Russian True Crime

Before she became a legend, she was a woman who learned how power looked — and how to wear it. Remembered across the Russian Empire as Sonya Golden Hand, Sofia Ivanovna Blyuvshteyn has long been immortalised as thief, impostor, society woman, escape artist, and criminal queen. In popular memory she glides through hotels, railway carriages, and jewellers’ shops in silks and diamonds, dazzling the wealthy before vanishing with their valuables. But behind the glittering myth stood a far more complex and dangerous woman. Queen of Thieves, strips away the easy romance of criminal legend to ...

A legal analyst for NPR, NBC, and CNN, delves into the facts surrounding what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in US history”: the case of Robert Hanssen—a Russian spy who was embedded in the FBI for two decades.

Seven Million Dollar Spy reveals, for the first time, the inside story of the dramatic US counterintelligence operation that resulted in the capture of the most dangerous mole working for Russia inside US intelligence. Now, the former senior KGB spy, to whom the US paid seven million dollars for Moscow's file on the mole, is identified by both his real and code names.

In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the listener into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his 30-year career in the CIA.

As much as it sounds like a Cold War fairy tale, “Russian Disneyland” is a breathtaking novel inspired by a True story. Most of the characters are based on real individuals. Two of them are serving long sentences in American prisons. Others were tried in Spain, some served their sentences in a Spanish prison, and others escaped during the trial. Some still hold responsible positions in Spain in the fields of intelligence and forensics. Others continue to practice law in Spain and Switzerland. Some are still wanted by Interpol/Red Notices and are hiding in Russia to this day. Visiting ...

It is dawn on Thursday, 14 February 2019, and armed FSB agents are raiding Michael Calvey’s Moscow apartment. He is being arrested for a crime that never happened.

The New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires tells his most incredible story yet: A true drama of obscene wealth, crime, rivalry, and betrayal from deep inside the world of billionaire Russian oligarchs that Booklist called “one more example...

Darya Saltykova was a Russian noblewoman who exercised near-absolute authority over the people bound to her estates. For years, violence unfolded within that private world, sustained by serfdom, silence, and a system that treated suffering as an internal matter. In The Lady of the Estate, Alana Sanchez examines Saltykova’s case not as an isolated act of cruelty, but as a study of private power. Drawing on petitions, legal process, and the political context of Catherine II’s Russia, this book traces how abuse persisted, why intervention was delayed, and how punishment ultimately served ...

Nine wholesome university students mountaineering in the Urals go missing, and are later uncovered from the snows of a bleak forest's edge in the Siberian Taiga, in a series of grisly discoveries. Why were the climbers wearing no boots? Why were stout branches of the forest pines singed to a height of 30 feet? What were the mysterious markings in the bark of nearby trees? What was so-called "overwhelming force" that was capable of breaking eight ribs in a single blow without bruises?  

A riveting true-life thriller and revealing memoir from the daughter of an American intelligence officer the astonishing true story of two spies and their families on opposite sides of the Cold War. In the summer of 1975, seventeen-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her...

For some time, the CIA has been operating under old assumptions that men are superior beings in the spy world. That era is over. The new CIA culture is adapting to a world where the most powerful piece on the chessboard is a woman. THE QUEEN. After years of grooming a foreign agent to become Prime Minister, the CIA finds out its mission is about to be blown by Alexander Orlovsky, the son of an elite KGB officer with the mind of a chess master, the skills of a commando, and the looks of a playboy. The CIA makes the problematic decision to send Slavena Ivanova, a junior intelligence officer, ...

Anticipating a new dawn of freedom after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians could hardly have foreseen the reality of their future a decade later: a country impoverished and controlled at every level by organized crime. This riveting book views the 1990s reform period through the experiences of individual citizens, revealing the changes that have swept Russia and their effect on Russia's age-old ways of thinking.

In 1917, a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II - a dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the Tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes - starting with the British Empire. Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia and their mission to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world.

On March 21, 2022, The New York Times for the first time published excerpts from the diary of Nadiya Sukhorukova, who noted evidence of Russia's real crimes in Ukraine. "A neighbor said that God left Mariupol. He was afraid of everything he saw," Ms. Sukhorukova wrote in a series of Facebook posts posted after her escape late last week. "I am alive and now I will live long. And my city is dying a painful death," she added. "For twenty days I was dying with it. I was in hell.” (Megan Specia, The New York Times). Excerpts from the diary have been published in UK, USA, Germany, Ukraine, and ...

In January 1959, ten experienced young skiers set out to travel to a mountain named Mount Otorten in the far north of Russia. During the trip, one of the skiers fell ill and returned. The remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl, or "Mountain of the Dead."

Russian Oligarchs control all of the money in Russia but they are failing with the changing world and economy. They look to President Putin for protection and for a price, he agrees. Did a meteor really hit Russia. Secrets abound. But renegade spies are for hire to take out any who get in the way of the almighty Russian dollar. Decorated by supermodels and the highest-priced establishments in the old Soviet Union, the Oligarchs fight each other to hold on to the money while they kill off opponents. Even fleeing to England won't save any from the "Hammer," the former KGB agent who is the ...

Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and 1940s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War-Boris Morros also worked for Russian intelligence. Morros's assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain.

The urgent, explosive story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the West from the Cold War to the present – including their interference in the 2016 presidential election. Like a scene from a le Carre novel or the TV drama The Americans, in the summer of 2010 a group of Russian deep cover...

A riveting and deeply personal story, In Search of the Romanovs reveals hidden truths in the legends about the murder and disappearance of Russia's most famous royal family.

Большинство из тех, кто пережил ужасы XX века, будь то жертвы нацизма, сталинских исправительно-трудовых лагерей или многочисленных войн, бушевавших на протяжении этого столетия, старались, как можно быстрее забыть об этом страшном времени и с большой неохотой вспоминали о минувших событиях.