Russian Biographies

Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing. Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union...

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

Empress Alexandra Romanov – the last empress of Russia, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, and now a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church – chose Countess Sophie Buxhoeveden, one of her ladies-in-waiting, to be her authorized biographer, opening up to her about her closest relationships and giving her access to copies of her private correspondence. Additionally, as a lady-in-waiting, Countess Buxhoeveden attended on the Empress for much of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, only leaving her side when the Imperial Family was removed to Tobolsk after the Tsar’s abdication in 1917. Thereafter, she ...

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.

A Russian Drama best seller now in its second edition! In February, 1959 nine young hikers on a cross country ski trip mysteriously died under horrific circumstances. It is one of the great mysteries of our times. They would be found with missing eyes, even a missing tongue, crushed bones, and stripped of their clothes (later found radioactive) in minus 50 degree temperatures. Theories range from their being murdered by the CIA to space aliens, to even "Abominable Snowmen". This book explores this famous incident using a technique known as "Higher criticism" to explain their terrifying ...

Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes–as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag–has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century...

With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present Spies have long been a source of great fascination in the world of fiction, but...

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies...

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 ...

When Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail in 2009, Browder cast aside his business career and made it his life’s mission to pursue justice for Sergei. One of the first steps of that mission was to uncover who had killed Sergei and profited from the $230 million corruption scheme that he had exposed. As Browder and his team tracked the money that flowed out of Russia—through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas—they discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was one of the beneficiaries of the crime.

Stalin: The Architect of Fear and the Soviet Empire is a powerful and accessible biography tracing Joseph Stalin’s rise from his troubled Georgian childhood to his domination of the Soviet Union. It reveals how he built and ruled a vast empire through ideology, ambition, and relentless terror, shaping the lives of millions and redefining the course of the twentieth century. The book explores Stalin’s complex personality—his intelligence, paranoia, emotional hardness, and surprising moments of sentiment—while examining his relationships with Lenin, his rivals, and his own family. It ...

The revelatory, much-anticipated memoir from the Wall Street Journal reporter who was wrongly imprisoned in Putin’s Russia for more than a year—a glimpse inside the perils and contradictions of a country in the midst of autocracy In March 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, Evan...

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.

He was the general who triumphed over Napoleon's Grande Armee during the Patriotic War of 1812, not merely restoring national pride but securing national identity. Many Russians consider Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov the greatest figure of the 19th century, ahead of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, even Tolstoy himself. As award-winning author Alexander Mikaberidze shows in this fascinating, often startling, and wholly humanizing new biography, Kutuzov's story is far more compelling and complex than the myths that have encased him.

Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography PEN Literary Award Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist New York Times Notable Book Washington Post Notable Book Boston Globe Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched...

David Eliezrie’s Undaunted chronicles the extraordinary courage of the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, as he confronted the brutal oppression of both czarist Russia and the Soviet regime. While many religious leaders fled as the Communists shuttered synagogues and schools, Rabbi Schneersohn remained, risking his life to preserve Jewish life and earning the reputation of “the last man standing.” Despite enduring torture, arrest, and a death sentence, his unwavering defiance and international advocacy ultimately secured his release.

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of...

The gritty memoir of a former US Marine and Presidential Guard, who, after being unjustly held and abused in a Russian gulag for three years and freed in a high-profile prisoner exchange, seeks revenge against his former Russian captors by volunteering to fight in Ukraine. In August 2019, Trevor...

The New York Times bestselling author of Dark Invasion and The Last Goodnight once again illuminates the lives of little-known individuals who played a significant role in America’s history as he chronicles the incredible true story of a critical, recently declassified counterintelligence...

In Stalin’s Russia, when prison sentences stretched ten, fifteen, and twenty-five years, the future Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found himself incarcerated in its genocidal “corrective” labor camps (the so-called Gulag of the Soviet Union). His crime: expressing anti-Stalinist opinions in a letter to a friend. A devout Communist at his arrest, condemned to be worked to death in the frozen wastelands of Russia, he underwent instead a profound psychological transformation, broke free of his Marxist ideology—and survived. This full biography of one of the most influential ...