entirely hopeless.”
Ukraine vs. Darkness: Undiplomatic Thoughts by Olexander Scherba, a Ukrainian diplomat and former ambassador to Austria, is a prescient analysis of Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine written before the large-scale February 2022 invasion.
Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov wrote Ukraine Diary: Dispatches from Kiev to describe the protests that started in 2013 and their aftermath. In The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World, Julia Mendel, the former press secretary to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, writes about the early days of the war and fills in biographical details about her former boss.
Russian and Ukrainian Literature: Russian authors have contributed to the world’s culture even though Russian and Soviet leaders have killed, nearly killed and censored many of the country’s greatest writers.
Soviet authorities killed Isaac Babel (born in Odesa), tormented Boris Pasternak for publishing Doctor Zhivago abroad and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, prevented Mikhail Bulgakov from publishing his best novel (Master and Margarita) during his lifetime, and the list could go on. Fyodor Dostoevsky survived a Russian prison camp, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived through the Soviet Gulag. Leo Tolstoy was fortunate not to die during the Crimean War.
Among the best-known works of Russian writers are Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (a precursor to Orwell’s 1984). See also the works of Soviet writer Vladimir Voinovich.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of course, wrote other well-known novels and short stories. Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook is credited with influencing Tsar Alexander II’s decision to end serfdom in Russia. Turgenev was arrested and spent some time in prison.
Modern-day Russian writer Sergei Lebedev has written stories, such as about the poisoning of regime opponents, that hit close to home. Another contemporary Russian writer, Vladimir Sorokin, author of Day of the Oprichnik, lives in exile due to his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russia ruled over Ukraine and suppressed the Ukrainian language. As a result, writers such as Nikolai Gogol typically wrote in Russian, even though he was born in Ukraine. He moved to Petersburg as a young man and wrote short stories set in Russia and Ukraine. His most well-known novel is Dead Souls.
Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) is Ukraine’s most famous poet. He wrote in Ukrainian and is credited with promoting Ukrainian culture, although Russian authorities suppressed his writings. There are several books available that translate his works. Contemporary Ukrainian writers include Andrey Kurkov (Grey Bees), Oksana Zabuzhko (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex), Serhiy Zhadan (Voroshilovgrad) and others.
This list of books about Russia and Ukraine is not comprehensive, but a good place to start.
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The Books To Read About Russia And Ukraine - Forbes
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