Soviet Life

While you were hiding under a desk during nuclear drills, what were teenagers on the other side of the Iron Curtain doing? Inspired by true experiences, A Day in the Life of a Soviet Schoolgirl is an atmospheric coming-of-age story that offers a rare, intimate glimpse into ordinary teenage life under extraordinary circumstances in late-1980s Soviet Latvia.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Tom Rob Smith-the author whose debut, Child 44, has been called "brilliant" (Chicago Tribune), "remarkable" (Newsweek) and "sensational" (Entertainment Weekly)-returns with an intense, suspenseful new novel: a story where the sins of the past threaten to destroy the present, where families must...

The final heart-pounding novel in the sensational Child 44 trilogy, from bestselling author Tom Rob Smith. Leo Demidov is no longer a member of Moscow's secret police. But when his wife, Raisa, and daughters Zoya and Elena are invited on a "Peace Tour" to New York City, he is immediately...

Bloomsbury presents The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley, read by Jot Davies. From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms, an epic Cold War novel set in a mysterious town in Soviet Russia with a slow burn romance at its heart. In 1963, in a Siberian prison...

From an award-winning historian and Chernobyl survivor, a visceral account of the worst nuclear accident in history. "Vividly empathetic." —Wall Street Journal On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl...

Imagine waking up every morning in a city with no name. You send letters to an address that doesn’t exist. You work on projects you’re not allowed to discuss. And you know that no matter what happens… You can never leave. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built entire cities in complete secrecy—sealed off from the outside world, erased from maps, and hidden behind layers of military control. These were not temporary facilities or isolated compounds. They were fully functioning cities, home to thousands of people who lived, worked, raised families, and built their lives inside ...

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...

Roza Shanina was an exceptional, legendary sniper during World War II, a brave female-soldier known for her beauty, high moral qualities and shooting accuracy. She was credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius. And she also kept a diary – a document unique in its content, which reveals to the world the unknown side of war. Translated for the first time into the English language by a professional translator, the war diary of Roza Shanina is a unique piece of history, since diaries were strictly prohibited in the Soviet military in an ...

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...

A Jewry Reborn tells of the Jewish renaissance that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abolition of Communist-era policies aimed at eradicating Jewish life. It is related in a series of first-hand, real-time accounts of the author’s encounters with one of the world’s largest concentration of Jews at that time who, out of choice or necessity, remained in what became known as the Former Soviet Union (FSU), while many of their brethren emigrated. It is also a tale of the historic but little-known effort mounted by world Jewry to help the FSU’s Jews reconnect with their ...

Flying combat missions in wartime is always dangerous. But imagine doing so in a slow, rickety biplane, at night, with no lights or navigational equipment of any kind. Sound impossible? It wasn't for the Soviet Night Witches. This unit of incredibly brave women flew hundreds of missions to attack German forces on the front lines during World War II. Learn all about these brave women and how their skill and courage in battle helped defeat the Nazis to win the war.

This is a short autobiographical pamphlet written by a senior physicist and sprinkled with quotes from wiser people’s writings. From the Preface: When I was young, my father – a talented engineer and a caring but austere parent – liked to remind me of the old proverb, Wise people learn by others’ mistakes, fools by their own, and complete idiots do not learn even by their own blunders. He accompanied each reminder with the same advice: It doesn’t look like you have a chance to reach the first of these categories. So, try to cling to the second of them as much as you can, making ...

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR.

A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch). Much has...

On Christmas Eve, 2017, the life of Russian-American artist Nikita Nataniel Kuznetsov changes beyond recognition. He’s plagued with a deadly bacterial infection that sends him off to the afterlife. Before he can move on to the other side, he must stand trial that takes place in a concert hall, attended by an invisible audience. As he sits at his piano, he is compelled to watch a 3D movie of his life, allowing him to relive meaningful events: his miserable childhood at a boarding school in the USSR of the 70s, his rise to stardom, his run-ins with the KGB, and a fateful breakup from his ...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and NPR “We come to see in FDR the magisterial, central figure in the greatest and richest political tapestry of our nation’s entire history” —Nigel Hamilton, Boston Globe “Meticulously researched and authoritative” —Douglas...

A provincial lawyer's son turned professional revolutionary, who spent seventeen years in exile waiting for a revolution that never seemed to come — and then, in a single year, seized a sixth of the earth and changed the twentieth century forever. This is the complete story of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world knows as Lenin — the founder of the Soviet Union, the leader of the first communist revolution, and one of the most consequential and most fiercely debated figures in all of history. This carefully researched biography follows the whole of his extraordinary life: the ...

A Nobel laureate presents a brilliant, discomfiting reflection on literary life defined by the brutality of Ceausescu’s Romania. From her childhood in Romania, in a village “as small as a thimble on the edge of the world,” through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools...

Of the 30 million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, 8 million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan - as the ordinary Russian soldier was called-remain a mystery. We know something about how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.