Soviet Science

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical...

Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the 20th century.

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. 

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.

The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history. In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

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...

The ascension of Vladimir Putin - a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB - to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years - as America and the world's other leading powers have continued to appease him - Putin has grown into not only a dictator but a global threat. With his vast resources and nuclear weapons, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty.

With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy was thought to be absolute. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. But we now know this to be premature. Authoritarianism first returned in Russia, as Putin developed a political system...

In the mid-to late seventies, in a secret underground laboratory, in Soviet Russia, one man was tasked with finding a way to protect his country from the Americans. The Method was his response. A simple way for any man or woman to unlock the secrets of the mind, to push themselves to a level that made them nearly super human. It worked beyond reason. It was, in the end, a mistake. This, then, is the story of that program, as seen through the eyes of an outsider, twenty years later. This is, of course, a work of fiction. Even the parts that aren't fictional at all. Read this as a story, or ...

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself.

Did you know that a measles outbreak led to the assigning of phone numbers? How about the fact that pirates are the reason we don’t use the metric system in the United States? Or that there’s actually a reason why stepping on a Lego hurts so damn much? Now I Know: The Soviets Invaded Wisconsin?! is the ultimate challenge for even the biggest trivia buff. Based on the very popular newsletter, you are guaranteed to learn something new despite how much you already think you know.

Before the Martian revolution chronicled in Red Star, there was the man who built the world that made it possible. Menni Aldo is twenty-six years old when he stands before Mars's most powerful bankers and ministers and asks for absolute control over the largest engineering project in the planet's history: an inland sea flooded across six hundred thousand square kilometers of dead desert, fed by a canal blasted through solid rock. He gets it. What follows is not just the story of a canal, but of what it costs the man who builds one — his ruthless competence, his marriage to a shipwrecked ...

From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan, a “timely, riveting” (The Washington Post) new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace—one that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War. Henry...

Against the backdrop of the late Cold War, a tiny American start-up company forged a secret deal to place American scientific payloads aboard the Soviet space station MIR. Born out of sheer desperation after the Challenger explosion and grounding of the United States space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of United States government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments.

He was the funniest man in America. Then he got what he wished for. Tonio Presto is the highest-paid comedian in pictures and the ugliest man in California — short-legged, huge-headed, with a nose like a shoe. He has built a fortune out of a body that gets him laughed at in the street. When he asks the star Hedda Lux to marry him, she laughs too. So Presto goes to a Russian doctor in a quiet clinic outside Sacramento, a man who says the human body is not a fixed thing at all but a river — and who can redirect it. The treatment works. Presto comes back young, tall, and beautiful. He also...

He can put a thought in your head. You will believe it is your own. Germany, the 1920s. Ludwig Stirner is a penniless engineer with a genius for reflexes, a white setter that obeys him too well, and a talent for being underestimated. Then the banker Karl Gottlieb dies beneath the wheels of a train, and his entire fortune passes — inexplicably, against every expectation and every interest — to his young secretary, Elsa Glück. The courts find nothing. The lawyers find nothing. But Elsa cannot say why she signed what she signed, why she loves the man she loves, or why her own mind no ...

Off the coast of Argentina, pearl divers whisper of a monster in the bay — a "sea devil" that slashes nets, frees trapped fish, and vanishes beneath the waves before anyone can catch more than a glimpse. The superstitious call it a demon. The greedy call it a fortune waiting to be caught. He is Ichthyander — a young man surgically transformed by his father, the brilliant and secretive Doctor Salvator, into a creature able to breathe both air and water. Raised in isolation from the world, he knows the ocean's beauty better than he knows his own kind — until he falls in love with ...

Generation П - роман Виктора Пелевина о поколении россиян, которое взрослело и формировалось во времена политических и экономических реформ 1990-х годов. Когда главной мечтой молодежи было, чтобы свободный и поэтому запрещённый мир с той стороны океана вошел в их жизнь. Через 10 лет мечта сбылась.